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lilithism1848 · 7 months

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Atrocities US committed against NATIVE AMERICANS

In 2016, the US army corp of engineers approved a Energy Transfer Partners’ proposal to build an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, sparking the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, evoking a brutal response from North Dakota police aided by the National Guard, private security firms, and other law enforcement agencies from surrounding states. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe believes that the pipeline would put the Missouri River, the water source for the reservation, at risk, pointing out two recent spills, a 2010 pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, which cost over billion to clean up with significant contamination remaining, and a 2015 Bakken crude oil spill into the Yellowstone River in Montana. Police repression has included dogs attacking protesters, spraying water cannons on protesters in sub-freezing temperatures, >700 arrests of Native Americans and ~200 injuries, a highly militarized police force using armored personnel carriers, concussion grenades, mace, Tasers, batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In November 2017, the keystone XL pipeline burst, spilling 210,000 gallons of oil in Amherst, South Dakota.

In 1975, FBI agents attacked AIM activists on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in the ‘Pine Ridge Shootout’. Two FBI agents, and an AIM activist were killed. In two separate trials, the U.S. prosecuted participants in the firefight for the deaths of the agents. AIM members Robert Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted after asserting that they had acted in self–defense. Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada and tried separately because of the delay. He was convicted on two counts of first–degree murder for the deaths of the FBI agents and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison, after a trial which is still contentious. He remains in prison.

In 1973, 200 Oglala Lakota and AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, called the Wounded knee incident. They were protesting the reservation’s corrupt US-backed tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, who controlled a private militia, called Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), funded by the government. FBI, US marshals, and other law enforcement cordoned off the area and attacked the activists with armored vehicles, automatic rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and gas shells, resulting in two killed and 13 wounded. Ray Robinson, a civil rights activist who joined the protesters, disappeared during the events and is believed to have been murdered. As food supplies became short, three planes dropped 1,200 pounds of food, but as people scrambled to gather it up, a government helicopter appeared overhead and fired down on them while groundfire came from all sides. After the siege ended in a truce, 120 occupiers were arrested. Wilson stayed in office and in 1974 was re-elected amid charges of intimidation, voter fraud, and other abuses. The rate of violence climbed on the reservation as conflict opened between political factions in the following three years; residents accused Wilson’s private militia of much of it.

In Nov. 1969, a group of 89 Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island for 15 months, to gauge the US’s commitment to the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which stated that all abandoned federal land must be returned to native people. Eventually the government cut off all electrical power and all telephone service to the island. In June, a fire of disputed origin destroyed numerous buildings on the island. Left without power, fresh water, and in the face of diminishing public support and sympathy, the number of occupiers began to dwindle. On June 11, 1971, a large force of government officers removed the remaining 15 people from the island.

From its creation in 1968, The American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of repression from law enforcement agencies, and surveillance as one of the FBI’s COINTELPRO targets. This includes the wounded knee incident and the pine ridge shootout.

In 1942 the federal government took privately held Pine Ridge Indian Reservation land owned by tribal members in order to establish the Badlands Bombing Range of 341,725 acres, evicting 125 families. Among the families evicted was that of Pat Cuny, an Oglala Sioux. He fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge after surviving torpedoing of his transport in the English Channel. Dewey Beard, a Miniconjou Sioux survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre, who supported himself by raising horses on his 908-acre allotment received in 1907 was also evicted. The small federal payments were insufficient to enable such persons to buy new properties. In 1955 the 97-year-old Beard testified of earlier mistreatment at Congressional hearings about this project. He said, for “fifty years I have been kicked around. Today there is a hard winter coming. …I might starve to death.”

In 1890, US soldiers killed 150-300 people (including 65 women and 24 children) at Wounded Knee (19-26 people, including two women and eleven children.) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South Dakota. Twenty-five soldiers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded later died). At least twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor. The event was driven by local racism towards the practice of Ghost Dancing, which whites found distasteful, and the Native Americans arming up in response to repeated broken treaties, stolen land, and their bison-herds being hunted to near extinction by the whites.

