But but people here told me they’re just freedom fighters!
They're not "just" freedom fighters: they ARE freedom fighters, but they are also conservative religious freedom fighters who utilize indiscriminate violence to advance their cause of by any means necessary.
They are not morally upright heroes. I can't support what they did. They are, however, also still freedom fighters. And it makes me very, very angry that their tactics have been successful after non-violence failed in 2018. It shouldn't have come to this.
As Kennedy astutely observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
I cannot endorse the violence Hamas employs, but I also understand in such a context why others do. This was an inevitable outcome of extreme political disenfranchisement, and that makes me equally furious at the joint responsibility I see for the atrocities that have resulted.
That was well put, I don't know why all the downvotes?
I didn't downvote, but I would argue that you can't call someone a freedom fighter if their ideology or political position fundamentally opposes freedom, just because they are fighting for the cause of one particular oppressed group. To put a comparison: some Ukrainians that fought against the Soviet Union during WWII could have seen themselves as freedom fighters who were fighting for the right of self-determination of their nation (as they were fighting a dictatorship, and that was probably their main intention), but you absolutely cannot call yourself a freedom fighter when you're helping the nazis occupy half of Europe.
Banderites were fascists and contributed to plenty of massacres but they also fought the Nazis because they didn't feel like bending the knee to Hitler, unlike, say, the Ustaša. In that sense they weren't collaborationists. It's why the whole national hero emotionality surrounding Bandera gets so frustratingly complicated.
Makhno is a much more suitable national hero but he was on nobody's mind as the very idea or existence of Anarchism was suppressed in the USSR while Bandera was a suitable boogeyman. "Enemy of my oppressor is my hero" kind of mechanism.
Still, I hope my metaphor went across.
Ok, fair enough
What do you think freedom fighters are? The fact that they are fighting for freedom does not inherently mean that they support Western values. The West does not have a monopoly on freedom.
I guess its because freedom fighter has some sort of positive connotation to many. They may be fighting for freedom, but they're also just terrorists
Fighting for the freedom to subjugate people to their will instead of someone else's.
Yeah, not really a group of "freedom fighters" you'd expect people in the West to rally behind... yet here we are. Holding terrorists' flags in NYC lol
TIL: A bunch of flags at a rally is just as good as military support from western allies!
I guess I was more pointing toward the dark irony of waving terrorist flags in NYC
8.26 million people and you're surprised, why? Do you not understand mathematics? Do you always just make baseless assumptions based on racism?
Well no, the irony is that it’s the location of the largest terrorist attack… ever? Was that lost on you?
Hamas is a terrorist organization plain and simple. Trying to call them “Freedom Fighters” is like trying to polish a turd.
Is the IDF also a terrorist organization? How about the US military? I struggle to see any justifiable reason why Hamas should wear that label while the other two should not.
IDF, yes. US military, no. One is deliberately targetting civilians, the other fails to give sufficient fuck about avoiding civilian casualties, those two things are not the same. The US is not saying "let's kill civilians so they become scared and do what we tell them", they're saying "huh why are they suddenly angry at us"? There's a naive innocence to it, you have to judge the US military using juvenile law.
I don't see a practical difference between targeting civilians directly, and a blatant disregard for civilian casualties. Like, if you drop a bomb on a wedding, because you're trying to kill one non-civilian target, but you obviously know that 100 civilians will die-- then how is that any different than suicide bombing the same wedding? Are the civilian victims less dead? Do their families feel differently?
Are the civilian victims less dead? Do their families feel differently?
No, and no. But intent still matters. Afghans learned that when you stand next to the wrong type of person, you could be hit, that if you stumbled across the wrong spot, like a hidden US observation post while herding your sheep, you could be hit.
There's at least a plausible connection to military necessity. The US approach helps them fuck all when it comes to winning hearts and minds, and you're still breeding resistance by eliminating that shepherd who stumbled across your position instead of calling a chopper to evacuate and relocate, but the people overall don't feel like they're being exterminated -- because they aren't. Because in the end, the US does have restraint, sometimes even to the degree that they're willing to lose a battle over it, that was the case in Afghanistan for Taliban etc. holed up in Mosques.
That is, there's insufficient regard for the civilian population on the US side, they're prioritising tactical military goals too much -- but not completely. The IDF doesn't even know what regard for civilians is. The US is court marshalling soldiers left and right when they misbehave, Israel is applying military law to 10yold Palestinians who lobbed a stone at a tank, dishing out decade-long sentences. US soldiers carry sweets to hand out to kids. Those two attitudes are not the same, and if you think they are, you're trivialising genocide.
