The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Kaelik]

Important news!

The IDF has now announced the largest hospital in north Gaza that they have now invaded and seized does NOT have secret Hamas tunnels like Joe Biden just told us earlier today he has super proof it definitely does.

It turns out the IDF, which has been doing an ethnic cleansing of North Gaza did a little woopsie! Now they have announced the secret Hamas headquarters under a hospital is actually under Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, South Gaza. What a silly little mistake they made! Anyway just remember that the hospitals definitely have very real Hamas Terror Tunnels that Joe Biden will confirm 6-8 more times as the IDF extends it's ethnic cleansing from North Gaza to South Gaza.

Which the clever among you might have noticed is All of Gaza.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The IDF has now announced the largest hospital in north Gaza that they have now invaded and seized does NOT have secret Hamas tunnels like Joe Biden just told us earlier today he has super proof it definitely does.

Link?

[Kaelik]

Here’s the situation: You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened.

No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.

Q Can you just detail for us what kind of evidence the U.S. has seen that Hamas has a command center under Al-Shifa Hospital?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.

Q Do you feel absolutely confident based on what you know —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q — that that is the truth?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... odside-ca/

[Omegonthesane]

"Evidence of a Hamas headquarters in a hospital? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your kitchen?"

"Yes."

"May I see it?"

"No."

[Sashi]

I hate to talk in terms of "national psyches" or such nonsense, but the leadership of the Zionist entity has historically felt unable to just speedrun its warcrimes and achieve the objective before it makes headlines.

Hasn't this been the case for every modern military conflict? WWII was really the transition from when a country was able to justify invading another country through outright imperialism "we want your stuff and you can't stop us taking it" to the modern era of UN approved "peacekeeping" actions. Even Russia felt the need to cover their Ukraine invasion with a fig leaf of "liberating" and "denazifying" the Donbas region.

It's all out of the USA handbook, from "Iraq has a comprehensive CBN program so we've got to invade, just look at these aluminum tubes" to "we never cause civilian casualties with drone strikes because anyone killed by a drone strike is, by definition, an enemy combatant"

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Listen more closely to the Israeli reps in the media.

When Russia says its fighting nazis at least there are some actual nazis on the other side.

Israel is also so fucking desperate to tell you they are also fighting literal nazis. But they arent fighting any actual nazis at all. Hammas may be a lot of things but they have basically nothing in common with nazis.

Israel wants you however to regard not Hamas but all Palestinians as psychotic nazis suicidally bent on total jewish extermination by their very nature as a people. Listen to what passes for their media spin their entire case for their self defence genocide hinges on incredible levels of racism that just relies on the west accepting that arabs are inherintly evil nazis that froth into a blood rage when a jew wanders into line of sight.

The sheer racism they get away with in so called serious media interviews is jaw dropping.

And again I'm Australian so I'm inured to racism and my jaw is resistant to moving even when i speak.

[Kaelik]

There was a recent thing where an Israeli official pulled out a copy of Mein Kampf with highlighting and underlining, and then said "This was found in a child's living room."

Which was obviously calculated to imply that somehow it's actually fine that Israel is killing children because the children are all nazis.

But it does raise some serious concerns when you spend more then 2 seconds thinking about what a "Child's Living Room" means in terms of who owns what, and how that doesn't make any sense.

(And also it was probably fake, like the guns they find, which are probably planted, because Hamas probably doesn't leave duffle bags of ten guns lying around or like all the fake Israeli recordings that keep coming out of people with Tunisian Arabic accents saying "I am Hamas and it was definitely us that blew up that hospital. It was DEFINITELY not the Israelis, who of course, would never bomb a hospital" or "I am Hamas, I always joyride ambulance convoys, and I'll be getting in one of those red cross ambulances tomorrow, so if Israel blows up a Red Cross Convoy that gave them their exact coordinates and time of departure and is transporting critical patients in compliance with Israel's evacuation orders, they are right to do so.")

Which is to say, that yeah, Israeli propaganda exists to fool Israelis mostly, and they live in a censored echo chamber, so probably a lot of them are fooled, and also to fool specifically Joe Biden, who's very dumb brain just requires anyone to say something in a Pennsylvanian accent and then instantly decides it must be true and fabricates all the very real evidence needed to be 100% sure. But the propaganda does exist, and regularly claims that all Palestinians are nazi genocide monsters that are racially incapable of peace. It's a huge part of the Israeli mythology and has been for decades, and was done convincingly enough in the past that almost everyone over the age of 50 in the US believes it.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

But remember that they definitely wont be letting Palestinians run a state of ANY form in Gaza after they DEFINITELY let them have oh lets just use the words "right of return" after this, because explicitly they have stated that Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority, and every other remotely extant alternative will, because of their intrinsic evil Arab nature, teach racial hatred and terrorism to their children with brainwashing propaganda.

