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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I've been noticing Russell conjugation of "enemy fights for (leadership) / ally fights for (country)" quite frequently lately - notably, the Ukraine war has people fighting for Putin vs. ones fighting for Ukraine in Western media, and people fighting for Russia vs. ones fighting for Zelenskiy in Russian media. Has this always been a thing?

Also, while pro-Palestinians will certainly say they are fighting for Palestine rather than Hamas, they don't seem to say that Israelis are fighting for Likud/Netanyahu. Is this just because the vanguard of Israeli anti-Palestine action is too obviously pluricentric?

They (or rather, "We", since I do it too) use that when the leadership is an aberration that does not represent its constituents. Sometimes it's a reach.

The IDF's actions in Gaza are popular among Israelis, so they are fighting for Israel. I'd sure like if Hamas was unpopular in Gaza and only represented themselves, so I'm tempted to say their combatants are only fighting for themselves.

I see the same thing at a smaller scale with politics:

  • Something great: "Canada did..." (or "We did...")
  • Something good: "The Federal Government did..."
  • Something bad: "The Liberal Party did..."
  • Something very bad: "Justin Trudeau did..."

Hamas isn’t an individual. It is the government of the Palestinian state. When people say “the US or Israel did X” do they mean the government, the nation, or the people?

Has this always been a thing?

To a degree, but you're conflating correlation versus causation here.

Many of the country-vs-country conflicts you would be tracking/aware of involve exceptionally personalist regimes, whether that's more objective (Putin's Russia as a individual-centric system) or more part of the propaganda narrative (Russian claims that Ukraine is led by Nazis, but that the rest of the country can be salvaged/liberated with a different government). Since regime change was an explicit goal of the Russians in the invasion leadup, but not the Palestinians on 7OCT, the conflict-propaganda reflects the initial rationales for conflict, even as the Hamas conflict is more categorical (Israel/Jews regardless of leader) in nature. At the same time, when it comes to their own allies, no one has a reason to characterize their allies as personalist autocrats as opposed to an alliance with a general nation, so Russia has no real incentive to characterize it's relationship with the leader of Belarus rather than Belarus in general.

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