In 1887, the Dawes Act, and Curtis Act, resulted in the loss of 90 million acres of native-alloted land, and the abolition of many native governments. During the ensuing decades, the Five Civilized Tribes lost 90 million acres of former communal lands, which were sold to non-Natives. In addition, many individuals, unfamiliar with land ownership, became the target of speculators and criminals, were stuck with allotments that were too small for profitable farming, and lost their household lands. Tribe members also suffered from the breakdown of the social structure of the tribes.

Starting in the 1870s, The US army, aided by settlers and private hunters, began a widespread policy of slaughtering bufallo and bison, in order to destroy many tribe’s primary food source, and to starve Native Americans into submission. By 1900, they succeeded; the bufallo population dropped from more than 30 million, to a few hundred. The country’s highest generals, politicians, and presidents including Ulysses S. Grant, saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s “Indian Problem.” By destroying the food supply of the plains natives, they could more easily move them onto reservations.

Starting in 1830-50, The Trail of Tears was a series of forced removals of Native American nations, including Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee people and the African freedmen and slaves who lived among them, from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to an area west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Native Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by various government authorities following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. “Marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors,they were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick sheep.” They went on ox wagons, on horses, on foot, then to be ferried across the MississippiRiver. The army was supposed to organize their trek, but it turned over its job to private contractors who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible. The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush. Approximately 2,000-6,000 of the 16,543 relocated Cherokee perished along the way.

In 1848, the California Genocide is a term used to describe the drastic decrease in Native American population in California. The population decreased from ~300,000 in 1769, to 16,000 in 1900.

The Second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War, was a conflict from 1835 to 1842 in Florida between various groups of Native Americans collectively known as Seminoles and the United States, part of a series of conflicts called the Seminole Wars. The Second Seminole War, often referred to as the Seminole War, is regarded as “the longest and most costly of the Indian conflicts of the United States.” ~3000 seminoles were killed, and 4000 were deported to Indian territory elsewhere.

In 1832, the Black Hawk War, was a brief 1832 conflict between the United States and Native Americans led by Black Hawk, a Sauk leader, in Illinois. The war gave impetus to the US policy of Indian removal, in which Native American tribes were pressured to sell their lands and move west of the Mississippi River and stay there. Over 500 Native Americans were killed in the conflict.

In 1832, the Chickasaw Indians were forced by the US to sell their country in 1832 and move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s.

In 1813, the Creek War, was a war between the US, lead by the then notorious indian-hunter Andrew Jackson, and the Creek nation, residing primarily in Alabama. Over 1,500 creeks were killed. The war effectively ended with the Treaty of Fort Jackson, where General Andrew Jackson insisted that the Creek confederacy cede more than 21 million acres of land from southern Georgia and central Alabama. These lands were taken from allied Creek as well as Red Sticks. In 1814, Andrew Jackson became famous for his role in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where his side killed more than 800 Creeks. Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, 70,000 Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward.

The Red Sticks, a faction of Muscogee Creek people in the American Southeast, led a resistance movement against European-American encroachment and assimilation; tensions culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813.

From 1785-96, the Northwest Indian War was a war between the US and a confederation of numerous Native American tribes, with support from the British, for control of the Northwest Territory. President George Washington directed the United States Army to enforce U.S. sovereignty over the territory. Over 1,000 Native Americans were killed in the bloody conflict.

In the 1800s, Indian removal was a policy of the United States government whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory. That policy has been characterized by some scholars as part of a long-term genocide of Native Americans.

The Texan-Indian Wars were a series of 19th-century conflicts between settlers in Texas and the Southern Plains Indians. Its hard to approximate the number of deaths from the conflicts, but the Indian population in Texas decreased from 20,000 to 8,000 by 1875.

The Indian Wars is a name given to the collection of over 40 conflicts and wars between Native Americans and US settlers. The US census bureau reports that they have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the number given… Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate.

From 1500-1900s, European and later US colonists and authorities displaced and committed genocide on the Native American Population. Ward Churchill characterizes the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 as a “vast genocide.. the most sustained on record.

