2mo ago

Sympathy for their PTSD

179 comments

The last sentence is fucked up. If you're running over hundreds of people how in the fuck do you know they are terrorists. These people are intentionally and knowingly committing war crimes then come back home and cry about how this all made them so sad.
- If the IDF is killing people, then they are terrorists. Not the other way around. You are to be checked for antisemitism/glorification of terrorism. Please report to your nearest IDF bulldozer.
  
  Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:
  If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
  Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
  You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
  Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
  This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
  Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
- Anyone who runs is Hamas. Anyone who stands still is well disciplined Hamas.
- Ask Rachel Corrie, who was similarly run over by a bulldozer protecting Palestinian land. It's been over 20 years and the US still doesn't give a single shit about Israel murdering it's own citizens.
  
  Yeah I remember reading about her. She was an incredibly brave woman. The most horrifying part was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
- Look at how well Israeli propaganda is working abroad. Now imagine how well it must be working on the israeli population.
- Anyone who runs is a terrorist anyone who doesn't run is a lazy terrorist.

reminds me of this bit:
"not only will america go to your country and kill all your people but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."
- For context, this is from Frankie Boyle's 2016 Hurt Like You've Never Been Loved.
  
  I reread that in his voice.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
- My opinion of humanity was already so low...
  
  It's funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It's really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
- There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
- Everyone: "It seems we, as humans, have a pretty strong dislike of executing other humans. A biological aversion to commiting genocide, one might say."
  Nazis: "Halten Sie mein Bier!"
  But in all seriousness, your comment reminded me of "The Banality of Evil".
  For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.
  — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People's liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don't want to loose sight of humanity just because you're committing atrocity.
- I know that another driving force for the gas chambers was to preserve ammunition.
  The earliest versions of gas chambers were essentially "piping truck exhaust into a building." They moved on from that in order to preserve metal (from the piping), fuel, and vehicles for other purposes.
  
  I think they were using vans or buses, not filling buildings with carbon monoxide. Smaller spaces.

i sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life
- Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.
  Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they're doing this because they think they're the good guys/helping out.
  We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel's parliament that's enabling this.
  But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you're trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it's difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it's not until you're finished with your tour and you're back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.
  Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don't humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.
  There's no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity were by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they're all human, or we risk repeating history.
  
  They made a choice, do not absolve people of what they are doing and continue to do, especially if it's fucking genocide, that's literally how these things happen as well as the Holocaust.
  At some point, people have to stand up and say no, voice their concerns, and just simply do the right thing.
  Literally read what you wrote, the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so, are you tone deaf?
  How about we fucking Humanize Palestine
- I'm pretty sure they did.
  Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder [...] Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
  
  Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.
  Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them "terrorists in their hundreds". Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.
  
  Wait... He crushed HUNDREDS of people with a bulldozer in less than 6 months‽ What the actual fuck.

Yeah, I suppose it was traumatic, bombing food relief convoys and hospitals. You could have avoided a lot of that PTSD by refusing to follow illegal orders.
Also, get farked, CNN.
- My interpretation of this is that some mid-level staffers at CNN pushed the story knowing exactly what was in it. Their bosses wouldn't let them do obvious things, so they got a little subtle.

You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn't run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that's some high-level incompetence in CNN.
- CNN has to run every story through the Israeli censor in their Jerusalem bureau. The only mainstream outlet that doesn't go through that process is Al Jazeera, and Israel closed their offices.
  
  Precisely: this is the story CNN and the IDF want you to see. No matter the CNN reader's reaction, the policy will not change.
  So they do the thing because it is a demonstration that they can do the thing without repercussions. Bullingdon Club type mentality.

Ah yes, those hundreds of "terrorists" all nicely lined up in the road.
- How the fuck do you run someone over with a bulldozer... no matter what i think of it's not coming up good...
  
  https://youtu.be/l4UFQWKjy_I

I'm actually speechless.
I hope this guy suffers until his end.
If you run over HUNDREDS with a BULLDOZER, you deserve permanent PTSD to prevent you from ever fucking thinking of doing anything remotely like it again
- I believe this particular quote is from a soldier who took his own life. How. Tragic.
  
