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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The question is will that actually happen. I don’t see how it does, because at the end of the day, there’s a contradiction in the sense that on the one hand never again and on the other is from the river to the sea (code for eradication of Jews in Israel). You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity. The difference at least in Israel is that this time the people calling for the death of Jews are unwilling to do the deed themselves and thus will sadly shake their head as they die at the hands of people that the West refused to let them fight back against.

You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity.

Sure you can, if your intellectual basis is "oppressor-oppressed dynamics." Just argue that in the Holocaust, Germany was the oppressor and Jews the oppressed, but here, Jews are the oppressor and Palestinians the oppressed; that the relative position is the moral factor. That the point of comparison for "calling for the death of Jews" now isn't "calling for the death of Jews" then, but "calling for the death of Nazis" then, because both are calling for violence against "the oppressor" in the name of defending "the oppressed." (I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it.")

I don't agree with this view and its "more oppressed than thou" hierarchy, but at can, at least sometimes, be a consistent one.

I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it."

Out of morbid curiosity, who, in this someone’s mind, “deserves it”?

who, in this someone’s mind, “deserves it”?

In short? Right wingers.

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