Like they agree with me in terms of being "team Palestine", and understands my analogies of the initial Hamas attack being like if slaves in the 1800s had tried to stage an uprising etc but still "you can't tell me terrorism is good because it's never good", even when I explain to them how non-violent protest actually working (like when schools taught us about MLK JR/civil rights etc) is propaganda...fun times.
See if they’ll read How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It’s basically “nonviolence has never worked” the book.
Also, if you search Library Genesis for a copy, make sure to use more than just the first three words of the title in your search query, lest you find yourself on a Volcel NSA watchlist.
“How to Blow” gets some interesting books
Also your username is one of my top ten favorites on here
Same. Basically exact same scenario, except I'm Jewish and she isn't. That gives me a bit of leeway but she's still totally anti violence, and anti 'terrorism'. At the end of the day, that sort of liberalism simply doesn't make sense. All you can do is try to erode it over time.
I went down the route of 'Israel and the West created the conditions that enable Hamas existence and necessity to exist/fight.'
Ok, but innocent people died.
'more innocent people have been killed by Israel than the other way around by a very large margin, and the relations are the opposite. Hamas rises up against colonial power. Israel enforces power upon a colonised underclass.'
yes but violence is wrong, innocent people on both sides shouldnt be harmed
'Should they just sit there and live in Israel's enforced squalor? If conditions continue the way they have for the past 70 years, Palestine will simply no longer exist. Violent uprising is all they can do'
Well I wouldnt be violent, I don't have it in me
'You have never lived even remotely close to a warzone, or lived in conditions at all similar to what they have. To say that you are simply different and wouldn't react to social factors is to imply that you are genetically peaceful or civil. That is eugenecist thought.'
...
I just think there's better ways of doing it.
'of course, you, a person with no combat experience or anticolonial resistance theory knows better than the group born into and forged by that conflict...'
That's sort of the lines of the conversation. I probably wasn't as clear, and her views were more nuanced, but I think the essence is there. I definitely word things differently to be kind, and to not show how much it actually frustrates me sometimes.
Small rant.
If you truly cannot resist violence with violence, then you are usually killed by your aggressors. It's easy for pacifists to exist in the first world where they'll never have to lie down and let themselves be killed. They can just sit at home while the system they accept the continued existence of does the killing for them.
Ironically, it's those comfortable material conditions that have shaped her "violence is bad no matter what" ideology, because seeing violence makes her feel bad, and she doesn't have to see it when it's inherent in the system.
I'm sorry you have to have these conversations often, because they're indeed uniquely frustrating, especially with loved ones.
Yeah. Definitely. That's well worded. I think many of us have a probably been peace-fetishists at some point in our lives, and now we're here. So I hold out my hopes that I'll get through some day.
That is eugenecist thought
Daaaaaaaaamn I've never ever considered that before holy shit
Don't justify the violence. That's a losing strategy. Actually agree with them, that violence is bad.
But...
What happened with all the "good" decisions? Like the nonviolent year-long protest where IDF snipers shot out Paletinian knees. Where did that "just, reasonable" non-violence get them? Where were we (the west) when this was all going down? How can we condemn violence from Hamas when we allowed Israel to commit violence? Who are we to judge these people? What moral high-ground could we possibly occupy? Palestinians would be justified in telling all of us to shut the fuck up and turn off the TV, just like before and before and before.
What is the point of appeasing our morality if nothing changes? We gave up being moral when we allowed so much violence to go unanswered. Why should Hamas or Palestinians care about our morality?
MLK told all of us who value a "negative" peace to Justice to shut the fuck up too.
EDIT: To use a Marxist turn of phrase: If we wish to abolish Terrorism, we must abolish the conditions that require Terrorism.
"you can't tell me terrorism is good because it's never good"
Liberals are so obsessed with something being "good" or "bad" (meaning things that make them feel good or bad) that they miss the point. They can literally acknowledge how slaves killing their masters is effectively self-inflicted by the masters, and the only reason they don't always immediately turn around and say "but killing is bad" is because it was long ago and they're fully aware of how racist they would sound if they did.
"Terrorism is never good" is childish, because "terrorism" is before anything else an insult pointed at non-white people who defend their rights and tactics that many consider "terrorism" (guerilla tactics, surprise attacks, etc.) can be a means to a good end - in this case halting the settlement of Palestinian land.
Adult settlers who voluntarily live in illegal Israeli settlements have participated in a genocide of the Palestinian people, the same way German settlers during WW2 were participants in the genocide of the people of Eastern European nations, and those who took the property of Jews were direct participants in the Shoah. They're not unaware of what happened to give them that land. Often they personally committed the violence. They were comfortable with this because they believed that the IDF would protect them. It's absolutely ridiculous to see people all around the world, who have stood by and done nothing about this for generations as the Palestinians were repeatedly murdered for attempting peaceful resistance, suddenly start crying "terrorism" when Hamas (a group which would likely not exist and hold power without having been funded by Israel) has inflicted violence on the settlers in turn.
Oh my partner is really bad, they will pause a movie/show etc we are watching to go “ok so I’m confused, who’s bad and who’s good?” I honestly blame the fact that their taste in entertainment is self-admitted “trash”, like I’ve made the joke/response of “so you know a lot of more clever/prestige media often has a lot of shades of grey, where no one is clear cut good or bad”
Capitalists creating armed hardline leftists in the same way antibiotics created antibiotic resistant bacteria.