  Too bad about the order of operations
- He offed himself because he was about to get sent back out to do it again and apparently the IDF were gonna refuse burial because he was a chicken shit that didn't want to squeeze the organs out of more children.
  Some other people need to suffer from this story than the ones actually suffering.

“So, there is no such thing as citizens,” he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians. “This is terrorism.”
Fuck the IDF
- Well when he said “this is terrorism” he was correct. Just that it’s the IDF terrorizing innocent people.

Poor guy. Did he also have to murder the little baby terrorists and their sobbing, horrified terrorist moms and terrorist sisters too? Poor fella. I hope he can muster the strength to do the right thing.
Fuck Israel and fuck conservatives (including neoliberals) who gleefully support this genocide. The wrong people are being erased.
- There's no such thing as a "correct" people to erase.
  
  When it comes to people committing genocide, I disagree.
- Well, did he have a choice?
  
  ah yes.. "I was only following orders" - Otto Adolf Eichmann
  
  He called the families he murdered terrorists. He's lying about being "traumatized".
  Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. The only terrorists in this story are the settlers committing genocide on the local residents.
  
  Yeah you can go to prison
  
  Everyone has a choice.
  
  He has a choice now. The choice to end his own pathetic life or burn in mental anguish for the rest of his life. I hope he chooses whichever path leaves him and his the most miserable.

I swear this is almost trying to parody the title of the article about the 19 year old who was burned alive
- I'm sure we'll soon get an article about how the pilot felt sad about bombing a hospital.
  
  Something about he at the end of a hard day of bombing schoolyards and hospitals filled with "human animals" going home to his young wife and 5 month old baby with a sad look on his face.

ah Israelis and playing the victim, name a more iconic duo.

"IN THE HUNDREDS"
Good god someone please operation overlord these mother fuckers.

"cop needs therapy after shooting unarmed child"

Didn't the US use to invade countries for much, much less of a reason than that? Sheesh.
These days I'm finding myself agreeing with the Iranian government more and more often because of Israel's crap. I don't like agreeing with the Iranian government.
- I find myself asking "How did I fall for this? How did this seem normal my whole life until now?"
  We didn't hear the whole story during the Holocaust. Now we're getting live videos and firsthand accounts of steam rolling crowds.
  What the fuck is wrong with a person to be OK with this at all.
  
  We didn’t hear the whole story during the Holocaust.
  come again?
  
  Mis/under -education (propaganda), lies through omission. Once the realization occurs, it’s a choice to live in denial and ignore it.
- I don’t like agreeing with the Iranian government.
  I don't like agreeing with Hamas, either. But if the rest of the world isn't interested in lifting a finger against this genocidal excuse for a state, I guess that's just the way it's going to have to be.

Let me go get my Planck length sized violin.

Gee I fucking wonder why you have trauma and PTSD??? Fucking moronic fucks, zero sympathy

Posted this in another thread, gonna post it here, too.
"Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war."
It's an unpopular take, but I recommend everyone read the book "On Killing" by Dave Grossman. It's obvious that what Israel is doing is very much a genocide, but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
- but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
  Sure, but couldn't the same be said for many of the literal guards at Auschwitz? A lot of those people were just kids who were drafted and were simply following orders. Even many of those who were there willingly only did such things after being subject to years of ruthless Nazi propaganda.
  At some point, regardless of what circumstances led you to that moment, you become responsible for your own actions. There is no set of circumstances that can make murdering innocent civilians justified. And if you do that anyway, you bear full moral culpability, regardless of what may have happened in your life before that point.
  We literally hashed this out during the Nuremberg trials. It doesn't matter what propaganda you were subject to. It doesn't matter how you were raised. It doesn't matter if you were "just following orders." It doesn't even matter if you yourself would face execution for refusing to kill innocent civilians. It is never OK to kill innocent civilians, to perform genocide, or commit ethnic cleansing. If you do that, you deserve to hang for it. Full stop. No excuses.
  