Children that otherwise would TOTALLY have been happy loyal citizens of a not at all apartheid state they cannot move, work, build, live, vote or reliably not be beaten, imprisoned, tortured and shot in.

I think most of us are aware at this point what Israeli schools are teaching about "Arabs".

It really IS always projection with fascists.

[Omegonthesane]

I hate to talk in terms of "national psyches" or such nonsense, but the leadership of the Zionist entity has historically felt unable to just speedrun its warcrimes and achieve the objective before it makes headlines.

Hasn't this been the case for every modern military conflict? WWII was really the transition from when a country was able to justify invading another country through outright imperialism "we want your stuff and you can't stop us taking it" to the modern era of UN approved "peacekeeping" actions. Even Russia felt the need to cover their Ukraine invasion with a fig leaf of "liberating" and "denazifying" the Donbas region.

It's all out of the USA handbook, from "Iraq has a comprehensive CBN program so we've got to invade, just look at these aluminum tubes" to "we never cause civilian casualties with drone strikes because anyone killed by a drone strike is, by definition, an enemy combatant"

There's a third approach the Saudis take of just getting it over with and not talking about it. Or rather I should say a second approach, because whether you're justifying your crimes with "outright imperialism" or "peacekeeping", you're justifying them at all instead of trying to sweep them under the rug.

[Sashi]

When Russia says its fighting nazis at least there are some actual nazis on the other side.

Ukraine does have a nazi paramilitary force, but Russia is literally paying a nazi mercenary company to invade Ukraine. Replacing Ukranian nazis with Russian nazis is not "denazifying" Ukraine.

Israel is also so fucking desperate to tell you they are also fighting literal nazis. But they arent fighting any actual nazis at all. Hammas may be a lot of things but they have basically nothing in common with nazis.

The far-right leadership of Hamas has about as much in common with nazis as UKIP or Republicans do, which is much more than "basically nothing" but also I think this more of a semantic issue because the number of Palestinians who identify as "Hamas" because they're tired of being genocided in an open air prison is much higher than the number who are ideologically aligned with the leadership.

It's also irrelevant because even if there were literal goose-stepping nazis in Gaza that wouldn't justify bombing hospitals.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Ukraine does have a nazi paramilitary force, but Russia is literally paying a nazi mercenary company to invade Ukraine. Replacing Ukranian nazis with Russian nazis is not "denazifying" Ukraine.

All I am saying is there really WERE actual Nazis there, maybe not to the full degree of the full Russian propaganda, but it was definitely true enough to give that propaganda real legs. I'll go further and say the Ukrainian Nazis had a genuinely significant and relevant presence in relation to provocation of the Ukranian war, but the important thing is they are actually real and if Putin wants to point at them he actually has a thing to point at. Palestinian Nazis, in whatever miniscule number of brown guys once saw the cover of mein kampf while an Israeli minister was planting it in a "child's living room" might as well not fucking exist.

The far-right leadership of Hamas has about as much in common with nazis as UKIP or Republicans do.

Words mean something and Nazi doesn't just mean political movements you don't like. The Nazis are our big nasty example of Fascists. UKIP and the Republicans and the Isrealis are also Fascists and have very strong similarities.

Hamas is a Nationalist and Religious Extremist movement, but neither of those things is Fascism, and the way Nationalism and Religious Extremism are expressed by a movement based around resistance to colonial extermination are very very different to the way a Fascist dominates and oppresses its internal and external enemies.

One mans terrorists are another mans freedom fighters. BUT THEY AREN"T FUCKING NAZIS THAT WORD DOES NOT GO THERE.

It's also irrelevant because even if there were literal goose-stepping nazis in Gaza that wouldn't justify bombing hospitals.

The goose stepping Fascists in this situation are genuinely the Israelis. They are using Nazi language, strategies and politics very openly and blatantly.

And Israeli leaders are even Nazi apologists and frequently attack holocaust victims/survivors as weaklings, failures and cowards unlike the strong Zionist super soldiers.

[Sashi]

There's a third approach the Saudis take of just getting it over with and not talking about it. Or rather I should say a second approach, because whether you're justifying your crimes with "outright imperialism" or "peacekeeping", you're justifying them at all instead of trying to sweep them under the rug.

Bringing up drones might have muddied my point but I was just talking about Napoleon-style imperial expansionism where the justification for invasion really wasn't more complicated than "We want more stuff and they can't stop us from taking their stuff, let's go add them to the empire". That's a big difference from Iraq where W spent months building up justifications like WMDs and "bringing Democracy to the region" before rolling tanks into Baghdad.

