• SteamedHamberder [he/him]
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    31 year ago

    I think the audience was prepared for a long, drawn out war between Russia and Ukraine.

    I think in October ‘23, even the most loyal Zionists in the U.S. and Western Europe were expecting a military operation similar to previous invasions and incursions into Palestinian areas, as Israel had been doing between roughly 2000 and 2021. (I’m using the language of a typical assumption, so I apologize as this does dehumanize and minimize the value of Palestinian lives.) The fighting might be ugly, but it would be contained, a few mid-level leaders would be targeted, and Israel would rebuild their “security apparatus” and leave within a few weeks.

    As the human cost in terms of the suffering of the sick and most vulnerable, the disproportionate deaths of children, the targeting of whole families became clear through better technology channels, I think the libs who already were sick of Netanyahu got tired of a strategy that was at once brutal and ineffective.

  • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]
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    111 year ago

    You don’t remember the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war when western news anchors were shocked and nearly speechless, only able to say how horrible it is that this is happening to people who “look like us” ???

  • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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    51 year ago

    I think at least some of it is the extreme, outrageous, unbelievable levels of incompetence from the Israeli propaganda machine. There’s a lot more clear evidence of straightforward war crimes coming out of Palestine, and much of that evidence is posted to Twitter by Israeli soldiers. If there was a daily drip feed of, say, Ukrainian soldiers just setting children on fire for fun, I think you’d see a dip in the public support of that war also. Israel was so convinced that they had the unwavering support of the international-community-1international-community-2 to do whatever they wanted that they really have made no effort to do genuine propaganda or cover up their worst excesses. It turns out that they were right to be convinced of that, since nobody has actually done anything about it, but their laziness has eroded their popular support.

    Most of the really awful stuff coming out of Ukraine requires you to be familiar with fascist iconography (the Black Sun, wolfsangel, etc.) to appreciate and find horrifying. In contrast, to be horrified by Israel you only need to have eyes and not be really super racist.

  • @[email protected]
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    261 year ago

    Basic premise most agree with in 2024: wars of aggression are bad.

    Who is the aggressor, what is their political history, what are the skin colors involved, what are the respective ideologies, who are ‘allies’… all of those things influence how the baseline premise is perceived.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Basic premise most agree with in 2024: wars of aggression are bad.

      I mean, yes, but also no. In most wars, you could make some argument for either side being the aggressor. For some of them you’d really have to work hard for it, but it’s generally possible to at least conjure some flimsy rhetoric around it. The Iraq War, for instance, was very obviously a war of aggression by the US against Iraq. …or was it? I mean, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and they have WMDs!!! Iraq is actually declaring a war of aggression against the concept of freedom and democracy! We’ve gotta respond to this attack!

      So what’s actually going on here is “If your government can successfully persuade you that they aren’t the aggressor, and in fact they’re actually the victim, then you’ll probably support the war a lot more than if your government isn’t able to do so.”

      For the Russia-Ukraine situation, portraying Russia as the aggressor is quite easy, because… well… they invaded Ukraine, and almost nobody knew anything about the Donbass. I only very vaguely knew about it before 2022, and the extent of my knowledge was “Oh, there’s some territorital disputes and fighting going on between Ukraine and Russia over something or other,” and I was fairly geopolitically-minded. So if you’re just the average guy on the street, you might not even have known anything about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass. But if you did know about the general sequence of events since the fall of the USSR; the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, Russia taking Crimea in response, the West arming neo-Nazi groups, the diplomatic efforts taken by Russia to try and not go to war while Europe was arming Ukraine for the sole purpose of trying to weaken Russia (as Merkel explicitly admitted in an interview), the mass murders of the Donbass people, etc - then suddenly, NATO looks a lot like the aggressor in this war. The Russian people certainly know this sequence of events, which is why most of them support the war. It’s not that Putin has weaved a magic brainwashing spell on the Russian people, or that they’re all secretly too scared to say their opinion - they legitimately, and quite rightfully, believe themselves and their fellow Russians in the Donbass to be the victims of NATO and Ukrainian aggression. NATO has been on the offensive against Russia since 2014 - I mean, really, since NATO first expanded after the USSR fell. February 24th 2022 was merely the start of the Russian counteroffensive.