  The Nuremberg Trials are a great example of how you don’t hang if you provide enough value to the military-industrial complex, and a terrible example of full stop no excuses. Seems ill suited to be a foundation for a moral philosophy.
  
  It absolutely could, and should. I'm not saying that the crimes should be forgiven, but it is not a purely black and white area. It is very grey. To ignore the fact that they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, just because it's uncomfortable to think about, would be a disservice towards efforts to prevent things like this in the future. People are complex.
- Dave Grossman is full of shit. This is independent to the potential trauma from killing people (there's a wide range of reactions to that experience). Dave Grossman is full of shit.
  
  Grossman
  What a fitting name. Because he is quite gross
- I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims
  Settlers enlisted in an occupying force that seeks to claim more territory over the bodies of the native occupants are not victims.
  
  They have mandatory service, though I'm sure very few people serving their mandatory term are a part of the invading force.
- but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
  Caramel Marks, I mean Karl Marx, would probably agree with you.
  Imperial war.
- Humans are not made to kill other humans. And those who fight the wars of the mighty, are those who are among the ones who suffer the most.
  War is really stupid. And it's astonishing how we continue to be such a stupid species. Given how far we've come, one would think that we've finally realized how much humanity could achieve if we were working together instead of killing each other.
  By the way:
  It's obvious that what Israel is doing is very much a genocide
  The international court of justice has not ruled on this yet, but continues to observe and investigate whether such genocide allegations could apply.
  However, I am not a fan of anyone who practises or participates in wars and so easily tolerates the deaths of innocents.
  
  Lmao are you really trying to act like it's not a genocide because some bureaucratic board has been bullied into being quiet about it?
  
  There's literally video of a child getting cut down, then when help comes for the child they blow them up with a bomb. That's some psychopath shit.
  
  The international court of justice
  We don't need a pack of overpaid bureucrats with fancy titles to tell us whether a genocide is occuring or not. It's a fucking genocide. Plain and simple.

Child murderer.

Some have labelled Israel as a rogue nation, but their actions are explicitly and implicitly condoned through other nation’s support and silence.
- I don't think that's really the case though? I'm pretty sure most nations condemned Israel except for USA, but USA blocked all attempts from anyone to do anything. And when USA says that commiting genocide with their weapons is on the table, I doubt any country wishes to find out what would happen should any concrete action against Israel be taken. It's a big part of the reason why everyone calls USA complicit in genocide of Palestinians.
  
  I have no reason to believe Germany's government condemns Israel's actions right now, and the way they always point out its right to defend itself, I suspect they actively condone them..
  
  Just to be clear, everyday US citizens do not condone this shit.

Aww, poor war criminals

Article link and a mirror
- How naive of me to think "That can't be a real article. Surely they wouldn't publish themselves saying they crushed living and dead people by the hundreds with an armored bulldozer. They must know how abhorrent, insane, and shocking that sounds. Right?"
  No. Of course the worst excesses of violence which had never crossed my mind are being done by the IDF. I'm... I have no words.
  
  Complaining about how they don't want to eat meat because it reminds them of fucking running over live people with a fucking bulldozer!
  The dude killed himself because he was about to be sent back out and the IDF even was gonna refuse him a military funeral because he didn't commit hard enough to genocide. While his family says he obviously wouldn't have killed anyone cause he was a good boy.
  Fuck all this. Fuck this bullshit take on how hard it is for the soldiers and CNN should maybe focus on how obviously evil the IDF and Israel is acting.
  
  I'm at a loss too. I was going to write something with the links but what can even be said.

Oh, I can't wait for the sympathy piece on Auschwitz guards to drop any day now. They must have seen some very, very, very difficult things too, poor souls.

