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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Next time someone pretends to be horrified over Russia killing a guy in the UK just remember the amount of assassinations the US and Israel does.

  1. at that time UK was not bombing Russia, directly, via proxy or giving weapons to country bombing Russia. Also, UK was not calling Russia to be removed from the world map etc.

  2. I was horrified over Russia killing a guy in the UK mostly for strategic reasons, because that indicated Russia can kill people with impunity. I had cared almost nothing about far more people dying elsewhere in Africa or on Chinese/Indian border etc. I cared about this more for strategic reasons than ethical ones.

at that time UK was not bombing Russia

I don’t really see how assassinating Palestinians overseas becomes more palatable if you’re also gunning them down by the thousands with ground infantry.

Or is this a “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” thing?

I refer to fact that this assassination has targeted leader of organisation that declared war against Israel and performed large attack in addition to continuous regular attacks with rockets.

And they assassinated them in country that was using them as proxies and supporting them, and recently performed quite large attack on Israel.

You're decrying "assassination during war" on the grounds that "you're gunning enough of them down as it is"?

There's a principled ethical difference. Terrorists vs dissidents.

Why? Unironically, the US is good and kills bad guys, Russia is bad and kills good guys. There’s no reason to hold different parties to the same vague principle, abstracted and zoomed out to such a degree as to blur the line between good and evil.

I beg the differ. Unironically, Russia is good and kills bad guys. Besides, quite a lot of Israelis have Russian ancestry, up to the point of having just changed their surnames, and Israel would not exist if it weren't for Russian support.

Russia is one of the great historic nations, it's never going anywhere. No amount of spite will change the fact that they launched the first man in space or erase their contributions to art and science.

  • -12

Nah, launching a war of aggression and invading unprovoked, causing suffering and death to millions, is bad. Gulags are bad, communism is evil, and exporting it all over the world to the point that we still haven't recovered is even worse. What would Korea look like today if it weren't for the USSR, for example?

Quite a few Israelis have Russian ancestry and ran away to Israel due to persecution. Not all of them, but there's generally a reason why they're not in Russia anymore.

Russia as the USSR has backed, and is still backing today, Israel's enemies. There had been a short period around Israel's founding when the USSR did help us, which it should be credited for. That, however, was the USSR 70+ years ago rather than today's Russia.

But honestly, Israel is a small blip on the map of the world, we don't actually matter. A better approach would have been to talk about the USSR's role in defeating the Nazis - to which the obvious response should be that one evil fighting another is just the nature of evil, that doesn't turn it good.

launching a war of aggression and invading unprovoked

Lmao, It must feel nice to ignore geopolitics an completely ignore the US meddling in Ukraine's elections. i guess Russia should have just rolled over dead and allowed the US to completely cut it off from the Black sea. Get real.

  • -11

This is low effort and unnecessarily antagonistic, please don't post like this.

I’m confused, what’s wrong with Novorossiysk, and how did invading areas of Ukraine that don’t border the black sea at all is related to that?

While we’re at sea access though, why not invade Turkey to secure access to the Mediterranean? Or maybe invade Spain to secure access from there to the Atlantic?

why not invade Turkey to secure access to the Mediterranean

Can you imagine what the Russian casualties would look like if they attempted this considering how Ukraine is going for them? This is discounting any outside direct NATO intervention I think just Turkey would have annihilated their expeditionary force to the last man.

Russia regained the Black Sea in 2014.

it's never going anywhere

And for my ensuring that it hold true in geographic sense is personally quite important to me.

Unironically, Russia is good

Well, Eastern Europe is going to disagree for obvious reasons.

I'm Eastern European.

Serbian? Belarussian?

Croatian (OK you caught me, South-Eastern European? But so are Serbs.)

Needless to say your nationality does not determine your stance, and I am sick and tired of these generalizations, as if we are all reducible to your average Redditor.

Well, Russians themselves and few people will disagree. But approval of Russian government and of Russia is remarkably low there (obviously, not 0 and for example in Slovakia it may be relatively high).

they launched the first man in space or erase their contributions to art and science.

How is that even remotely relevant to figuring out whether what they're doing now is good or bad?

The claim was literally "Russia is bad", so I felt that it could be countered by listing a few achievements of world-historic significance that benefited all of mankind off the top of my head

How many wanton land grabs does, in your opinion, one first man in space buy? Are historical achievements time-discounted?