      For Israel-Palestine, efforts to portray Palestine as the aggressor did kinda work initially because the October 7th attack was so effective. But in the months that followed, and as Israel further bombed and invaded Gaza, it became increasingly difficult to say that Israel somehow isn’t the aggressor here, and because most people are at least generally aware that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists and that the Palestinians have been suffering for decades, Westerners were primed to be able to experience sympathy for the Palestinians. The legacy of the Holocaust complicates the matter sufficiently that for a big chunk of people, the whole conflict just becomes this big complicated blob of “Well, both sides here have reasons to hate the other and fight, idk what to think really, I’m gonna go back to watching Love Island or whatever,” but generally speaking people believe that it was a war of aggression by Israel. The footage that has come out of Gaza helps in that regard, compared to Israel’s unwillingness to show their own pain and suffering publically because they want to maintain their image as God’s chosen superior ubermensch to the inferior, weak, untermensch Arabs.

  • Kaplya [none/use name]
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    391 year ago

    Because Russia (at least according to the propaganda) is a threat to US hegemony, even though this is disregarding the fact that Russia is economically on a far smaller scale than the US and its allies.

    Everyone knows Palestine and Cuba cannot possibly fight back against the empire, so in the back of their minds, the ultimate defeat of the brave, noble underdogs is guaranteed so it’s easy to find pity with them

    Give Palestine and Cuba the firepower of Russia who can actually fight back against their oppressors and see how quickly the Western public change their tune.

  • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]
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    1 year ago

    Everyone knows what russia is and ‘know’ about it being bad and evil and violent, very few actually knew much about israel and palestine other than that it was ‘complicated’, and basically no one knew what a “Hamas” was, that makes it a harder narrative sell on its own, but then you have just the sheer absurdity of the disproportionate violence and blatant lies, fucking “Voldemort knows evil” shit lmfao

  • they are not my friends, but i know some libs that cosplay as leftists and they completely bought into the nato-framing of the russo-ukrainian war from the jump, while they are generally opposed to what is happening in Gaza… but not enough to voting for Genocide Joe, ofc.

    for russo-ukraine, it was a part of the world they have fuck all analysis about but the news footage really played up how sympathetically white ukranians are. like one admitted that the footage of ukranians being displaced bothered them more, on an emotional level, than the US invading and displacing iraqis. major us-foreign-policy vibes. combine that casual racism with the fact that there was no geographical placeholder information for them about eastern europe. NATO aggression? what’s that? total clean slate for the media blitz to fill.

    with Gaza, the extermination and land grab has been a project for a long time. these libs have met muslims since 9/11 and heard voices contradicting state department messaging about the middle east, a place the US has been terrorizing and bombing and invading multiple times in our lifetimes. they have developed their own opinions in that time and there is even acknowledgement of Biden’s enthusiastic role in the 2003 invasion of iraq.

    of course, they are libs so A Dang Cheeto In The White House is more of a threat to their comfortable brunching than Genocide Joe exterminating Gazans, so their aversion to genocide isn’t that motivating.

    i will never, ever forget something i think Christman said about how genocidal war was not a problem for Europeans/The West until Hitler committed the unpardonable crime of doing it to Europeans. i have never heard a more succinct framing for perennially fickle western outrage about slaughter.

  • Dolores [love/loves]
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    251 year ago

    Ukraine piggy backed off cold-war & neo-cold war propaganda decades in the making. theres been a basically unbroken stream of anri-russian media since 1917

    Israel ooth doesn’t always enjoy such bias, when the proverbial ‘chips are down’ the imperialists back them but there’s plenty of liberal scolding and bones thrown to arab allies in intervening years. there’s also something abt all the cameras israel is just gleefully advertizing genocide on that makes it hard for anyone plugged into anything besides cable news to ignore

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    Did Ukraine take 247 Russians hostages and slaughter 1000 people including whole families and people at a music festival?

