o7

They also list South Africa, where Westerners love to give themselves all of the credit via boycotts when in actuality fighting Apartheid used all means available and necessary, including escalating violent campaigns and associated political parties who were the main representatives at negotiations.

Most examples of “non-violent” liberation (in some cases I should say “liberation”) are like this, it is a PR campaign putting a microscope on their preferred group or “movement” and failing to discuss the totality or criticize the incompleteness of outcomes and how this could relate to an adherence to nonviolence.

Example: MLK was notoriously incorrect about the propaganda power of seeing participants in nonviolent direct action arrestes and hurt by cops. Most people, particularly whites, disliked King, thought he and his methods were too extreme, and opposed the movement. They won impact through organizing ground game, by turning an increasing number of people out. But their wins were incomplete and King was martyred when trying to pivot to capitalism as the main racial oppressor that would live on after the legislative concessions. The groups he was active in fell apart or became a recuperated part of the system he opposed, many of his compatriots killed or houndes into silence by the FBI and local cops, and of course, black people still face mountains of discrimination and disadvage today, particularly by the “subtle” effects of the economic system. We should potentially blame nonviolence for the collapse of the movement, as it wed itself to bourgeois electoralist concessions and primed it to accept that as sufficient rather than steeling the public for a protracted fight that would not rest until liberation, e.g. New Afrika.

I’ll go through some other examples from this database.

• Soviet Bloc Independence campaigns after the fall of the USSR. These were, by and large, primed by CIA-funded “civil society” organizations that congealed around liberalization (read: privatization) campaigns. Some employed violent coups to accomplish this while their states were weak due to a diminished Moscow. But in what world is the backing of the dominant superpower simply a win for non-violent action? The knife was already at their throats, they would receive the shock therapy treatment like Russia or Ukraine if they did not fall in line. Rather than an example of the power of grassroots non-violent organizing, these are examples of a great powers struggle. And once the liberal parties were in power, they enacted their privatization with brutal violence.

• The Arab Spring. This was not non-violent and it largely failed due to disorganization and a lack of militant discipline. It was another case of cooption snd defanging by “civil society” style groups, but different ones this time. No Arab Spring uprisings led to a better country for their people, for liberation, for the demands sought. They list Mubarak and then fail to mention Morsi and Sisi or explain why they head the new government or what the military had to do with it. They just vaguely tut-tut Egyptians about not “keeping” the “freedom” they had won.

• Latin American non-violent campaigns were essentially all crushed with violence via US-backed military coups or are otherwise misrepresented. Carlos Ibañez del Campo was removed via coordinated strikes and protests that were not non-violent. They had to fight cops. But all of this is simply called non-violence rather than organized class struggle. They list the overthrow of Pinochet without mentioning that Allende was deposed in a US-backed coups or that Chile more or less retains the Pinochet dictatorship constitution. The single man was removed from power (and allowed a comfy retirement in the US) but the system was left in place. And again, not a simply non-violent campaign and again one premised on class struggle and collective labor power.

• They incorrectly label the GDR a dictatorship and fail to accurately describe the outcomes, which were primarily the DDR illegally annexing the country, stripping it for parts, and impoverishinh the people there. They don’t mention that East Germans preferred their own country and state nor that, with these conditions imposed and left parties bsnned, East Germany is still comparatively poor and is now far right. And, again, this was something pushed and funded by the US.

Note that this article was written by George Lakey, the academic behind this database. As a tenured professor for decades and now emeritus, he has no excuse for these gross cases of ignorance / omissions. He is literally paid to think about such things, to spend the time to skeptically investigate and question his own biases. But of course, such people are recruited and funded and promoted precisely bevause of their bias and selective incompetence.

The IDF constantly lies and their human shield rhetoric is just PR for their wanton murder of Palestinians.

“Here are several terminally online streamers. Are they cooking oe are they cooked?”

:)

To clarify I only meant the attacks on civilians.