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hussyknee · 9 months

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Not given: "I'm Scottish/ Irish/ Welsh and want to dig that motherfucker up again so we get to kill him too."

(Saw a USAmerican scientist on Twitter who only just found out who Oliver Cromwell was and baffled that everybody else knew. I'm boggled at the US's insularity from the rest of the English-speaking world.)

Please reblog.

#please reblog #dunno how to tag this without skewing the results #tumblr polls #american culture #american education system #american exceptionalism #united kingdom #british colonialism #us hegemony #imperialism #global south #colonization #knee of huss

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ummnews · 26 days

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Israeli officers admit that most Gaza fatalities classified as ‘terrorists’ are civilians

www.UMMnews.org 01 April 2024; MEMO: Israeli officers and soldiers have admitted that most of the fatalities classified by the army as “terrorists” during its war on the Gaza Strip are actually civilians, a report said Sunday. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz collected testimonies from officers and soldiers who have fought in Gaza during the war, which has been ongoing since Oct. 7, 2023. “The…

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emptyanddark · 5 months

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To be clear, many in and out of the US government often treat the term “rules-based international order” as a synonym for international law. And proponents of the rules-based international order are happy to use or hail international law when it serves the United States, like when the International Criminal Court seeks to arrest Vladimir Putin for his war crimes in Ukraine. Yet the United States will never submit itself to the ICC. Under President George W. Bush, the US revoked its (unratified) signature to the treaty establishing the court. Under President Donald Trump, it sanctioned the families of ICC prosecutors who opened a war-crimes investigation into the US war in Afghanistan. That is how the rules-based international order operates. It doesn’t replace the mechanisms of international law; it places asterisks beside them. The rules may bind US adversaries, but the US and its clients can opt out. A brief history of how the US spent its post–Cold War moment of supreme global power shows the rise of what we now call the RBIO at the expense of international law. When the United Nations wouldn’t authorize war on Serbia to save Kosovo, the United States acted as if NATO wielded the same imprimatur, and no nation was strong enough to challenge its assertion. That impulse was supercharged by 9/11. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq made a mockery of international law while claiming cynically to uphold it.

What began as a response to an emergency in the Balkans is now routine. President Barack Obama turned a UN humanitarian mission in Libya into supporting the overthrow of Moammar El-Gadhafi. After the wreckage of Iraq became the horror of ISIS, the US stationed troops in eastern Syria with neither UN mandate nor invitation from the unfortunately enduring Bashar Assad. Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, one of the most important figures in the Iranian government.

“The RBIO cannot replace international law—international law is inherent in the very concept of a state, of an international boundary, of treaties, of human rights,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international-law expert and professor at the University of Notre Dame, said via e-mail. “But the RBIO is undermining knowledge and respect for the system of international law. The law’s capacity to support solutions to global challenges from war and peace to climate change and poverty is being severely degraded by this competing, deeply flawed concept.” Now consider what Israel is doing in Gaza. By early November, it was killing an estimated 180 children a day. The IDF demanded that Palestinians abandon their homes in northern Gaza and then, when hundreds of thousands complied, attacked the destinations in southern Gaza it herded them toward. After starving Gaza, denying it medicine, shutting off its communications, killing its journalists, besieging and even raiding its hospitals, and asserting that places of mass refuge are Hamas positions, Israel claimed to have killed “dozens” of Hamas commanders, out of a total death toll at the time of 10,500 Palestinians. There is no way to square those figures with international law’s demands for distinction and proportionality. Israel, however, knows it has something stronger than international law: the protection of the rules-based international order.

#international law #genocide #western imperialism #rules based international order #us imperialism #us empire #us hegemony #nato #gaza genocide #gaza under attack #israel #usa #palestine #rbio #un #r/#readings #icc

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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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Western media start to note how their politicians' unwavering support for Israel and Ukraine is diminishing their countries' global standing.