    Casus belli is a thing that has existed for thousands of years because people are much more favorable of a war when there’s a clear cause.

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]
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      421 year ago

      Did Ukraine take 247 Russians hostages and slaughter 1000 people including whole families and people at a music festival?

      No but they did have a bunch of Nazi paramilitaries fucking around in majority Russian regions.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Where am I doing whataboutism?

        Ukraine gets invaded, people support them because it’s a war of aggression with no real cause.

        Palestine takes an offensive action with mass murder and kidnapping and then gets invaded, I don’t think it’s surprising people don’t see it the same way. It’s not the same as Ukraine at all.

        People supported the US invading Iraq and Afghanistan even though they were tangentially related to 9/11. 20 years later it’s clear that was a shit show and nobody would support doing it over again (the only good was ousting Sadam and Bin Laden).

        Back to Israel Palestine. I don’t support how Israel is doing any of this, closing the borders was wrong, the mass civilian deaths is wrong, flattening neighbourhoods for “buffer zones” and calls for settlement are wrong.

        But there was never any outcome where Israel did nothing, nor ceded their land back to Palestine after this. Hamas’s actions could only ever have had the outcome of an invasion.

        • Dolores [love/loves]
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          321 year ago

          land back to Palestine after this. Hamas’s actions

          so you acknowledge israel stole palestine’s land, but somehow palestine started this?

        • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
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          271 year ago

          Are there instances where you don’t get a negative response to not answering the question that was asked by delivering obvious (and wrong) information?

        • Adkml [he/him]
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          391 year ago

          And thats why we post ppb, so dumbshit libs won’t come in and shit up the place.

          This is like when chuds say they wouldn’t even talk to a girl with blue hair.

          Good, it’s working.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            If you want to only experience your own opinions then why are you federated?

            I came from all, I saw a post and engaged, and you guys seem like the angry ones about it.

            • davel [he/him]
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              171 year ago

              Hahaha as if we’re not exposed to genocidal NATO opinions all the other hours of our day.

            • @[email protected]
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              161 year ago

              I come from a different instance with distinct views and I am tolerated here, not all outsider views are shunned here, just irritating, pointless, or historically innacurate ones.

              I don’t see anger in this discussion personally. People here are well steeped in the common tropes trot out when discussing something like Palestine, we are tired of the same points being brought up that have been discredited numerous times.

        • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]
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          291 year ago

          You guys show up and act like smuglord constantly, and then cry like babies when we reply with pigpoop

          There’s plenty of people who try and engage you honestly despite acting like a smarmy jackass but really don’t wander in here with your piss attitude expecting to get treated like you’re brining free donuts.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            Look at the pot calling the kettle black.

            I came in here trying to engage honestly, I didn’t even bother looking at the instance. You guys responded with this moronic pig butt. I did laugh but I’m finding this entire instance to be hostile and incestuous.

            There are other legit comments, and I’m trying to engage them honestly.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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          281 year ago

          How are you a Star Trek fan and a chud, do you believe the honorable Jean Luc Picard would genocide Palestinians?

          • AfterthoughtC - he/ him
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            1 year ago

            Media literacy is dead apparently. Not surprised though. My mom spent two years studying Things Fall Apart with me when I was doing English Literature (and later on To Kill a Mockingbird with my brother). Today she believes the zionist propaganda and believes Palestinians need to be saved from Hamas.

            Also I’ve been aching to make this comment on somewhere so I will make it here:

            Pop Culture Politicals after watching TLA: Aang should have killed Ozai. Killing an evil overlord that genocided your people and aims to enslave other nations is not cold-blooded murder, it’s self defense.

            Pop Culture Politicals when real-life marginalised groups fight their oppressors: Violence is not the answer. Be peaceful like a sterotypical monk.

            • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]
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              41 year ago

              This is less about media literacy and more about detachment and compartmentalization. Fiction is fiction, it’s easier to play and experiment in a fictional space because there are no real consequences. People can easily say “yes I would pull the lever to save the 5 children tied to the railroad track even if it means I have to watch one child be crushed before me due to my action, it’s the right thing to do! Just like the protagonist in this story I read.” Thing is if you actually stuck them in a freight yard with a bunch of children tied to the tracks they’d probably struggle with the choice a lot more than they did while reading a novella on their sofa.