Shooting and Crying
Gil Hochberg described "shooting and crying" as a soldier being "sorry for things I had to do." This "non-apologetic apology" was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as "a way of maintaining the nation's self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] [...] an overall sense that things were going wrong."
- Interesting read thanks.
  Karen Grumberg noted that "the Zionist soldier, a man with a conscience, loathes violence but realizes he must act violently to survive; the dilemma causes him to weep while pulling the trigger. Looking inward, he despairs at the violence he feels compelled to enact this way because he fears his moral corruption."
  Amir Vodka wrote "It typically depicts the IDF in a critical light, as a traumatizer of young soldiers, yet the genre itself is often criticized for turning the assailants into victims, and in a sense allowing the continuation of war under the guise of self-victimization."
  
  So, basically every war movie the US makes about itself.

I hope not that he dies but that he lives to watch everything he cares about crumble to dust as he is powerless to the winds of change
- Dude killed himself (the one the article is about).
  
  Dude also killed a lot of people

Waltz with Bashir (2008)
- I got excited thinking there was DS9 content i hadn't seen
- Hadn't heard of this before but it looks pretty good

Just as Chris Hedges predicted.

Link to the original article.

and if he had refused to do as commanded would he have been shot himself?
- If the army starts shooting its own soldiers, it's not going to exist for very long. You can read very obscure stories about occasional killings during the Vietnam War, but those are almost always things that happened in the jungle when nobody would ever find out.
  If they try that kinda thing in Israel today, it's not going to be a secret, and all of the other infantry and their family are going to wonder who is next, which in turn would massively reduce support for the Israeli military.
  
  there was a story of an iraq war soldier killed by his own squad a couple years ago. thats what put the thought in my head
- No he would sit in a jail cell. As a trained soldier no one would fuck with him
  Essentially a perfectly risk-free environment. But he chose murder instead

I hope these IDF soldiers wake up. You can't kill people without killing part of yourself.
- I'm seeing so many parallels to our false wars in the Middle East. The vast majority of US soldiers who died did so by suicide.
  Also netanyahu trying to create more generations of terrorism so he can have forever wars that keep him in absolute control. That's literally what we did, he is copying us play by play. Or perhaps we have a hand in what is happening as well... At least our intelligence agencies that is
  
  The violence in that region predates both Iraq wars. Israel has no need to copy the U.S. here. It's important to remember that the situation is multiple generations of on-again-off-again violence, except now the scale is way up on the killings.

Sympathy for the devil

So, I hate to be this guy for Israel. But there are legal ways for this to have happened. I know the first picture in all of our heads is them running over prisoners. But it is a valid tactic to collapse your enemies trenches or building on top of them. The US has been doing that since at least Vietnam. Armored bulldozers are, of course, uniquely pretty good at this tactic. Although it is usually a tank with a bulldozer blade attached to the front.
- “Everything squirts out,” he added.
  Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza
  Yeah. This ain't that.
  
  That logic doesn't follow. Did you think collapsing a trench means you don't see anything?
- Rachel Corrie was a civilian.
  How can Isreal use TOTAL WAR while claiming HAMAS using hostages is bad ?
  
  She was also a long time ago. Why not use the unarmed American they shot in the head recently?
- Here is a video of the soldier in the bulldozer with his friend in gaza bragging they destroyed 5000 houses https://files.catbox.moe/sgmc5b.mp4
  The friend already killed himself.
  
  They're gloating about it, absolute monsters.
  
  Yeah that's not a great visual. But the house was clearly already badly damaged and had explosives in it. This is standard for combat clean up. We can certainly talk about why 5,000 houses were damaged bad enough to need demolition though.
- I'm sure this guy operated his bulldozer with all of the due care and concern for innocent human life as the IDF bombing campaign that by their own reports have killed twice as many civilians as militants.
  
  Yup, they get very little benefit of doubt at this point. I'm just pointing out that it's not 100 percent straight to war crime from this description.
- Except we already know that they were doing this.

179 comments