I think you've absorbed too many American movies. The idea that "Afghans learned that" is so fucked up for at least two reasons. One, are you saying it was terrorism until the civvies learned to avoid US targets? Two, how the fuck are rural Afghanis supposed to know who's on the CIA kill list? The idea that they learned anything from being drone struck, besides what it feels like to have PTSD every time you go outside, is pretty silly.
The US military, much like most if not all other militaries will absolutely murder civilians if the objective requires it. You can't just take their word for what the objective is either. And is the US military really handing out court martials over civilian casualties? Given that the vast majority of US caused civilian deaths have resulted from ATG ordnance, we should expect a lot of court martials of pilots and drone operators, no? I'd love to see an example of that if you have one!
I think it's a matter of propaganda and aesthetics. If you kill civilians with an air force, that's "collateral damage". If you kill them with a truck bomb, that's "terrorism". After 9/11 there was at least a conversation about how squishy a word like 'terrorism' is, and how it was going to end up applied to anyone we needed it to.
Two, how the fuck are rural Afghanis supposed to know who’s on the CIA kill list?
The fuck does the CIA have to do with anything. And you don't need to be a genius to infer that hanging out with insurgent commanders is not a safe thing to do.
How stupid do you think Afghans are. Do you think that they are capable of language, of exchanging observations and experiences and drawing collective conclusions from them.
Motherfucker.
If you kill civilians with an air force, that’s “collateral damage”. If you kill them with a truck bomb, that’s “terrorism”.
Bullshit. In both cases, collateral damage is if alongside with the enemy commander or whatever, any legitimate target, you take out civilians. It's in the world "collateral". Look it up. If you're targeting civilians directly that's not collateral.
The CIA is often in charge of designating drone targets.
Not everyone who is targeted is an "insurgent commander"
Even "insurgent commanders" have families who might not have much choice about their proximity.
US military prisons like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were famously filled with victims of grudges and bounties. Basically the US pays informants for targets, and informants just point at whoever they want. Military "intelligence" has a lot of holes in it to rely on it as an authority on who lives or dies-- and that's before we even get into "collateral".
Speaking of "collateral", yes that is a weasel word, much like "terrorist". Don't allow the perpetrator to define the terms for you. If there was one US general in the twin towers, would that have made the other 3k victims "collateral damage"?
Military “intelligence” has a lot of holes in it to rely on it as an authority on who lives or dies-- and that’s before we even get into “collateral”.
And that is why Germany's kill lists had juridical oversight, and collateral damage was not measured in civilians but "people who at least look like they're probably fighters". The Taliban also once sent the Bundeswehr an apology letter, saying "Some idiots of ours thought your convoy was a US one hope you're not mad".
You seem to be under the impression that I'm defending the US approach, I'm not. What I am doing is contrasting it to the IDF while you're engaged in trivialising IDF actions by insinuating the US is even half as bad. Even in Vietnam it wasn't as bad as the IDF is right now. US military intelligence blindly believing random accusations? The IDF doesn't even need those accusations to target you. Stochastic terrorism is part of their strategy.
Can you get it into your head that this isn't a simple, binary, "good" and "bad" thing, that there's degrees to everything?
I'm not saying they are all "just as bad" as one another. I'm trying to move us beyond the word "terrorism". IDF is worse than Hamas because of the context. IDF is an occupying force.
IDF is worse than Hamas because of the context.
Hamas very much is an occupying force, too. They've been brutalising Gaza for quite a while and are very very happy with the result of October 7th. It got the exact response they wanted it to have, what's luckily missing is the reaction among Palestinians they wanted it to have, those accelerationist fucks. "Make Israel crack down harder to make the population madder".
Can you please stop that campism it's brainrot. Just because fascists happen to be on the underdog side doesn't make them in any way worthy of supporting, fascists love fighting other fascists as they can reinforce their respective holds over their own population.
Literally just yesterday, someone responded to a comment of mine about the peace deal “there is a genocide going on, they’re just freedom fighters” in reference to Hamas. LMAO
So one person?
Oh its a common sentiment on this site - that wasn't the first, or second, or third, time someone has said something similar. There's a common thing here where people look at a losing side and think it's a cause worthy of their support
I would say that the common sentiment is that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations, but that doesn't justify killing Palestinians indiscriminately.
How long is your instance blocklist that this one left as a common sentiment?
Are you seriously saying people being pro-Hamas is far greater than people just being against the killing of innocent people?
Hard to tell, the latter ones are usually eerily quite or will deflect when pressed about the first one.
Usually? How often? Let's see your data. Or is this anecdotal?
You were the first to claim that it is a common sentiment, burden of proof is on you mate.