Next time some country decides to invade Russia I won't say a word about what Russia does to the opponent's leaders.

Who has said that it would be against the rules of war for either part to kill the opposing side’s leader in this case?

Assassinations have never been a mainstay of warfare. The 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not orchestrated by any European power, and the aftermath led to the outbreak of WWI. In WWII for example assassinations were not a method of warfare except by Partisans in only a few notable cases, and today we refer to Partisan warfare as 'terrorism'.

During the Cold War the attempted assassinations of Castro and other foreign leaders was a huge scandal when it was made public and Ford, Carter, and Reagan all issued Executive Orders prohibiting assassinations by any agent of the US government. The KGB engaged in some assassinations of dissidents, but the huge reliance on assassination for waging warfare by Israel and Mossad is unique to Israel and not precedented in the history of warfare. They heavily rely on assassinations to wage war and manipulate political proceedings and negotiations, probably more than any other country in history combined.

I don't want to be class reductivist. But no shit it's not a mainstay of warfare - because the methods and norms of warfare are set by the ruling elites and they obviously don't want to be in the firing line of reciprocal action. Do you think the 50,000 American guys that died in Vietnam would have preferred a series of assassination attempts on leadership or key figures to stem the spread of communism, even if it meant that Kissinger or William Rogers might have their cars blown up (I have no evidence or intuition that this would me more effective, nor do I intend to defend that position), or would the ungentlemanly breaking of norms upset them too much?

I think this is a bit orthogonal to the topic, though. "Decapitating enemy leadership" has arguably always been a "legitimate" (insofar as such things can be "legitimate" when you go down to the level of primitive, tribal tit-for-tat) strategy in warfare. The rebel army seeks to overthrow the Emperor, killing him if necessary; the Emperor is in his right to demand the rebel leader's head on a pike; rival kingdoms are perfectly fine with the enemy bloodline being extirpated, and so on. Consider the Ferguson, the 18-Century rifle that could have been used to assassinate George Washington.

The 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not orchestrated by any European power

This is an unfortunate example to have chosen. I just finished reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark, who goes to great lengths to show the involvement official and semi-official Serbia in the assassination plot.

In particular, Dragutin Dimitrijević (a.k.a. "Apis") was both chief of Serbian military intelligence and a leading member of the Black Hand. According to Clark, he was "the principle architect behind the plot". Serbian officer Major Vojislav Tankosić also played a key role training and arming the Princip and co.

The relationship of the Black Hand and other Serbian irredentist groups to "official" Serbia was also complicated. Lots of members of the Serbian officer corps and intelligence service were more or less openly members, and the groups existed with the tacit approval and often support of the government and its institutions. Indeed, much of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia concerns demands that "official" Serbia divorce itself from these groups and networks.

Clark also alleges that Prime Minister Nikola Pašić was forewarned of the plot and even tried to send a clumsy warning to the Austrians.

Seems like pretty thin evidence, "two degrees of separation" notwithstanding. What it does prove is how the practice itself is a sort of Pandora's Box. Everybody was scandalized by the assassination, no European power took credit for it. It led to a massively destructive war.

So now that Israel has embraced and normalized the practice as S.O.P in engaging in warfare, what are we to make of it? It's dangerous at best. They know they could start a regional war by conducting assassinations in Tehran. That's the point. They want a regional war so they can drag America to their defense.

The 1914 plot is a very good example for how and why the practice has not been used in warfare in the past. Imagine if the US engages in a Proxy war with China, and China starts assassinating US politicians or sending mailbombs to civilian factory workers. All hell would break lose.

Seems like pretty thin evidence

In my view, the case as made in the book is pretty strong that official Serbia bears significant responsibility for the assassination. Clark spends about the first third of the book tracing the history of Serbian irredentism, the relationships between terrorist irredentist groups, and the Serbian officer corps and the civilian politicians. These guys were trying to maintain secrecy and plausible deniability, so by its very nature the case relies on some circumstantial evidence. That said, I wouldn't describe the evidence as "thin" - I found myself pretty well convinced.

So now that Israel has embraced and normalized the practice as S.O.P in engaging in warfare, what are we to make of it?

If you haven't read it, I expect you'd enjoy Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. Isreal's targeted assassination programmes have been extensive ever since they began hunting Nazis post-WW2 - the author credits them with "at least" 2,700 since then, which is to say this isn't something the've embraced and normalised recently.