The ANC also attacked civilians. Though you should note how dramatically more the Israelis (and the SA government and white South Africans) target civilians.

There will never be a way to justify the senseless killing of those.

When under occupation, any means necessary is not only sanctioned by international law, it is necessary. Note that the kibbutzim in the area had armories and shot at the al Aqsa flood participants, which included a wide coalition as well as whoever simply went past the walls of their own volition.

How is it senseless, by the way? Do you actually know what happened on the ground? Who did what? What was going in in their heads? What their lives were? There is an implicit chauvinism in the use of clichés and guesses rather than become educated.

There are other ways than violence to get rid of them.

No there aren’t. You apparently know nothing about the history here, the many movements that attempted peaceful means, even as recent as the Great March of Return in 2018. And the repeated lies and violence that Palestinians have faced following every diplomatic agreement.

As you can see, the Israelis will speed up and openly embrace genocide at the mere perception that they are not totally dominant over those that they occupy. Israelis march not for peace or justice, but for harsher violence and getting rapists out of jail. They are an ethnic supremacist culture that embrace the genocide they are committing. You cannot “peace” your way out of that. You would condemn Palestinians to extinction.

For concentration camp victims, they are far more restrained than virtually anyone. Would you also condemn the Sioux for killing settlers occupying their land? Why not instead materially oppose the settler colonists? Your tut-tutting is just tacit both-sidesing of a decidedly imbalanced situation.

Ofc the whole situation in Gaza is fucked beyond comparison but there has to be another way on the world political stage to resolve this instead of letting it cook like we now do.

There is not. You have an unrealistic idea about how geopolitics and imperialist violence function. It is not like the movies or the 1 or 2 examples of allegedly nonviolent movements recuperated by capitalism. You’re not going to win just because you are right or empathetic. You will not convince your captors and child murderers with a good speech and some protests. Most of the states, i.e. the major sourcea of military power in the world, will not step in to help you unless it serves their self interest - and most capitalist countries see subverting themselves to the US and therefore Israel as in their self interest.

And when states or similar forces do step up, you get tacit genocide apologetic PR campaigns against them. Such as, “do you condemn Hamas?”

The historical and realistic source of liberation is organized armed struggle.

Condemn? I commend freedom fighters taking military action against settler colonial ethnocentric apartheid genociders.

Do you also condemn the ANC?

The year of the Linux desktop gaming handholdis upon us.

A huge majority of those who actually lived through WWII gave credit to the Soviets, who killed the most Nazis by far.

Surely Veldkamp is also making the same conditions on Israel’s withdrawal and demands sanctions on Israel as well.

How nefarious: this famine-facing country is growing food.

The title of the article is itself casting doubt on the genocide. This article caters to a very specific audience that wants to feel bad about the people harmed while still supporting the forces that cause that harm and feeling morally secure. This is meant for the settler colonists feeling bad because of the oppression they cause without the call to stop enacting it, and in fact using third personing neutral language to obfuscate the connection netween their ideological actions and the genocidal acts it causes.

What would the value have been in uncritically sharing propaganda about feeling bad for the victims of Kristallnacht from a Nazi-supporting publication that downplayed its nature as a pogrom? Wouldn’t its true function be to sheepdog the empathetic into not rejecting the Nazis?

This is a genocide denying liberal Zionist source.

It is a genocide, full stop, and this source is rife with liberal Zionist genocide deniers.

You cannot truly honor this martyr while denying what is happening to him and all Gazans. You cannot clean your conscience selectively.

No, feudalism has different economic relations than capitalism. It is about farm product graft from land-bound peasants on penalty of death or injury. Capitalism is about wage working. Capitalism emerged in the context of feudalism, so there were periods where both existed side by side, but capitalism is clearly different.

And in those times the causes were things like feudalism.

I use Happy Cow. In addition to having a vegan filter it doesn’t seem very gsmed yet.

