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Sorry to burst your bubble, but I think the idea that it is a bot army is a cope (or, more precisely, you taking something that is meant primarily as a propaganda message for a different audience as accurate information). I'm just about old enough to have consciously experienced 9/11 as a European, and the reactions were very similar. Of course back then there was no mass social media, and traditional media was understood to be under the watchful gaze of people who are respectable and have political obligations; but on the ground, already, in my perfectly respectable, mainstream, upper middle class environment, the reaction was almost universally a certain giddiness and excitement, because the underdog managed to land a most spectacular punch straight to the face of the smug snake who had been grating everyone with their smug strutting around. It's not that, individually, people even liked Islam or Islamists, or, imagining an individual American, were happy for them to die a violent death; rather, this did not figure at all, because the American deaths were as much of an abstract statistic to us as the deaths in random US bombings of targets in Sudan. All that mattered is that the Americans had been doing all the hitting, seemed very secure and self-assured in doing so, but finally got hit. People like stories where the plucky underdog embarrasses the Empire.
I don't see the balance or nature of sentiment regarding Oct 7 as significantly different from that at all. The only thing that changed is that now there is an internet where you can share your edgy thoughts with the like-minded, rather than there only being mass media where your edgy thoughts will be judged by schoolmarms with well-paid political consulting gigs. You do also have to understand that, just like 9/11, it is in a way nothing personal; Israelis are simply (1) abstract distant foreigners and (2) the smug overdogs who had been running circles around everyone else with impunity. ((2) might grate when in your internal narrative you see yourself as the underdog.)
I was pretty young for 9/11, so my impression was that Europeans had a lot of sympathy and support and only soured on the reaction later. This is a big update for me, so thanks for letting me know. You just converted my contempt for Europeans at your general economic dysfunction, cultural arrogance, churlish ingratitude, and eagerness to commit civilizational suicide into genuine hatred.
Edit: I’m seeing other Europeans in this thread disagreeing with you, so I’m updating back to “leftists are evil everywhere.”
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Yeah the bot army is always the most insane garbled cope. Especially the whole 'Putin has the world's best digital marketing force that can swing a democratic election by 40% from the CORRECT views that I hold personally' kinda vibe.
That being said I largely find the Israelis better aligned with my interest in functional Middle East civilization and I prefer them to the alternative. It is somewhat funny how badly some people are reacting to Jews going from an essentially unassailable position in polite conversation to being an acceptable target of Left Wingers. These things are cyclical it swings around and maybe don't botch your cultivated position in the first place.
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I guess I will believe you when you say that Europeans cheering for 9/11 meant nothing personal to Americans, but it certainly felt personal to us. (In fairness, I don't remember a lot of Europeans openly celebrating, but there certainly were a lot of Europeans saying, in so many words, that we had it coming, and the real tragedy would be if we retaliated against poor innocent Muslims in any way.)
If a major terrorist attack happened in your country, and Americans were all "Haha that's what you get for importing infinity Muslims, face meet leopards!" (and I have no doubt you'd see Americans saying that), I suspect you would take it very personally and would not be convinced by arguments that it was an abstraction, that Americans didn't really wish death to Europeans.
There is of course a more sophisticated discussion about empire and "chickens coming home to roost" (another popular phrase of the time), and just as with Hamas and October 7, reasonable people can talk about what led to this without it being black and white and "They just hate us because they are made of pure concentrated evil." But it is kind of unreasonable to say "You had it coming" (and that "Death to you!" doesn't literally mean "Death to you!") and expect people to believe that it's not personal and they should understand it as an abstract political statement because a few deaths are just a statistic, and you're just celebrating the fat kid standing up to the bully.
I see that all the time, but I don't take it personally because it's default-sub Reddit equivalent posters saying it. What I don't see is international student activism chanting "Anglicise the intifada" and wearing Irish tricolour balaclavas as fashion statements, or at least not outside of Kneecap gigs.
The question is how much of it is organic, if it's organic how much is sincere, and if it's sincere how much is truly earnest.
The fact that you can find people supporting Palestine offline and without any effort looking for them indicates that it's at least meaningfully organic and somewhat sincere, even if they wouldn't do more than make cost-less gestures of support. On the other hand it's rare to hear (non-British) people shitting on Britain outside of social media, so what I see online can be chalked up to low effort trolling and banter.
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Well, my point isn't about it being good or bad, just about the sentiment existing organically (contra the idea that only bots would hold such views in force). Regarding the reverse situation, I really can't comment on it for myself because I am too rootless to take insult or injury against any country personally (every country I'm somehow associated with has had its share of terrorism and outside gloating, and all of those left me cold), but certainly going by newspaper comment sections people did seem upset about Americans projecting their narratives e.g. on the Breivik event.
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Were there? Because I don’t recall any of that and I’m European and old enough to have watched the second plane hit WTC live on BBC at work.