At Naked Capitalism Yves Smith notes the devastating political effects of the Gaza bombing on Biden's foreign policies:

Biden Gets Zelensky Treatment in Middle East as Israel Tries to Escalate

The US, in a continued demonstration of the degree of enbubblement of what passes for its leadership, seems to believe it still has the force and soft power to be able to bully talk its way out of its geopolitical messes. Yet this week we have stunning examples of how critical players in the rest to the world no longer buy what the US is selling. The gap between the American establishment’s connection to reality and facts on the ground has opened up to a yawning chasm as the Arab world, as Jordan cancelled a Biden summit with its King Abduallah II plus PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in response to Israel’s shelling of Al-Ahli Arab hospital. Not only are they rejecting the attempt to shift blame for the attack to Hamas (we’ll soon address the “rogue shell” claim), but also the bigger pretense behind that, that the US is incapable of, as opposed to unwilling to, applying the choke chain to Israel. Even the Western media are not much on board with the Israeli and Biden Administration pretense that somehow Hamas dunnit, when Israel has been trying to herd Palestinians out of northern Gaza and specifically attempted to order the evacuation of the hospital. Oh, and this follows Israel ordering the UN to evacuate from Gaza in 24 hours and then shelling its warehouse there: ...

Israel bombed, probably with a U.S. made Hellfire missile, the courtyard of the Baptist al-Ahli Arab hospital where thousands had sought refuge. A short video of the immediate aftermath shows several dozens if not hundreds of dead and wounded. Doctors later held a press conference while standing among some of the casualties.

Like other hospitals al-Ahli Arab had been told by Israel to evacuate but could not do so as there are no other places where the sick and wounded, including many intensive care cases, could be cared for.

Three days earlier, notes the UN, the same hospital had, like others, already been bombed:

14 October 2023: In Gaza city city and governorate, Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by Israeli airstrikes, partially damaging two floors and damaging the ultrasound and mammography room. Four people were injured. Sources: Al Jazeera V and Personal Communication

To then claim, as Biden did, that 'the other team' was responsible for the attack is unfathomable.

It was also way too late says a RUSI fellow:

Going to repeat this as the situation has moved more in the past 16 hours than in the previous week. The plates have shifted, radically. The window for Israeli operations has shrunk from more than a month, to a few days...if at all. That is now the reality of where we stand.

No country besides the U.S. and a few Europeans will ever defend such barbarity. They will simply stop listen to what the 'west' has to say.

The Financial Times quotes a G7-official who struggles with this global divide:

Rush by west to back Israel erodes developing countries’ support for Ukraine (archived)

Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned. The reaction to the October 7 attack on Israel by Islamist militant group Hamas and to Israel’s vow to hit back against Gaza has undone months of work to paint Moscow as a global pariah for breaching international law, they said, exposing the US, EU and their allies to charges of hypocrisy. In the flurry of emergency diplomatic visits, video conferences and calls, western officials have been accused of failing to defend the interests of 2.3mn Palestinians in their rush to condemn the Hamas attack and support Israel. ... The backlash had solidified entrenched positions in the developing world on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, officials said. They warned that this could derail future diplomatic efforts on Ukraine. “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” ... Some American diplomats are privately concerned that the Biden administration’s response has failed to acknowledge how its broad support of Israel can alienate much of the Global South.

Looking at the current BRI anniversary meeting of some 140 states in Beijing, the New York Times voices similar concerns:

New Global Divisions on View as Biden Goes to Israel and Putin to China

Russia and China are siding with a Palestinian people seeking liberation and self-determination, while in Washington’s eyes, they themselves deny those same possibilities to the Ukrainians, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and even to the Taiwanese. But in their reluctance to blame Hamas and effort to associate themselves with the Palestinian cause, both Russia and China are appealing to a wider sentiment in the so-called Global South — and in large parts of Europe, too. For them, it is Israel that is conducting a colonialist policy by its occupation of the West Bank, its encouragement of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land and its isolation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza, who are subjected even in normal times to sharp restrictions on their freedoms. The Global South, a term for developing nations, is a vital area of the new competition between the West and the Chinese-Russian alternative, said Hanna Notte, the director of a Eurasia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. From the point of view of many in the Global South, she said, “the United States fights Russia, the occupier of Ukraine, but when it comes to Israel, the U.S. is on the side of the occupier, and Russia taps into that.”