I completely agree that there's all kinds of other actions countries will just do without any justification or acknowledgement. But these days those are things like CIA coups or sending Uighurs into concentration camps. A quick Wikipedia check shows Saudis do a lot of that kind of stuff, but their military actions are all currently "interventions" into proxy conflicts with no outright expansionist invasions, is there a specific event you're discussing that I missed?

I'll go further and say the Ukrainian Nazis had a genuinely significant and relevant presence in relation to provocation of the Ukranian war, but the important thing is they are actually real and if Putin wants to point at them he actually has a thing to point at. Palestinian Nazis, in whatever miniscule number of brown guys once saw the cover of mein kampf while an Israeli minister was planting it in a "child's living room" might as well not fucking exist.

I agree with you on everything here except for two points. One is that it is not the "Ukranian war" it is the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". It's out of the same playbook as what we're seeing in Gaza: displace one ethnic group (Palestinians/Ukrainians) with another (Israelis/Russians) then claim the second group is so threatened by the original displaced group's anger over being displaced that you have no choice but to roll in and "pacify" the region. The only reason Ukraine has a "genuinely significant and relevant" nazi presence is because they have a functional government and the neo-nazis are a separate political faction from the conservatives the same way you can differentiate between the Conservative party and UKIP in the UK. In fact, before the Russian invasion Ukraine was politically stable enough that there were readily identifiable pro-Ukrainian neo-nazis and Russian separatist neo-nazis.

Second is that you seem to be implying the existence of those neo-nazis in Ukraine makes what's happening in Ukraine more justified than what's happening in Gaza? It's fundamental to my point that calling out a nazi presence is just propaganda to justify ethnic cleansing whether that propaganda has legs or not. You can't disempower the Azov Brigade by giving them an actual excuse to strap up and run in to battle yelling "freeeeeedom".

Words mean something and Nazi doesn't just mean political movements you don't like. The Nazis are our big nasty example of Fascists. UKIP and the Republicans and the Isrealis are also Fascists and have very strong similarities.

Hamas is a Nationalist and Religious Extremist movement, but neither of those things is Fascism, and the way Nationalism and Religious Extremism are expressed by a movement based around resistance to colonial extermination are very very different to the way a Fascist dominates and oppresses its internal and external enemies.

Again, this is what I meant by a semantic issue. The actual leadership of Hamas (as in the people in charge of the Hamas political party when they won that 2006 election) absolutely are fucking fascists. They want to wipe out Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab ethnostate that would be at least as brutal as Israel is now. But Palestine doesn't have a functional government and those fuckers haven't actually won an election since 2006. The actual Palestinian and Sunni nationalist organization on the ground in Palestine basically calls itself "Hamas" not necessarily because they agree with the fascists but because "Hamas" is frozen in amber as leader of the PLO which is the only Palestinian group Israel recognizes as being allowed to distribute food and water in their open-air prison.

One mans terrorists are another mans freedom fighters. BUT THEY AREN"T FUCKING NAZIS THAT WORD DOES NOT GO THERE.

I agree with you about "Hamas" on the ground in Palestine but the problem is that the Hamas leaders-in-exile totally are nazis and that word totally does "go there" to describe them. Israel loves this fact because it means they can play clips of the Hamas leadership spouting nazi talking points (because they are nazis) then point out that there are ~25k members of "Hamas" in Palestine (because they are resisting ethnic cleansing and distributing food) then use that as justification for "denazifying" Gaza. It does nobody any good to pretend that Hamas has zero association with nazis because there are totally people who have a legitimate claim to being leaders of Hamas (2006 version) and will happily recite their nazi talking points to anyone who will listen. The fact is that unless you're talking about Germany between 1939 and 1945 there has never been a time in which the correct way to "denazify" a country was to invade it and arguing about whether there are or aren't nazis in Gaza gives undue legitimacy to the idea that if there were nazis in Gaza it would be okay to bomb hospitals there.

[Kaelik]

I agree with you on everything here except for two points. One is that it is not the "Ukranian war" it is the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". It's out of the same playbook as what we're seeing in Gaza: displace one ethnic group (Palestinians/Ukrainians) with another (Israelis/Russians) then claim the second group is so threatened by the original displaced group's anger over being displaced that you have no choice but to roll in and "pacify" the region. The only reason Ukraine has a "genuinely significant and relevant" nazi presence is because they have a functional government and the neo-nazis are a separate political faction from the conservatives the same way you can differentiate between the Conservative party and UKIP in the UK. In fact, before the Russian invasion Ukraine was politically stable enough that there were readily identifiable pro-Ukrainian neo-nazis and Russian separatist neo-nazis.