What reason would Europeans even have had to dislike US en masse outside the pseudo-communist far left circles back then? Clinton era US was generally liked and GWB was a somewhat bumbling but seemingly largelt irrelevant president until after 9/11.
Maybe you underestimate how many pseudo-comminist leftists there were and are. (Again, to be fair, I heard "chickens coming home to roost" from Anericans.)
Noem Chomsky would be the type specimen there. There's a substantial group of people, mostly intellectuals or those who would think of themselves as intellectual, who dislike America and consider it always in the wrong.
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Sounds like you were a respectable person, the intended audience of the respectable shock in the mainstream media?
I remember the edgy young adult / teenage leftist people I knew not cheering, but being incredibly smug. Vibes of some analyses in leftist newspapers were "akshually, the US foreign policy is at fault here". But I think many people may have their memories confounded by the opposition to Iraq war few years later. Condemnation and anti-American sentiment were much more widespread then. Freedom fries and all that.
GWB was supposed to be the herald of evil white evangelical regime, controlled by Dick Cheney and/or Skull & Bones, who was opposed to the Science, such as teaching evolution in schools and opposition to stem cell therapies. The Handmaid's tale the tv series was not yet made, so nobody made references to it, but it illustrates the mental space.
And all the above is certainly different than the situation with Israel today. Same leftist not-longer-young adult crowd seriously believes (or act like they believe) that Israel is really equivalent to apartheid era South Africa and moral people should oppose it and support Palestinians with the same enthusiasm and moral force as they supported Nelson Mandela. I don't personally know anyone who cheered on their public real name social media, but their relief was palpable when the war in Gaza began and they could again earnestly concentrate on complaining about the evil crimes of Israel.
I mean Israel in the West Bank is inching pretty close to full apartheid. Keeping people in permanent stateless limbo in a swiss cheese of disconnected towns. And the Gaza treatment is fucked up too in that they and Egypt essentially don't allow freedom of movement out of Gaza.
Nah dude it's not apartheid it's just that we don't let them go to certain places. And we continuously expand the list of places they cant go. Sometimes they have economic or other interests in one of those places so we make them leave. It's not apartheid, we let them have their own separate government! But it can't have any kinetic power, we keep the monopoly on that to prevent them from going to the places they aren't allowed to be.
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Yeah, my social democrat lower middle class parents were devastated. Even by european leftist standards, /u/4bpp is extreme in his anti-americanism and anti-israelism.
European anti-Americanism works in layers, as in scott's counter-signaling model. The politicians at the top/international elite are atlanticist, the leftist upper middle class is anti, the broad middle class is pro again, the high working class "conspirationist podcast" tranche is against, and real proles/idle poor love American soaps/action movies again.
I was in, essentially, middle school (analogous age bracket) back then. I'm just relaying the general vibes that I perceived around me (from other kids, and by extension presumably their parents because I'm not sure how they would develop those views independently). It might be relevant that this was in East Germany, which by then already had started entering its ongoing phase of Smug Westerner Fatigue.
Plus you're Russian, which have their "Ostalgie" in the 90s. Plus you hold roughly Chomskyite views on the evil of the West, america, israel, and the contrasting fundamental innocence of the Wretched of the world, like the khmer rouge, milosevic putin and hamas.
I don't understand how you leap from "4bpp saw these things around him" to "4bpp personally championed this view". There was, to my best knowledge, only one other kid of Eastern Bloc origin in my entire school at the time, and he was Ukrainian, and I didn't interact with him. Besides, I don't think the attitude had much to do with nostalgia for the East, any more than American "deplorable" Trump voting is due to nostalgia for Jim Crow or whatever its detractors claim, but rather a very similar impulse of defiance against constant moralising by richer, more successful self-proclaimed betters.
Even if you were right and I was just merely secretly reporting on the ostalgic ideations of my pre-teen self rather than a snapshot of what my corner of East Germany believed, the set of beliefs you impute to me is wild (and not very accurate). Innocence of the Wretched? Please! My attitude has long been that the Wretched of the World all deserve each other and utility would increase if they went extinct. I just find those who could not leave their grubby fingers off of them before their self-inflicted demise to be detestable in a different way.
I don't want to sound like a prosecutor, but do you deny your left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine views, and are you now, or have you ever, been a member...?
I'm establishing a bubble here. If those are your opinions, then you will tend to see them in others with greater frequency than you would in the general population.
I don't think I'm that left-wing by most measures. Anti-NATO, yes. Pro-Palestine, a bit more complex again; if a Palestinian state was founded, I would be against providing it with any sort of aid. I just want any organisation/country that represents me to wash its hands of the whole business, and stop supporting either side, because I think it's a moral quagmire with no winners. Since currently most organisations that represent me are staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Palestine, this directionally winds up being mistaken for a pro-Palestine view.