Clearly, whatever our assessment is, at least some important decision makers within the Israeli state think it's an effective means of achieving their goals - and have done for a while for now.

List of American assassinations

List of Russian assassinations

Looking at the list of American assassinations is jarring in that they are entirely after September 11th, in the context of the Middle East conflict and America's alliance with Israel. Israel's tradition of using assassination for political purposes and warfare goes back decades before. Certainly the evidence you've posted bolsters the case that these types of assassinations are brand new in the history of warfare and were introduced and normalized by Israel's methods in Palestine.

Russia is more comparable example. But take those two lists, the American and Russian, and compare that to the list of Israeli assassinations.

These lists would indeed suggest that Israel's reliance on assassinations in engaging in warfare is not precedented in world history.

Items 2 and 4 in the US list encompasses thousands of individuals. Vietnam alone includes more individual assassinations than the entire rest of the list. The US has assassinated so many people, you can't even get an accurate number or a list of names. That the Israeli list is so exhaustive is evidence against your claim.

Honestly, just the word "assassination" with its history is evidence against your claim.

The Phoenix Program was a counter-insurgency program, not created as an assassination program. Nobody considers all the Hamas killed in Gaza in 9 months to have been "assassinated." The assassinations mentioned in that Wikipedia article include things like car-bombing political figures and civilians, or sniping somebody in the back while they are in their garden.

i.e. from a Veteran of the program:

The biggest myth coming out of Vietnam was that perpetrated by non-veterans of the Phoenix Program. I am constantly amazed at the number of postings in various forums describing the "truth" about Phoenix. As a veteran of the program - Go Cong and An Xuyen from Jan 1969 to Jan 1970 - I see several problems.

First and foremost, the "assassination" question. We had definite orders to the contrary. We also had orders to report such activities we had knowledge of. Were people killed? Of course. In my tour, going over notes about my tour I accumulated in preparation for writing a book on the subject, we had tens killed in military operations. For example, in one battle in upper Thoi Binh, the PRUs [Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, or counter-terror team] were suckered into an ambush by the VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure, or political agents]. However, they wisely deployed differently than normal and sprang a counter attack. Outnumbered, the PRUs asked for reinforcements. The Province responded and over the next two days, about 150 VC were killed. A number were VCI. We got the credit for the kills, but it was an all out pitched military battle and the numbers are counted in the "assassinations" figures spouted by the uninformed.

Even so, especially because much of the violence fell under the gray area of "assassination", the program was denounced and disbanded.

This stands in sharp contrast to the long history of assassinations in Israel where it's a matter of official policy and a longstanding pattern of behavior.

Ah, quibbling over definitions is always a fun time.

I contend that CIA-led ops going to a person's home in their village and killing them there, many times a civilian "infrastructure" and not even a soldier, is a central example of "assassination". This is without going into the kidnapping and torture even. In a few short years the US managed to do just that enough times that it will take Israel centuries to catch up, which means that whatever Israel does is hardly "unique".

On the other hand, if that doesn't count as "assassination" and neither does counter-insurgency or targeted killings, then what are you left with from the Israeli list? All the PLO members are just combatants hiding in other countries, everyone killed in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Judea and Samaria count as either counter-insurgency, seek and destroy or out-right combat - which is most of that list by the way - and now you're left with... what? a few tens of people at best? I'll raise you all the CIA attempts at Castro & other actual world leaders and call it even?

Now compare that to the Russian list, and I'd say "unique" goes right out the window.

Russia and the US are just easy modern-day examples, though. The most obvious refutation, as I hinted at earlier, are the original Assassins with hundreds of central-example stab-in-the-back killings of political leaders under their belts. I'm sure they would've done more if they had predator drones.

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Trump assassinated a more senior Iranian figure than any that Mossad has targeted. The FSB regularly uses assassinations. I hardly think it’s unique.

In WWII for example assassinations were not a method of warfare except by Partisans in only a few notable cases, and today we refer to Partisan warfare as 'terrorism'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance

You just linked to a battle, at a military installation on a battlefield. The Czech partisan assassination of Reinhard Heydrich on the streets of Prague is more similar to the type of assassinations we are talking about here, the ones that have been made ubiquitous and normalized by Zionist operation in Palestine.

I don’t think anyone in this thread brought up the rules of war, but functor was pretty clearly holding Israel to a different standard than Russia.

Functor, by implication.

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