This is not in fact even remotely what the war is about. This is an entirely made up bad guy narrative that was made up post hoc to justify why Russia is totally worse then the US when it invaded Iraq, but also not even the official position of the US government, just weirdo freaks.

The invasion of Ukraine was to set up a political puppet state that would serve Russia and potentially allow for annexation of Ukraine and/or official recognition of past annexation in Crimea from the other side. It was not in fact, and still isn't, about ethnic cleansing Ukranians to make Liebensraum for Russians. To the extent that Russia is looking to annex Ukraine for economic reasons, it's for more people, not more land.

The ETHNICITY of Russians was already the majority in half of Ukraine before the invasion happened, including all the territories that Russia has taken. The war has not meaningfully resulted in the elevation of ethnically Russian residents of Ukraine in the Russian occupied parts, nor has resistance to the Russian invasion been along ethnic lines either. The people subjugated by Russia in Russian occupied parts of Ukraine are predominately ethnically Russian Ukranians, and not because the ethnically Ukranians got cleared out, but because those areas were ethnically Russian before Russia showed up, and now those ethnic Russians are being suppressed alongside ethnic Ukranians.

Russia is not engaged in an ethnic cleansing or war for ethnic cleansing. Sorry, it's just the regular kind of war that's bad for the regular kinds of reasons, you don't get to throw around the extra special "this one is more evil" tag to separate it from US wars.

Again, this is what I meant by a semantic issue. The actual leadership of Hamas (as in the people in charge of the Hamas political party when they won that 2006 election) absolutely are fucking fascists. They want to wipe out Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab ethnostate that would be at least as brutal as Israel is now. But Palestine doesn't have a functional government and those fuckers haven't actually won an election since 2006. The actual Palestinian and Sunni nationalist organization on the ground in Palestine basically calls itself "Hamas" not necessarily because they agree with the fascists but because "Hamas" is frozen in amber as leader of the PLO which is the only Palestinian group Israel recognizes as being allowed to distribute food and water in their open-air prison.

And what PL was telling you is that "people who are bad" are not in fact the same things as fascists, and that Hamas was/is a different kind of bad thing. The fact that you said "Muslim Arab ethnostate" should have been your first clue, but also, it would not in fact be a Muslim Arab ethnostate, even besides that Muslim Arab is not an ethnicity, it would also not be an Arab ethnostate.

That some guys from 2006, if given total power, would commit mass murder or even genocide does not mean they are fascists and want an ethnostate. Turns out, it's totally possible to be pro genocide without being a fascist.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I agree with you on everything here except for two points. One is that it is not the "Ukranian war" it is the "Russian invasion of Ukraine".

If you care about that level of spin for labeling a war in the Ukraine you are swept up in war propaganda and are not making clean rational statements.

It's out of the same playbook as what we're seeing in Gaza: displace one ethnic group (Palestinians/Ukrainians) with another (Israelis/Russians) then claim the second group is so threatened by the original displaced group's anger over being displaced that you have no choice but to roll in and "pacify" the region.

Sort of, the Russians ARE the occupying force and the Ukrainians ARE the resistance force. But whatever else the Russians are doing its not precisely ethnic cleansing. BUT prior to the war it was the reverse and Nazis really were shelling ethnically Russian communities in eastern Ukraine with mortar fire in an ongoing campaign of attempted ethnic cleansing at least permitted if not sponsored by the Ukrainian government. This is NOT the same, again like the presence of the Nazis it may have been a pretext but it was a REAL pretext that Putin could and in fact DID point at and it was the final round of mortar shelling that Russia specifically pointed at as the final provocation right before they invaded.

This is a substantive difference between them and Israel. I'm all for drawing the Russia=Israel and Palestine=Ukraine thing just on the simple basis of who is occupying and who is resisting. But do NOT make the mistake of thinking that Ukrainians are as much one sided victims as the Palestinians. Organized government forces of Ukrainian Nazis were engaged in an ongoing military campaign of ethnic cleansing. Hamas sometimes launched fire works at Israeli occupied beaches and this one time had a big violent prison break out. It is not the fucking same.

The only reason Ukraine has a "genuinely significant and relevant" nazi presence is because they have a functional government

That is both irrelevant, the fact that they are there and the facts of what they were doing not really requiring us to know the reason why they are there. But also because fuck you no that's not the only reason why they are there, its a long history and about legacy of prior wars and so on. But worse that's not even A reason they are there.

Functional governments do NOT automatically create Nazi miltias and sponsor their ethnic cleansing campaigns. Why would you think functional governments just make Nazis as a natural byproduct? That is serious liberal brain rot level insanity.