I'm afraid it was the other way around-
My bad, didn't scroll up all the way.
Still, asking someone for data for disagreeing with your own unsubstantiated comment seems rather disingenuous. Definitly something you want to avoid when posting with a mod tag.
But but people here told me they’re just freedom fighters!
They're not "just" freedom fighters: they ARE freedom fighters, but they are also conservative religious freedom fighters who utilize indiscriminate violence to advance their cause of by any means necessary.
They are not morally upright heroes. I can't support what they did. They are, however, also still freedom fighters. And it makes me very, very angry that their tactics have been successful after non-violence failed in 2018. It shouldn't have come to this.
As Kennedy astutely observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
I cannot endorse the violence Hamas employs, but I also understand in such a context why others do. This was an inevitable outcome of extreme political disenfranchisement, and that makes me equally furious at the joint responsibility I see for the atrocities that have resulted.
That was well put, I don't know why all the downvotes?
I didn't downvote, but I would argue that you can't call someone a freedom fighter if their ideology or political position fundamentally opposes freedom, just because they are fighting for the cause of one particular oppressed group. To put a comparison: some Ukrainians that fought against the Soviet Union during WWII could have seen themselves as freedom fighters who were fighting for the right of self-determination of their nation (as they were fighting a dictatorship, and that was probably their main intention), but you absolutely cannot call yourself a freedom fighter when you're helping the nazis occupy half of Europe.
Banderites were fascists and contributed to plenty of massacres but they also fought the Nazis because they didn't feel like bending the knee to Hitler, unlike, say, the Ustaša. In that sense they weren't collaborationists. It's why the whole national hero emotionality surrounding Bandera gets so frustratingly complicated.
Makhno is a much more suitable national hero but he was on nobody's mind as the very idea or existence of Anarchism was suppressed in the USSR while Bandera was a suitable boogeyman. "Enemy of my oppressor is my hero" kind of mechanism.
Still, I hope my metaphor went across.
Ok, fair enough
What do you think freedom fighters are? The fact that they are fighting for freedom does not inherently mean that they support Western values. The West does not have a monopoly on freedom.
I guess its because freedom fighter has some sort of positive connotation to many. They may be fighting for freedom, but they're also just terrorists
Fighting for the freedom to subjugate people to their will instead of someone else's.
Yeah, not really a group of "freedom fighters" you'd expect people in the West to rally behind... yet here we are. Holding terrorists' flags in NYC lol
TIL: A bunch of flags at a rally is just as good as military support from western allies!
I guess I was more pointing toward the dark irony of waving terrorist flags in NYC
8.26 million people and you're surprised, why? Do you not understand mathematics? Do you always just make baseless assumptions based on racism?
Well no, the irony is that it’s the location of the largest terrorist attack… ever? Was that lost on you?
Hamas is a terrorist organization plain and simple. Trying to call them “Freedom Fighters” is like trying to polish a turd.
Is the IDF also a terrorist organization? How about the US military? I struggle to see any justifiable reason why Hamas should wear that label while the other two should not.
IDF, yes. US military, no. One is deliberately targetting civilians, the other fails to give sufficient fuck about avoiding civilian casualties, those two things are not the same. The US is not saying "let's kill civilians so they become scared and do what we tell them", they're saying "huh why are they suddenly angry at us"? There's a naive innocence to it, you have to judge the US military using juvenile law.
I don't see a practical difference between targeting civilians directly, and a blatant disregard for civilian casualties. Like, if you drop a bomb on a wedding, because you're trying to kill one non-civilian target, but you obviously know that 100 civilians will die-- then how is that any different than suicide bombing the same wedding? Are the civilian victims less dead? Do their families feel differently?
No, and no. But intent still matters. Afghans learned that when you stand next to the wrong type of person, you could be hit, that if you stumbled across the wrong spot, like a hidden US observation post while herding your sheep, you could be hit.
There's at least a plausible connection to military necessity. The US approach helps them fuck all when it comes to winning hearts and minds, and you're still breeding resistance by eliminating that shepherd who stumbled across your position instead of calling a chopper to evacuate and relocate, but the people overall don't feel like they're being exterminated -- because they aren't. Because in the end, the US does have restraint, sometimes even to the degree that they're willing to lose a battle over it, that was the case in Afghanistan for Taliban etc. holed up in Mosques.
That is, there's insufficient regard for the civilian population on the US side, they're prioritising tactical military goals too much -- but not completely. The IDF doesn't even know what regard for civilians is. The US is court marshalling soldiers left and right when they misbehave, Israel is applying military law to 10yold Palestinians who lobbed a stone at a tank, dishing out decade-long sentences. US soldiers carry sweets to hand out to kids. Those two attitudes are not the same, and if you think they are, you're trivialising genocide.