              I think people here really give fiction and media more power than it has, people mostly just consume it for fun. Reading about plucky underdog guerrillas fighting an imperialist occupation is good story telling, it makes for exciting drama. Enjoying that doesn’t really translate to having good geopolitical takes, cuz real world drama isn’t fun, it’s uncomfortable and challenging and can actually affect your life.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            Bajor is probably the closest I think you’ll get, and on that his opinion is clear.

            And I don’t agree with Israel, I acknowledge that hamas’s attack has provoked a broader invasion and a state change in their relationship.

            There’s not always a good guy and a bad guy, and Hamas is no fucking boy scout group.

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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              1 year ago

              For your dumb analogy to make any sense you’d have to pretend Picard supported the Cardassian occupation, like the US which LITERALLY finances the entire Israeli colonial project

              If the US had the same policy toward Israel as the Federation had toward Bajor, the Israeli nazi state would’ve collapsed decades ago

              Hamas is no fucking boy scout group.

              The Palestinian resistance is currently defending 2 million men, women and children from a depraved army of butchers, rapists, grave robbers and organ thieves

              You’re goddamn right they’re no boy shouts, they’re a bush-wacking guerilla army taking nazi scalps

              Now go fuck yourself nazi

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                Jesus Christ.

                Picard was on the side of Bajor… I’m not trying to paint him in any other light.

                This whole server is fucked, the admins can feel free to ban me for life.

            • @[email protected]
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              If Hamas wasn’t there, a different militant group would be in the lead against Israel. Even on Oct. 7th several militant groups attacked Israel, not just Hamas. So they might not be seen as a “good guy” but they are fighting on the morally correct side.

              Israel frames this war as a fight against Hamas but it is against Palestine as a whole. Israeli politicans have funded and propped Hamas up specifically because of their extremism, to divide Palestinians, reduce Western sympathy, and make a more palatable enemy to slaughter.

    • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
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      301 year ago

      Agreed. It’s wild that Hamas would just kidnap and murder a bunch of people on the very first day that history began.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I’m not saying this is the first thing that ever happened, this is like hundreds of years in the making after thousands more years of history.

        I’m saying if you do what Hamas did, you don’t deserve support.

        See my other comment on whatabout guy on Israel too, because how they’re doing what they’re doing is wrong too.

        • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
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          181 year ago

          Yes, it is unconscionable that prisoners in an open air concentration camp would dare to lash out at the group running the camp. That’s why Nelson Mandela went to jail, after all.

        • robinn_IV [he/him]
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          201 year ago

          I’m saying if you do what Hamas did, you don’t deserve support.

          Did the slaves in Santa Domingo who wrought terror on old society and killed white settlers not deserve support? How about the American slaves in the Nat Turner rebellion who slaughtered whites? As I’ve shown, your description of Al-Aqsa Flood is nonsense, but even so the terror of the oppressed is simply a product of the oppressor; violent resistance to Israel is a response to their own violence, of which all of this could be ended by Israel agreeing to end their occupation/apartheid system. Israel has the complete power to eliminate these conditions of oppression that brought Hamas into existence.

          You compare Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto and then say those who revolted went too far and lost their legitimacy. Go tell the concentration camp inmates how to correctly revolt so they will be deserving of your support! Ridiculous.

          "Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood—one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two ‘Reigns of Terror,’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves” — Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Ch. XIII

    • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
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      No, it was much worse. Ukraine killed somewhere around 14000 people, in keeping of course with their pre USSR tradition of protecting the rich by using ethnic minorities as scapegoats. Thankfully there was a Russian intervention since no western country was gonna do it.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Did I actually? I didn’t get any notification of that if I did.

        I guess disagreeing with them is easier than blocking all their communities individually.

    • plinky [he/him]
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      271 year ago

      That’s ass backwards post, cause western public hates israel fascist ways, while your post argues in the opposite way (?).