And I mean that's IF you actually want to call the Ukrainian government functional. Which before the war propaganda, WAS NOT A THING ANYONE IN THE WORLD EVER DID. Especially not after the USA couped them for getting too friendly with Russia and their own ethnically Russian minority voters. It was and still is famous as one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt governments in a region of dysfunctional and corrupt governments.

Second is that you seem to be implying the existence of those neo-nazis in Ukraine makes what's happening in Ukraine more justified than what's happening in Gaza?

More but not enough. I am ENTIRELY fucking capable of comparing different levels of evil. So for instance. When someone says "That man murdered a civilian" I do NOT go "Well that's the same as this other man who murdered over 11,000 civilians because HOW DARE I consider the numbers!".

In fact I will direct you to another comparison of evils between the two conflicts.

Russia almost definitely is committing war crimes. Most commonly and specifically targeting civilian infrastructure and not caring about civilian loss of life. Israel is doing the same thing. But when you look at the casualty numbers and the proportion of civilian to military loss of life the gulf between the two conflicts is fucking VAST.

A person without liberal brain rot can notice that the higher number of civilian casualties and the higher proportion of civlian casualties MEANS THINGS.

The specific thing it means between those two conflicts is that Russia doesn't give a shit about war crimes that hurt civilians in the course of pursuing its objectives but Israel clearly DOES give a shit and is actively trying to eradicate civilians as their primary objective.

They want to wipe out Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab ethnostate that would be at least as brutal as Israel is now.

I think you might be surprised what Hamas actually wants. The number of times its actually been clear they are ready to negotiate and for goals much fucking smaller and more reasonable than that have definitely been swamped by propaganda. I mean you know one of the main things people seem to think they want for hostage release is the release of large numbers of innocent civlians swept up and illegally imprisoned (and tortured) in recent West Bank ethnic cleansing prior to the official "outbreak of violence" (the bit where Israelis get hurt)?

And the "their only relentless irrational nonnegotiable goal is to wipe out Israel and form a Nazi Caliphate" IS the racist Israeli propaganda line. I'll give it the fraction of truth that they ARE a nationalist and religious extremist organization with extreme religious goals, some of them might even call jews inherently evil sometimes, but beyond that it wiffs pretty hard of drinking the Israeli kool aid if that's your line and language.

[MGuy]

Whenever I see someone under these conditions trying to argue that Hamas definitely does want to wipe Israel out two thoughts occur to me.

1: Given the conditions of this conflict why would that matter? Let's say that the people of Gaza do have a burning desire to see Israel wiped out. So what? They weren't doing that. What is the point of bringing that up if not to justify everything Israel has done, is doing, and will likely do in the future? If a government shot my sister's kneecaps out, assaulted my family at my aunt's funeral (who they killed), then bombed the shit/forcefully evicted me out of my house I would really giving want everyone involved dead. However that doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that jackbooted government sponsored thugs regularly do that shit. So why talk about it? Perhaps as a justification for Israeli action? To remind people to fear the Muslim and the Arab?

2: The Media is still incredibly effective at teaching people that brown people are bad even while they are being actively killed by a hostile, genocidal, government. Sometimes slowly through starving them and limiting access to water and at present with more bombs than even the US used in an active war there's still time to ponder if oppressed brown people are like Nazis. Replace black with Arab, concerns of thugs/criminals with Hamas and you can get a surprising number of people right back into old habits.

[Sashi]

This is not in fact even remotely what the war is about. This is an entirely made up bad guy narrative that was made up post hoc to justify why Russia is totally worse then the US when it invaded Iraq, but also not even the official position of the US government, just weirdo freaks.

The invasion of Ukraine was to set up a political puppet state that would serve Russia and potentially allow for annexation of Ukraine and/or official recognition of past annexation in Crimea from the other side. It was not in fact, and still isn't, about ethnic cleansing Ukranians to make Liebensraum for Russians. To the extent that Russia is looking to annex Ukraine for economic reasons, it's for more people, not more land.

I know that it is propaganda, I was specifically talking about how it was propaganda before PL started talking about how the propaganda for Ukraine "has legs". If you want to lecture someone about not believing propaganda, lecture PL.

I'm also not trying to invent a "more evil" tag for the Russian invasion out of some apologia for the US invasion of Iraq. It's just true that the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are there because the Holodomor killed a fuck-ton of Ukrainians and Stalin chose to resettle the area with ethnic Russians for the explicit purpose of diluting the Ukrainian national identity and increasing the region's ties to Russia/USSR. Considering Putin is specifically referring to the demographics of this region as part of his propaganda for justifying annexing Ukraine I don't think it's improper to refer to this annexation as a continuation of Stalin's ethnic cleansing project. The Iraq invasion is also bad but it is bad in a different way and I don't have the combined degrees in political science and mathematics required to properly compare the size of those infinities and figure out which one is worse. Probably Iraq, because USA, but does it actually matter? I'm not trying to justify any of these fucking atrocities.