Either way, as I said, we are talking about a time when I was not even in my teens. I don't think my political views back then were that developed or similar to my current ones. Later, during my teenage edgelord years, I used to tell people that my preferred solution for the Middle East is to offer anyone who is willing to take it a large lump sum of money to move away, and then glass the entire area together with anyone left who refused to take the deal, figuring those people are part of the problem. Does this sound like a "pro-Palestine" view? Whatever I believed during 9/11 is further away from my current beliefs than that.
Either way (2), "left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine" taken together still do not entail belief in an "innocence of the Wretched of the World" or support for the Khmer Rouge.
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Not really an argument that he was in a lizardman-sized bubble. Chomsky was not an insignificant minority figure among the left in Europe, but one of the prominently heard voices, a mainstay of the countercultural bookshops and reading clubs among the left-wing academic class who'd read Le Diplo's praises of ATTAC and sympathize with the Black Bloc.
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So am I, and I kinda remember some of my friend group going "fuck them". Though we were all retarded teenagers at the time, and I don't remember much of what the adults were saying. 4bpp is European too.
Which is rather different than ”a lot of Europeans”. It’s like trying to seriously claim that ”a lot of people are lizardmen” because a bunch of edgelords put a mark there on a survey.
Well, hold on, teenagers shouldn't be taken seriously, but it's hardly because they express lizardmen opinions.
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This is the same as my experience. The guy who was the most insistent about going "fuck them" was basically just a teenage edgelord, a channer before the chans. He became conspicuously right-wing a few years after the events (conspicuous enough to stand out in the generally apolitical atmosphere). The next day there was a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11 and the one guy known for left-wing activism in the class made a point of saying that he was only doing it to honor the civilian victims.
I do really suspect it depends on where you are; Scandinavia was already much more Philoamerican than the parts of Europe (DE, FR) I was familiar with back then.
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Yes, this idea of Europeans (in any significant number) cheering on 9/11 seems completely made-up. There was a wave of pro-American goodwill like I can never remember before after 9/11. Lots of European countries participated in invading and occupying Afghanistan.
Iraq, on the other hand, thoroughly reset the counter. But that was after.
As one of those Europeans that cheered up about it - it is not completely made up. Seeing the hegemon humiliated and hurt felt nice after the Serbian bombings.
Eh, what?
The main perceived problem with the Serbian bombings for a layman on the street was that NATO took forever to actually start doing them. Certainly not that NATO bombed Serbia in the first place (outside niche edgelord or old communist far left circles).
In the balkans it was 50/50 aporoval at best.
Is that because it seemed like an arbitrary decision, considering all the shit the Serbs were put through over the last centuries, including genocide in WW2? I don't know much about it, but I've gathered that the genocide of the 8000 Muslims didn't just appear out of nothing?
The genocide in WWII was perpetrated by Catholics. The Ustasha facists specifically.
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It's hardly surprising that countries with significant Serbian minority would have anti-NATO sentiment after NATO struck Serbia. That doesn't reflect the rest of the Europe at all at the time.
Rest of Europe also include Russia which traditionally is Serbia ally. So no matter what definition of Europe you use - by square kilometers or by headcount, unless this definition is like the Metal bands definition of Europe when declaring Europe tour at the time - aka what is west of Berlin, the bombing was not universally applauded.
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I can't speak to sentiments in Europe post 9/11, but I think this:
is wrong. The people celebrating had a problem with very specifically with Israel, and it was absolutely personal. Israel had been bleeding reputation for a while, and 10/7 was a momentary shot in the arm, precisely because you had a very visible group of people openly celebrating it in a way that seemed to validate Zionist critiques of anti-Zionism. They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right), which is when their reputation really started to tank.
This really cant be true IMO. Unless something like 99.9% of people who have allegedly "soured" on Israel post 10/7 are just too stupid to understand what the response was always going to be. You can't have a neighbor that launches hundred + man raiding bands into your territory where 1000+ of your people are killed, 200+ are taken hostage, and thousands of others injured, maimed, raped, not to mention the property damage. The only reasonable response to that is the maximum response.
If a Mexican cartel did that with the support (even tacit) support of the Mexican government and a hostile foriegn nation there would be no more Mexico. Everyone involved would obviously be killed, the government deposed, a gigantic DMZ imposed on their norther border, the country would be divided up into a bunch of territories administered by our local generals at first, later we'd let some local puppet have some semblance of authority. And the country would simply be broken up as well. Baja would be one protectorate, for maximum humiliation we'd call 3 of the new territories we create, "South New Mexico", "South Arizona", and "South Texas". No amount of civilian casualties would set us off of carrying out our goals, and no amount of dissent to our administration would be tolerated, up to and possibly including forcing them all to switch to English as an official language.