      Incidentally. isreal maintains 2 million concentration camp. so any uprising against occupiers is just. If someone had decided to have a music festival near aushwitz, i also wouldn’t give two shits about their destiny

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Gaza is not remotely Auschwitz. If you want to draw a comparison to the Warsaw ghetto it would be more apt.

        And I’m not saying I agree with israel, I’m saying Hamas’s mass killing is why a lot of people don’t support Palestine. It’s why intentionally responses have been tepid on this situation. If October 7 hadn’t happened and what’s happening today was, I think you’d set much stronger responses.

        • plinky [he/him]
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          161 year ago

          people don’t support palestine because conditions in gaza are not reported in state friendly media, never have been. Running reservation where occupying force is counting calories is very bad.

          And 2021 also got mass social media outrage, so what? israel just mows the lawn, no sanctions. March of return? no reaction from “the civilized world”.

          HRW thinks its apartheid state? Have some pocket change for iron dome.

          ICJ finds its a plausible genocide? no sanctions, no nothing. Civilized world protects its settlers through all reason and decency

          Media produces outrage what is important to their shareholders, not over what is real.

    • robinn_IV [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Did Ukraine take 247 Russians hostages and slaughter 1000 people including whole families and people at a music festival?

      Haaretz: “According to [comments by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator], only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions—including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists without knowing whether the Israelis in those buildings were alive or dead—the IDF completed the takeover of the kibbutz.”

      An air force colonel said that Israeli airstrikes may have intentionally killed Israeli captives rather than let them be taken to Gaza. Speaking in Hebrew about the airstrikes, Colonel Nof Erez told a Haaretz podcast in November that “the Hannibal Directive was apparently applied” and that 7 October “was a mass Hannibal”

      Ynet: Israel fired from helicopters into crowd of festival goers indiscriminately (blamed on “Hamas deception”)

      You want casus belli for Al-Aqsa Flood? How about the fact that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for nearly eighty years (after committing ethnic cleansing), consistently putting up border walls and squeezing in Israeli occupiers in the West Bank, bombing whole villages and setting up chairs to watch, starving people with an inhumane blockade in the Gaza Strip, refusing the right to return, shooting down protestors (Great March of Return), using white phosphorus, imprisoning Palestinians without charge, using Palestinians as human shields, and that they brutally repressed Palestinians at al-Aqsa Mosque (namesake of the operation).

      Regarding Ukraine, there was a far-right U.S.-backed coup, Ukrainian nationalists were committing “ISIS-style” war crimes, there was the neo-Nazi targeting of ethnic minorities and Russian speakers, and yet, we must lament the deaths of those celebrating “infinite freedom” on the edge of a concentration camp.

      Ukraine’s previous president, Poroshenko, and his policy on Donbass: “We will have jobs—they will not. We will have pensions—they will not… Our children will go to schools and kindergartens—theirs will hide in the brments (cellars).”

      Ukraine: Widespread Use of Cluster Munitions on Donetsk

    • AFineWayToDie [he/him]
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      501 year ago

      and slaughter 1000 people at a music festival?

      Hot safety tip: Don’t hold your music festivals next to your concentration camps.

      And we’re down to a thousand now? Hannibal doctrine stays winning.

  • GaveUp [she/her]
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    1 year ago

    Media about Palestine in the West was infinitely more than Donbas (literally nothing)

    Also big strong countries bad and scary (like China despite doing literally nothing), weak and underdog countries good (notice how nobody supports Yemen because they’re a real threat)

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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    With imperial propaganda over Ukraine, it’s easy to metabolize it without seeming like an open racist

    But with Palestine it’s impossible, a lot of the western public still value the masks they wear when it comes to race and many liberals aren’t comfortable tearing them off just yet to support Israel, even if they’re generally supportive and enthusiastic about Israel’s warcrimes

    So that translates roughly into a general apathy in the west concerning the genocide, which some leftists have confused for widespread discontent over western support for Zionism, which is an illusion generated by social media and bad poll reading