Functional governments do NOT automatically create Nazi miltias and sponsor their ethnic cleansing campaigns. Why would you think functional governments just make Nazis as a natural byproduct? That is serious liberal brain rot level insanity.

I don't know, what kind of brainrot led you to think that's the argument I'm making instead of the argument I'm actually making which is that an even vaguely functional government allows you to differentiate between the nazi-curious conservative factions and outright nazis (Conservatives/UKIP, AUD/AfD, California/Idaho Republicans). We can talk about how many seats neo-nazis have in the Ukrainian government in a way we fundamentally can't for Palestein because Israel won't stop bombing for long enough to let them have elections. That's not an endorsement of Ukraine, it's an indicator of how bad things are in Palestine.

I think you might be surprised what Hamas actually wants. The number of times its actually been clear they are ready to negotiate and for goals much fucking smaller and more reasonable than that have definitely been swamped by propaganda.

Which Hamas? Considering my point is literally based on the fact that there is a fairly reasonable group called Hamas (the people in Palestine) and also an extremely unreasonable group called Hamas (the assholes from the 2006 election) and that the only reason the second group has any relevance is because Israel refuses to stop pretending they are relevant or stop bombing Palestine long enough for them to hold an election and prove they're irrelevant I think you will find I am not surprised in the slightest.

And what PL was telling you is that "people who are bad" are not in fact the same things as fascists, and that Hamas was/is a different kind of bad thing. The fact that you said "Muslim Arab ethnostate" should have been your first clue, but also, it would not in fact be a Muslim Arab ethnostate, even besides that Muslim Arab is not an ethnicity, it would also not be an Arab ethnostate.

This kind of Tucker Carlson hair splitting over whether any specific group of genocidal nationalist authoritarians are nazis or fascists or Caliphatists or run of the mill conservatives and the difference between an ethnostate and Caliphate is really only necessary if you are making some kind of "it's okay to invade because there are nazis but not okay if there are Caliphatists" kind of argument, which I don't think you are making and I know for a fact I am not making because I am making the opposite argument. If there is some other reason you are so concerned about this please tell me what it is instead of just yelling at me about how I'm not using nazi/fascist in exactly the right way that makes you happy.

We live in a hellworld and nazis are everywhere. Some places you have to really search and flip over rocks before you find two skinheads with swastika tattoos giving the roman salute to a burning cross in the woods before they jack off and go home and wear long sleeves for the rest of the month and other places they get elected to parliament but in neither case is that in itself a justification for war. We're not going to solve this by saying it's okay to invade any region that has nazis because then you can invade anywhere you want just by saying you're totally sure all the people you want to kill are nazis because you flipped over a rock and found a nazi and I know that's the case because it is literally what's happening right now in Palestine. Fuck!

[Omegonthesane]

Stalin's ethnic cleansing project

This has come up before.

The Holodomor was a crime against humanity in which the Soviets prioritised their economic objectives in the near future over the lives of starving Ukrainians in the here and now. Judging by the demographic reports, 2-3 million people died who would otherwise have lived, and that's a lowball estimate because people don't generally try to exclude from the list of those killed by atrocities "people who would have died anyway".

That being said, there is a conspicuous absence of evidence of any intent to kill Ukrainians or the Ukrainian culture through the criminal negligence displayed in the famine. (There is not, by contrast, any shortage of verifiable instances where the Soviets actually did forced transfers of ethnicities, a thing that actually is intentional genocide by the definitions that made it into the UN genocide convention.)

Strictly speaking one would also require proof of intent to demonstrate that the purpose of resettling Ukraine with Russians was to Russify it, rather than "because we need our breadbasket back up and running, and these are the people we have available to resettle it with". But I'll grant you that one because I've never seen any proof to the contrary, and also because even if that was literally Stalin's explicit intent it loses the majority of its nefarious character if the depopulation of the area was, first unintended consequences, then acceptable collateral damage instead of "an intentional genocide from the get-go".

I think you might be surprised what Hamas actually wants. The number of times its actually been clear they are ready to negotiate and for goals much fucking smaller and more reasonable than that have definitely been swamped by propaganda.

Which Hamas? Considering my point is literally based on the fact that there is a fairly reasonable group called Hamas (the people in Palestine) and also an extremely unreasonable group called Hamas (the assholes from the 2006 election) and that the only reason the second group has any relevance is because Israel refuses to stop pretending they are relevant or stop bombing Palestine long enough for them to hold an election and prove they're irrelevant I think you will find I am not surprised in the slightest.