The editorial board of the Washington Post also declares the failure of U.S. policies:

It would be a moral and strategic mistake to ignore Gaza’s plight

Still, the plight of Gazans has been treated by the United States and the wider international community as a sad but immutable fact in an irresolvable conflict. This was a moral and strategic error, helping promote the instability that has, for now, wrecked efforts on the part of Israel, the United States and Arab states to build a durable diplomatic settlement among the region’s big players.

The Carnegie Council explains how the global rift necessitates a change in western policies. It especially sees a need to ditch the so called "value-" or "rules-based-order" policies:

A Requiem for the Rules-Based Order The Case for Value-Neutral Ethics in International Relations

Regardless of how it eventually concludes, the Russo-Ukrainian War represents a seismic event signaling profound changes in the global landscape. The unipolar era is at its end, major countries are more concerned with their cultural sovereignty and strategic autonomy than they have been in decades, and it seems inevitable that the once-dominant Western hegemony must gradually yield to a more diverse and multipolar system. The period following World War II witnessed the ascendancy of the United States and its allies as architects of a new international order premised on the institutionalization of Western values such as democracy and human rights. This Western-centric approach to global governance—known as the “rules-based order”—has encountered mounting challenges. China's rise, Russia's geopolitical subversiveness, and the growing assertiveness of emerging powers from the Global South have eroded Western dominance. The outcome is a more diverse world, characterized by multiple centers of power coexisting, challenging any single ideology or set of substantive values. ... Our particular sense of morality in the West should not stop us from aspiring to pursue what’s both wise and right. The evolving international order, characterized by polycentrism and multipolarity, challenges the conventional Western-dominated “rules-based” order. Drawing from Nietzsche's perspective on values, we recognize that values are context-dependent rather than innate, timeless, or universal. Similarly, the decline of our ancien regime does not spell the end of international ethics. If the current transition is understood correctly, it could promise the birth of a new normative system based on a functional, value-neutral, situational, and diplomatic ethic that has its primary concern in managing reciprocal relations between world powers. Instead of attempting to impose our values on others (no matter how good or true we think they are), we in the West should prioritize engagement with other major powers based on common interests and shared objectives. ... ... In sum, within the intellectual framework offered by cultural realism, we need an alternative instrumentalist and pragmatic ethic that 1) accepts the realities of power politics and spheres of interest without moralizing and projecting a Manichaean mentality upon the world, and 2) is grounded in principles that are conducive to a pluralist modus vivendi, including mutual and equal recognition, statesmanship, non-interference, humility, strategic empathy, and open dialogue.

Some might say that the west will never change its behavior but I do not believe that.

The west WILL HAVE TO change its behavior or it will go down into history's graveyard. There is no longer an alternative as the 'rules based order' has proven to be an unsellable dead end.

Posted by b on October 18, 2023 at 15:31 UTC

#multipolarity #global south #moon of alabama #israel #gaza #israel palestine conflict #joe biden #us hegemony

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kendrixtermina · 4 months

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Points against Zionism: Moral vs Pragmatic Arguments

The Israeli framing of their atrocities is often as a sort of tough pragmatic decision: Maybe it's ugly, but they have no choice. It needs to be done

From that starting position, some ppl then work themselves into sadism & dehumanization to ease the cognitive dissonance of hurting people to do so, telling themselves they are not hurting people, but monsters who deserve it, but not everyone goes so far. There's enough people who say they don't like the pictures, they don't like Netanyahu, but it's needed to protect their people.

Often the counterargument is done in a kantian, moralistic fashion: (No end could possibly justify these means) coulpled with moral shaming (if you support these evil means, you're a bad person)

However, this is useless.

Zionists are indoctrinated to be paranoid & think all non-jews intrinsically want to kill them.

They're in self-preservation mode:If someone is coming at you with a knife and it's you or them, and you kill them in self-defense, most ppl will say that was justified: It was you or them, you are not obligated to die. From the zionists' pov, they are being asked to just die or at least take a big risk.