And if you asked any American President or Speaker of the House 1865-2000, "well isn't this proposal by some anon anti_dan a little extreme?" They'd first laugh at you, then tell you the US has a rich history of pseudonymous political writers, then tell you I'm a moderate, and a few would say something like, "thats a good idea, do we have to wait for the Mexicans to attack?"
This is demonstrably not true. We know because it has happened. The punitive expedition in Mexico did not involve any such tactics, and the US invasion of Afghanistan was not a brutal scorched earth campaign in the slightest.
I'm sure some would agree with you, but most of them would call you an absolute barbarian.
The problem in the US, and Israel, and indeed basically every country, is that there is a significant subset of the population with incorrigibly brutal instincts. It is incumbent on the rest of us not to indulge them, however much they try to promise that their methods are the key to success. Their instincts are terrible, and will constantly lead you to doing appalling things that will make your situation worse in most cases.
The problem is not incorrigibly brutal instincts, but the opposite: Tolerating crybullies who utilize their own citizens as human shields.
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I think this sentiment gives the lie to the idea that there was much goodwill among people on the left and center to begin with (which is the group that dominates traditional media). The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it". The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans and portray them as a particular consequence of Israel's uniquely evil conduct, conveniently forgetting that war always negatively affects civilians, particularly those whose leaders try to maximise their own suffering for PR purposes (using human shields, firing from hospitals, stealing aid etc.)
chadyes.jpg
Or, to elaborate and contradict myself: Israel should have done something about it, but not what they did. Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare. The problem is that these positions are incoherent and unjustifiable. Israel occupies a position of near-total superiority over Hamas and other Palestinian militants. Even in the worst case, it does not face anything even remotely approach an existential threat from these groups.
It's been two and a half years of high intensity conflict in an extremely confined geographical space; the victims of 10/7 have been avenged seventyfold, and yet Israel's position is, basically, that they are going to keep bombing Gaza so long as there is evil in the hearts of men (or the President pardons Netanyahu). If they are conducting this war in a good faith effort to end Palestinian militancy (which I question), they should contemplate whether there is some flaw in their strategy.
Was it, though?
There's a lot wrong with this post, but to keep things focussed:
Gaza has had complete sovereignty since the mid 2000s. So I don't see any contradiction in Israel treating the conflict as a war.
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I think this is just a straight up lie. I honestly can't recall anyone expressing even the slightest amount of sympathy for Israel in the immediate wake of October 7th. The idea that everyone in the West was on their side until they retaliated just seems flatly untrue to me. Even to this day I still encounter pro-Palestine types claiming that October 7th was a false flag, or that Hamas only attacked military targets (and the hundreds of hours of footage of their squaddies murdering civilians at a music festival were created with AI). Even pointing out that Hamas raped women and abducted people is widely seen as tantamount to endorsing Israel's "genocide" (massive enormous scare quotes).
From this comment I feel like you most be an incredible bubble. The MSM media from Fox to MSNBC was incredibly supportive of Israel after the October 7th attacks. The boomercons and boomerlibs started out 100% in lockstep support of Israel along with the entire US political establishment. Except maybe the squad which is 4 out of 435 representatives. Young leftists and groypers were very loud, especially online. And the young leftist were loud in deep blue urban cores and on elite university campuses but were pretty clearly a minority.
Now as the war dragged and increasingly turned into a slaughter with no real military objectives a lot of people turned on Israel. Which is why now the pro-Palestine position is the highest it's ever been. Israel had plenty of goodwill in America but they burned it up by gradually showing their opponents right. And I include myself in this I was very supportive of Israel in their initial fight against Hamas but gradually turned against them over the course of the war. And I know several people in the same boat. I could be in a bubble as well but polling seems to show that there was a real shift in opinion during the war in Gaza.
It's called "Europe", and specifically Ireland.
Ireland being aggressively in the tank for Palestine is not exactly new, but it is also an outlier. It certainly does not reflect American sentiment.
Back when the PLO was uncomplicatedly a terrorist organisation, the IRA, ETA and PLO saw each other as ideological allies and almost certainly cooperated operationally.
The dominant strain of Irish nationalism is anti-British first and foremost, and therefore anti-Western Civ by implication, which is why it is so hard to organise a right-populist party in Ireland, despite the obvious unmet demand for anti-immigration politics.
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That's quite the bubble, yes.
For what it's worth, post October 7th, I recall a massive amount of support for Isreal from a large number of right-wing coded spaces, though perhaps that's my bubble in action.
...conversely, I'm also seeing a number of that same space react negatively to getting dragged into a war with Iran, while the other half has simply devolved into Holden Bloodfeast.
In Australia it felt like the whole Gaza plight/anti-Israeli thing didn't really spin up till after a couple months of the October 7 attacks
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I meant it was not personal in the sense that it was not about the individuals who died. Of course it was indeed about Israel, just like the reaction about 9/11 was about the USA.
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