The "assholes from the 2006 election" as you call them are in fact the ones ready to negotiate for goals far smaller than "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and did in fact repeatedly make such negotiations in the intervening years.

And what PL was telling you is that "people who are bad" are not in fact the same things as fascists, and that Hamas was/is a different kind of bad thing. The fact that you said "Muslim Arab ethnostate" should have been your first clue, but also, it would not in fact be a Muslim Arab ethnostate, even besides that Muslim Arab is not an ethnicity, it would also not be an Arab ethnostate.

This kind of Tucker Carlson hair splitting over whether any specific group of genocidal nationalist authoritarians are nazis or fascists or Caliphatists or run of the mill conservatives and the difference between an ethnostate and Caliphate is really only necessary if you are making some kind of "it's okay to invade because there are nazis but not okay if there are Caliphatists" kind of argument, which I don't think you are making and I know for a fact I am not making because I am making the opposite argument. If there is some other reason you are so concerned about this please tell me what it is instead of just yelling at me about how I'm not using nazi/fascist in exactly the right way that makes you happy.

It's actually really important to do this kind of "hair splitting" in Palestine, because a central pillar of pro-occupation propaganda is the idea that the atrocities Tel Aviv has perpetrated are no worse than what Palestine would do given the chance, and this is bolstered by the idea that they are not fanatics driven to fanaticism by their desperate conditions who would mellow the fuck out in better conditions, but rather Nazis of the kind that would love to round up all Jews into gas chambers.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I don't think it's improper to refer to this annexation as a continuation of Stalin's ethnic cleansing project.

I think it is. I think it is VERY fucking improper.

Because ethnic cleansing can end and when it does there are people there, and sometimes people who have been there for a long time and are not as blood stained guilty as many Zionist settlers personally are, especially several generations after the crimes.

You are fucking advocating that ethnic Russians being in Ukraine NOW is somehow wrong, them JUST LIVING WHERE THEY HAVE THEIR WHOLE LIVES is, from the angle you are arguing a continuation of ethnic cleansing, but a group of government backed organized Nazi military killing them and trying to drive them out of the region somehow isn't?

Fuck you that IS very fucking improper.

You should fucking apologize for saying it.

In fact so much so I just deleted a long response to the rest.

You are talking gibberish. You are misdirecting. You are accepting racist genocidal language from genocidal fascists they use to justify their crimes, you are whole heartedly embracing the liberal brain rot argument of total moral equivalence to allow you to condemn everything as equally bad for your convenience.

You need to calm down. Acknowledge that two very bad things CAN be different amounts of bad and in different ways. And that an actual thinking person with a brain, not a "vaguely functional government" with only occasionally honest party brand differentiation, is how to identify Fascism and that correctly identifying it is kind of important not just to fight it, but also to express a less than laughable opinion of it on the internet.

[Thaluikhain]

Can we all not agree that the IDF's war crimes in Palestine are appalling, and that Ukraine and Iraq aren't directly connected to it?

[Omegonthesane]

I don't think anyone is disputing the literal phrase "the IDF's war crimes in Palestine are appalling, and... Ukraine and Iraq aren't directly connected to it".

However, things exist in a context. So it is legitimately useful to bring up comparable examples of when similar things have happened to compare the similarities and the differences.

All three of Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, and Amerika-Iraq had a bad side suffering military aggression from a significantly worse side, with civilians on the ground paying most of the price. There are of course differences, most notably that the IOF has been far more blatantly genocidal than either the USA or the Russian Federation.

(ETA: in those specific wars. Not interested in derailing to a broader discussion of the USA being blatantly genocidal.)

[Kaelik]

It's just true that the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are there because the Holodomor killed a fuck-ton of Ukrainians and Stalin chose to resettle the area with ethnic Russians for the explicit purpose of diluting the Ukrainian national identity and increasing the region's ties to Russia/USSR.

It is not in fact true! I'm sorry you are so american propaganda brained that you believe every dumb american thing, but this is not true.

The Holodamar was a made up term which was invented in the cold war to try to justify arguing that the USSR was worse than/as bad as the Nazis. There is no evidence that the famine which occurred was 1) Worse in Ukraine then in many parts of Russia, 2) Worse in Ukraine for ethnic Ukranians then it was for ethnic Russians, 3) caused to kill people, 4) Redirected deaths to Ukrainians to protect ethnic Russians, 5) part of or used to support a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Soviet Union at the time did have a famine across it's territories because of it's failed agrarian and economic policies. But there is no evidence it was intentional or when it happened was used to ethnically cleanse Ukranians.