Let's notice that this isn't unique to them: Many ppl say that they would kill to protect their family. Few would say that if it's between their family or a stranger they pick the stranger.

So the moral shaming doesn't work: It sounds like being shamed for not obediently dying.

The survival instinct is one of the most powerful drives in the human psyche, which is why politicians love to trigger it & condition ppl so as to make it more easy to trigger.

It's kind of evil genius.

This belief is often planted at toddler age so it's pre-rational and triggers an indistnct child-like emotional response that can be hard to dislodge... at least by discourse.

There are so many videos of ppl who instantly quit zionism after just witnessing a Palestinian being normal & nice. Though even those mention having a conditioned fear response - just that when they did, the murder they expected did not occur, proving the falsehood at once.

This is also probably also where you get these "everything is antisemitic" discourse things that, idk, get bent out of shape over goblincore aesthetic, cosplays or cartoon witches, rather resembling a conspiracy theorist looking for evidence of illuminati in a music video or otherwise seeming to look for confirmation of a pre-determined, feared outcome, than any other anti-discrimination awareness that would be concerned with manifest, statistically measurable unfair treatment, harassment or stereotypic portrayal of real people. (which of course does without doubt actually happen to jewish ppl at times)

It's not a rational fear, & it's infuriating to see the faction with the bombs talking of being scared, but while they are scared they can't rly absorb information, neither empathy or nor logic based arguments. Scared ppl get worse at both.

Now, on the other hand the response cannot be to coddle the fear or treat is as rational, because that gives it leverage, plays along with bullshit & concedes their assumptions

What to do instead:

Counter pragmatic arguments on a pragmatic level.

To see what I mean, look no further than this recently publicized discussion with Biden, where he is telling them to "maybe be nice pretty please", & Netanyahu responded that the USA used carpet bombing of German cities and nuclear bombs to win WWII.

On the american side this really shows the absurdity of the foreign policy blob & the US playing world police when it's the biggest rulebreaker. If they don't follow the rules, why should weaker countries?

But on the Israeli side, it's a pragmatic argument: "Ugly acts solve uglier problems. Why don't you let us do what needs to be done? YOU did." this is why biden's weaksauce beseechments do nothing (that, & his refusal to use actual leverage), from their pov he's asking them to forgo the thing that works to look good, even though biden's country didn't in the same situation, he looks like a hypocrite.

But the big problem here, on a pragmatic level, is that it assumes carpet bombing & nukes are why WWII was won (and not because the fascists picked fights with all their neighbors at once, which was just never gonna work)

That is not true. The idea of "strategic bombing" is based on faulty psychology. Surveys done after the war show that carpet bombing did NOT lower axis morale (but rather gave the Nazis fuel for propaganda, in which they claimed the allies were the genocidal ones. they kinda pioneered that DARVO thing that Israel is also fond of) & the nuke was dropped when Japan had already pretty much lost the war.

The allies really should've known that seeing has Hitler's attack on civilians in London did not lower British morale either, they just kept-calm-&-carry-on'd right through it. Though they attributed it to their superior Britishness & thought the enemy would be different.

Wether or not carpet bombing civilians is moral doesn't matter here, because it's INEFFECTIVE.

the means will NOT archieve the ends, justified or otherwise.

It's the same thing as with torture. It doesn't make ppl divulge infor or change their allegiance, ppl end up making shit up to tell the torturers what they wanna hear

(Though, as in all these things, the most efficient ppl at convincing are gonna be the in-group. If an outsider speaks, they're easily dismissed as "just another one of THEM" but an "us" is seen as a person & given the benefit of the doubt, their opinion is seen as mattering.

The best way to fight sexism is men not laughing at sexist jokes, the best way to fight racism is white ppl acting embarassed of racist relatives (that, and systemic reforms, but I'm talking the individual layer here. The systemic remedy to zionism is probably international pressure. I think systemic & individual measures are best combined because you can't neglect either half, but that's a different essay)

In that sense I'm grateful to all those Jewish protesters.)

#gaza #free gaza #palestine #free palestine #israel #zionism #usa #united states #us hegemony

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