I think you've absorbed too many American movies. The idea that "Afghans learned that" is so fucked up for at least two reasons. One, are you saying it was terrorism until the civvies learned to avoid US targets? Two, how the fuck are rural Afghanis supposed to know who's on the CIA kill list? The idea that they learned anything from being drone struck, besides what it feels like to have PTSD every time you go outside, is pretty silly.
The US military, much like most if not all other militaries will absolutely murder civilians if the objective requires it. You can't just take their word for what the objective is either. And is the US military really handing out court martials over civilian casualties? Given that the vast majority of US caused civilian deaths have resulted from ATG ordnance, we should expect a lot of court martials of pilots and drone operators, no? I'd love to see an example of that if you have one!
I think it's a matter of propaganda and aesthetics. If you kill civilians with an air force, that's "collateral damage". If you kill them with a truck bomb, that's "terrorism". After 9/11 there was at least a conversation about how squishy a word like 'terrorism' is, and how it was going to end up applied to anyone we needed it to.
The fuck does the CIA have to do with anything. And you don't need to be a genius to infer that hanging out with insurgent commanders is not a safe thing to do.
How stupid do you think Afghans are. Do you think that they are capable of language, of exchanging observations and experiences and drawing collective conclusions from them.
Motherfucker.
Bullshit. In both cases, collateral damage is if alongside with the enemy commander or whatever, any legitimate target, you take out civilians. It's in the world "collateral". Look it up. If you're targeting civilians directly that's not collateral.
The CIA is often in charge of designating drone targets.
Not everyone who is targeted is an "insurgent commander"
Even "insurgent commanders" have families who might not have much choice about their proximity.
US military prisons like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were famously filled with victims of grudges and bounties. Basically the US pays informants for targets, and informants just point at whoever they want. Military "intelligence" has a lot of holes in it to rely on it as an authority on who lives or dies-- and that's before we even get into "collateral".
Speaking of "collateral", yes that is a weasel word, much like "terrorist". Don't allow the perpetrator to define the terms for you. If there was one US general in the twin towers, would that have made the other 3k victims "collateral damage"?
And that is why Germany's kill lists had juridical oversight, and collateral damage was not measured in civilians but "people who at least look like they're probably fighters". The Taliban also once sent the Bundeswehr an apology letter, saying "Some idiots of ours thought your convoy was a US one hope you're not mad".
You seem to be under the impression that I'm defending the US approach, I'm not. What I am doing is contrasting it to the IDF while you're engaged in trivialising IDF actions by insinuating the US is even half as bad. Even in Vietnam it wasn't as bad as the IDF is right now. US military intelligence blindly believing random accusations? The IDF doesn't even need those accusations to target you. Stochastic terrorism is part of their strategy.
Can you get it into your head that this isn't a simple, binary, "good" and "bad" thing, that there's degrees to everything?
I'm not saying they are all "just as bad" as one another. I'm trying to move us beyond the word "terrorism". IDF is worse than Hamas because of the context. IDF is an occupying force.
Hamas very much is an occupying force, too. They've been brutalising Gaza for quite a while and are very very happy with the result of October 7th. It got the exact response they wanted it to have, what's luckily missing is the reaction among Palestinians they wanted it to have, those accelerationist fucks. "Make Israel crack down harder to make the population madder".
Can you please stop that campism it's brainrot. Just because fascists happen to be on the underdog side doesn't make them in any way worthy of supporting, fascists love fighting other fascists as they can reinforce their respective holds over their own population.
Who told you that?
Literally just yesterday, someone responded to a comment of mine about the peace deal “there is a genocide going on, they’re just freedom fighters” in reference to Hamas. LMAO
So one person?
Oh its a common sentiment on this site - that wasn't the first, or second, or third, time someone has said something similar. There's a common thing here where people look at a losing side and think it's a cause worthy of their support
I would say that the common sentiment is that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations, but that doesn't justify killing Palestinians indiscriminately.
How long is your instance blocklist that this one left as a common sentiment?
Are you seriously saying people being pro-Hamas is far greater than people just being against the killing of innocent people?
Hard to tell, the latter ones are usually eerily quite or will deflect when pressed about the first one.
Usually? How often? Let's see your data. Or is this anecdotal?
You were the first to claim that it is a common sentiment, burden of proof is on you mate.
I'm afraid it was the other way around-
My bad, didn't scroll up all the way.
Still, asking someone for data for disagreeing with your own unsubstantiated comment seems rather disingenuous. Definitly something you want to avoid when posting with a mod tag.
Correct and agree.