This was a thing western historians believed BEFORE the soviet archives were opened after the fall of the USSR. However, since it is 2023, not 1990, you can actually just read books by the SAME historians who wrote about the Holodamar as an intentional genocide before the fall of the USSR write books AFTER the opening of the archives in which they use that info to go back and review the matter and reevaluate their conclusions with new evidence.

For example, "The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, Volume 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931—1933." by Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft. Which was published in 2004 and reflects a very different position then "The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1931—1933" from 1976.

There was an ethnic cleansing of a part of arguably modern day Ukraine and resettlement by ethnic Russians, and that part was Crimea, when the Crimean Tartars were ethnically cleansed partially before the USSR by the Tsars, but continued and completed by the USSR post WWII. But the ethnic Ukranians were never victims of an ethnic cleansing project, because unlike the Crimean Tartars, they were always seen by those in power as fundamentally Russians ALREADY so much so that they always had significant representation in Politburo from the beginning and no one was even moderately concerned when one became head of the Politburo.

[Kaelik]

"The Biden administration has been providing Israel with the location of humanitarian groups in Gaza for weeks to prevent strikes against their facilities. But Israel has continued to hit such sites."

.......

Sending Israel the location of every hospital and ambulance with a giant sign that says "no bombs here" and then sending them a bunch of bombs and then watching them perfectly target bomb every single place you told them not to and then changing NOTHING AT ALL about what you are doing.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/2 ... s-00128336

I feel like providing this information is a war crime of providing targeting info for murdering civialians.

I also do love how committed the media is to lying about Israel's genocidal campaign. "Still, Israel has launched operations against Hamas in or near aid sites" Did it politico? Did it? Did it really launch operations against Hamas? Or did it just drop a bomb and you decided to pretend it was aimed at Hamas?

I know the media exists to decieve people, but if anyone every seriously types the statement "human shields" in relation to Gaza they should instantly be fired for incompetence.

Israel has been calling every civilian they murdered for decades a human shield and 1) The claims have been investigated by the UN and HRW and Amnesty International and the Red Cross and all of them said there is NO EVIDENCE that Hamas has EVER used human shields. Human shields is when people are prevented from leaving locations by force by the people using them as human shields in order to prevent attacks. a) ISRAEL HAS NEVER ONCE IN IT'S ENTIRE HISTORY REFRAINED FROM BLOWING UP A HOSPITAL, Hamas isn't stupid enough to piss off the residents of Gaza for zero deterence effect. b) We know Hamas just straight up isn't in all the locations they claim they are when they blow up a hospital and call it human shields, c) You know who's using force to prevent Palestinian civilians from leaving? GUESS WHO It's fucking Israel. and of course:

2) We know Hamas isn't using human shields because the actual reason Israel kills civilians is because they have the explicit actual goal of killing as many civilians as possible. Before they started this most recent genocidal ethnic cleansing they called their regular bombings "mowing the grass" because they phrase all Palestinians, civilians included, as a "Demographic Threat" and this time through, various high level Israelis have been extremely clear that they see all Palestinians without exception as Hamas. A former PM, the current Intelligence Minister, and the head of the Defense have all explicitly said that there are no Palestinian civilians and they are all Hamas at various times.

[PseudoStupidity]

The UN has announced Russia has now killed 10,000 civilians in Ukraine (actual death toll is likely higher), this is a stark contrast with Israel's genocide in Gaza, which has been going on for roughly 1/20th of the time and has already killed more than 10k civilians.

In very recent news, the murderous beasts motivated only by their desire to wipe out every last Jewish person on earth, Hamas, have decided to further their genocidal agenda by releasing 50 hostages in exchange for a 4-day cease-fire and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners. What nefarious tricks are they up to? Honestly I'm glad there's going to be a cease-fire, even though it's only temporary. Hopefully it lets Israel read the fucking room and stop doing their genocide, or it lets all of Israel's backers put some actual pressure on them to make it a permanent ceasefire. Realistically I think this is just hitting the Pause button for 4 days, but I am hoping for more.

[Kaelik]

My honest answer is that while they have ethnically cleansed north Gaza and could just take the free theft of half the land, they might very well just decide to finish it on the southern part.

After all, Joe biden already announced the US will support Israel if they brutally torture to death 2 million Palestinians 1 at a time to clear it out, so consequences aren't real.

In unrelated knows. The US is bombing Iraq.

[PseudoStupidity]

If I'm trying to put myself in Israel's leadership's shoes I do see little reason to stop the genocide, at least not until my allies stop supporting me. They finally have a chance to accomplish their goals. The US still hasn't stopped getting revenge for 9/11, Israel can ride this out for as long as they want unless protests in allied countries start getting violent enough to force support to be pulled (elections will not matter for this, the genocide in Gaza will be complete before the next US elections at least).