I know so many MLs that could be described as "Anarchists in despair"
yeaaaa same thing happened to me. except it was just YOU SUPPORT HAMAS?
I never said anything about Hamas. I guess it doesnt help her dad and grandma were jewish, but my gf wasnt raised religiously, never had a bat mitzvah. But that shouldn't matter anyway when it's literally apartheid and segregation.
I think a big issue is that most people don't even know what that is, or about most other atrocities committed by the US and other colonizers besides what was I'm their elementary school history books. I sure didn't until I forced myself to learn and there's still a lot I don't know
I work with a lib I can never get through to; bizarrely he supports Palestine, everything else is just whatever you can read in the paper.....like Chinese spy weather balloons
Their new favourite line is "GUTTER OIL, food in China is all tainted!"
Just ask your partner whether they think the French resistance was good or not
That usually gets libs thinking
You can't say nonviolent protest never works. Gene Sharp has outlined the tools/tactics for nonviolent revolution, and it has been used successfully in several countries. His writings are so effective that they are banned by many regimes. I think there is a time and place for both. Unfortunately, the Palestinians are locked away from the main society, so that can't appreciably disrupt that society with peaceful methods. Additionally, the bulk of that society supports their genocide, so they aren't just fighting against a government/dictatorial regime but a majority of the populace as well.
Federation has been wild. Was not expecting to see pro-Gene Sharp takes here but
Ya'll don't like Gene Sharp around here? I know I don't agree with all of the politics from this instance, but I feel we have more in common than separates us.
It's a Sisyphus with the boulder thing with peaceful protests. Occupy Wall Street, put stickers of Joseph Kony, glue your hands to roads, whatever. Appealing to the better nature of your oppressors works so rarely it might as well be co incidence. But you keep trying because you were raised to believe violence = bad and peaceful = good. Peaceful resistance can't fail, it can only be failed!
Pacifism is also so extremely easily infiltrated and re-directed by feds/wreckers to burn out the frustration and momentum into doing something so utterly pointless it not only does nothing for your cause, liberal media will spin it as you being clueless idiots and shift the narrative away from your cause.
In small scales, yes, it won't accomplish much. When you can build a large enough movement, however, I believe it can be successful. With modern warfare, I don't really see how you can directly face the violence of the state and be successful. There are current examples of this. I will grant that some of these uprisings are facing a state propped up by foreign powers, some are even actively involved, but that furthers my point. How does an armed resistance usurp a government in the modern era?
When you can build a large enough movement, however, I believe it can be successful
This pretty much only works when the oppressors give in because they're afraid of any future potential violence if they refuse
One good recent example is the UPS giving into the Teamsters' demand before they even striked. Yes, you could argue that the entire process succeeded without economic violence through a strike but really, it was the threat of violence that won
There are so many examples of people facing the violence of the state and overcoming. Far more than there are examples of a state collapsing through non violent means
Why would we like a USian cold war theorist funded by the Defense Department to cook up theories the CIA and State Department then weaponized to run colour revolutions and regime change ops against official enemies of the United States
I can understand that take, I just feel his writings could be used by many people to affect national changes in society and political structure. The end result could be whatever the people want it to be.
Can you give me an example of when his theories were used to affect real change without the support of the State Department?
The Arab Spring saw the fall of US propped regimes in the Middle East. The Serbian uprising in 2000.
No no no, he said without the support of the State Department.
Lol, my understanding was that the US wasn't happy about much of what occurred, but I accept I could be wrong.
Vincent Bevins', who wrote The Jakarta Method, just published a book called If We Burn that covers the Arab Spring and really goes into detail on Egypt. The premise of the book is that the past decade has seen more protest than at anytime in history so why did they often have the opposite of the intended effect?
Given that nobody in the Middle East saw it as an 'Arab Spring' or decoupling from U.S. interests and that political repression is generally worse there since the so-called Arab Spring, I think you need to revaluate some things.
And less then two years later the region was put back under US propped regimes, you know why?
Because sustained organization trumps unguided spontaneity every single time
And what are those "tools/tactics" and which ones haven't the Palestinians used?
I specifically stated that nonviolence isn't much of an option for Palestinians.
Does it make any material difference what her personal opinion on Gaza is?
He's talking about his feelings not whether his partner will help bring about communism or not
What I mean will be revealed slowly over 8 months and 1700 posts concerning bugs, brain bugs, the bug-brained, and general buggishness of the nu male pseudo-marxist bugboy.
Theyre bein lil rascals right now but theyre saying treating your partner, the person you love like as if its part of some sort of five year socialist construction plan is very cold and buglike
International issues and legitimate uses of violence are the final bosses of liberalism. It's very easy to get frustrated at someone who's 90% of the way there, because they seemingly will never get there, but that's forgetting how far they've come already and how long it took many of us to take those last few steps.
It sounds like you two might want to pick apart what "terrorism" really is. The modern history of Afghanistan is basically a textbook on this. You can also look at
moments like white mass shooters with explicit political motivations not being labeled "terrorists," and what that says about how the word is more used as a political tool than an objective label for violence that is inherently bad.
really hard, duh!
