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

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    6·
    7 days ago

    As an aside I look with some amount of skepticism at those who propose that in the west we could at some enormous scale what China did at a very small scale to a small number of high ranking war criminals and a former emperor. Quite frankly the indoctrination runs far deeper here in the west than in China. Liberalism, capitalism have been here for hundreds of years. It’s interwoven with religious dogma, with cultural dogma that is entirely part of the liberal super-structure unlike in China whose culture still had strong communal non-individualist (if feudal/peasant) elements to it. You try and shame a Chinese person from that era with their ancestors and community responsibility and most feel it pretty deeply, you try and shame a westerner and they scoff at you because they, their parents, their parents’ parents were all raised in individualism, in a contempt for the community, in a fuck the world and treat others as stepping stones mentality, in an economic mode that directly rewarded and venerated this behavior.

    As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who brought up that China example in this thread. I did not bring it up to say it will translate directly to every circumstance. The point was about effectiveness and how we think about the question. Whether we are thinking about what should happen to people sourced from a sense of anger at what they’ve done and hypotheticals deriving from that, or whether we are thinking about what is most effective for liberation. Until power is actually in communist hands in a place such as the US, we can only speculate at what will or won’t be effective for the indoctrination problem. Small scale stuff preceding that might provide some insight, but it isn’t going to be quite the same as communist hands on sources of information at a large scale; as opposed to the current reality of swimming against the current of status quo propaganda constantly and communists effectively being locked out from most mainstream means of reaching people, whether through more direct censoring or indirect through funding difficulties.