hopefully i don’t get called a lib for this but i have been feeling quite a bit of uncertainty when it comes to Jewish people who have been indoctrinated into Zionism and Americans , and partially people from other western nations , who have either due to economic distress or due to indoctrination joined the military . don’t get me wrong both are absolutely privileged , especially those Jewish people who live in occupied Palestine , however i feel that they aren’t fully responsible for their harmful beliefs . of course this doesn’t excuse acting on their beliefs , but from testimonies of people who have rid themselves of those beliefs its not an easy thing to do (i have been particularly affected by Matt Leib’s , of the BadHasbara podcast , comparison between fighting off his heroin addiction and his Zionism) .
they are of course not the people who are most victimised , however i feel somewhat uneasy about blaming them for not doing the work of deindoctrinating themselves , especially as , especially those who joined the American military , they are really mistreated . a lot of propaganda is explicitly about making those who benefit from the ideology maintained by it to feel unsafe , therefore , in their minds , justifying violent actions .
like this mostly matters for those who are on the path if deindoctrinating themselves , even if they themselves have not realised that yet , for example a ex military member who is struggling with trauma over actions they made in while deployed or someone who has been raised in a Israeli settlement questioning the morality of living there , beyond the usual labor Zionist stuff . i definetly don’t think that , sorry for the extreme example , someone who relives pressing down the trigger of a sniper riffle and the bloody effects of what happened after , especially if they were aware then or were made aware later that the person they killed was a noncombatant , that their actions were wrong . i think that helping them towards the realisation that its a wider issue is the better option .
like this isn’t very well put together but like just wanted to throw this out and have someone say if i’m not insane or just the usual over empathic stuff .
on language
feel free to replace each usage of “person” with “entity” , i wanted to make this more readable to those outside the ΘΔ space
Were all Nazis bad people and to blame for their actions?
Are all oligarchs responsible for their actions?
KKK members?
Sure you can make an argument of some kind of diminished responsibility due to low
IQintelligence, general ignorance etc. But ultimately we’re talking about grown adults with the capacity of free will.Ask yourself what it would take for you to exult in the mass murder of tens of thousands of little girls? What could people tell you to make you behave in this way? I don’t think they even think of themselves as blameless because they think of themselves as supreme. They are entitled to cause massive harm due to being better, chosen, Übermensch etc.
It doesn’t much matter to the kids who are crying because they’ve been told that their arms won’t grow back, that someone who supports this happening to someone else tomorrow is starting to have doubts and might feel bad in the future.
This trade off of “bad feelings” versus the brutal physical impact of someone’s actions is a common feature of settler colonialism in particular. We see it with the “loyalists” in Northern Ireland, with the Americans’ about Vietnam (except only in movies), and it pervades Zionist supremacist propaganda today.
To blame, means to be responsible for. Are people responsible for their actions or not?
I think a very useful, if somewhat heavy handed and bitter position, is that reasonable sympathy for indoctrinated people ends when they greatly harm others.