I also check new restaurant openings at a local aggregator.

AOC is a liberal that coopts ledt aesthetics. She did a very normal liberal thing, which is to claim organized lavor cred and alignment and then undermine labor materially.

That’s not even a ladel >:|

I think you missed my point, entirely. I wasn’t saying that governments committing atrocities in other countries versus their own people were any different, morally speaking.

Then why say “their own people”? It doesn’t make sense. Parent didn’t use that qualifier. Maybe you used it because it is so often used in combination with the other terms? Either way, I am singling out this qualifier because it is a way that PR and propagandistic terms color our thinking. It does not mean I think you were being malicious.

I was simply pointing out that the quality of life for the working class, and low amount of wealth disparity, etc in this country is largely due to Socialist policies keeping Capitalism in check, and also pointing out that Capitalist policies cause atrocities, in general.

But these countries don’t have socialist policies! They are capitalist countries run by capitalists and capitalist parties. I already described the causes behind their social safety nets.

This was in response to the comment saying that countries were hiding atrocities behind the banner of Socialism.

I understand. I actually interpreted parent as being critical of the Eastern bloc, but I didn’t comment on this.

Atrocities of any kind are abhorrent and I agree that they need to be denounced.

I agree in the abstract sense but just like with “their own people”, what gets called an atrocity, how its veracity is established, and how often it enters discourse are all subject to the propaganda we are all immersed in. In addition, the context in whicj atrocities are “denounced” matters. Were the people tallying up lists of Saddam’s crimes in 2003 just denouncing atrocities like good, empathetic humans? Were they not helping to build consent for a much worse invasion? What about the US’ genocidal sanctions on the country for the prior decade plus? We, of course, do not live in a vacuum and what we are told to denounce is often aligned with ruling class agendas.

The overall topic of this thread is that baby leftists want to keep criticizing and denouncing the targets of US empire that they are told to hate. They have not engaged critically with the denunciations themselves and when others do so they begin insulting and deflecting. And they certainly don’t exist within any project to actually achieve anything against atrocities, because if they did they would be laser-focused on their own country where they can do actual organizing work, which will largely be in the US and Europe.

As an example of liberals’ having their attention to atrocities dictated by think tanks and imperialist media, we can look to Yemen. I could not get liberals to care about the US-backed bombing campaigns and US blockade of Yemen. Schoolbuses bombed, weddings bombed, basic civilian infrastructure bombed out to attack food, water, and electricity. Aid rotting on ships because the US prevented them from docking and unloading for 8+ months. Nobody even talked about Yemen in the US or Europe. Not regularly. You don’t see lemmy.worlders bringing it up all the time as atrocities you should denounce every time the topic of the US itself comes up. Every time target countries of US empire are mentioned, hiwever, it is time for kneejerk denunciation ans bad faith insults at anyone with a modicum of understanding of geopolitics.

I also agree with pretty much everything else that you said. Socialism is near dead and dying in Europe.

It’s gone. It fell with the USSR and then NATO-led balkanization of Yugoslavia. Europe is capitalist.

I just think that the sprinkle of Social policies that is left in the EU still holds back Capitalism from being quite as horrible as it could be.

I might agree but I frame it differently. The social policies remain because they are too popular to remove, but capitalism is eating away at them from multiple directions. Privatization is everywhere, as are benefit cuts to siphon into militarization. The latter is only possible due to fearmongering over Russia. But more dangerously, European countries oppress the left, such as banning communist parties or even expressions of solidarity with Palestine. That results in “the discourse” being dominated by liberald and protofascists. But the liberals are presiding over declines in conditions due to capitalism, so when they lose popularity, protofascists gain it. This will produce repeated one-two punches of austerity, dismantling social programs, and scapegoating marginalized people. And all while the US drains Europe’s industrial base. Europe’s utility as a forward base against the USSR is gone and they are now a bloodbag for US’ vampires.