site banner

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is there a Hamas steelmanning available?

When your people have been oppressed by the enemy for 55 years they start to treat the yoke as normal, they forget what it means to be free. After all, it's not really an oppression when instead of soldiers bulldozing your farmhouse at night you get bureaucrats informing you your farmhouse violates the new safety zone requirements and has to be relocated. To remind them that they are people and not cattle you have to provoke the enemy into renewed brutality, and the only way to do it is by brutalizing the enemy.

When the plantation owner tells you, "I think we had an agreement about production quotas. It's the same on all plantations, so you can't say I am treating you unfairly. You have underdelivered, so I am forced to punish you, no hard feelings, right?" you don't organize a sit-in to renegotiate the number of lashes or the number of bales of cotton. You kill the enforcers and torch the mansion. Why would you also mutilate the sons, violate the wife and the daughters of the plantation owner in front of him before killing them? Do you really expect every other slaveowner to become so horrified by this that they release their slaves? No, they will become horrified by the atrocities and double down on the oppression, but that's your goal. The slaves have become too complacent. The indiscriminate punishments will remind them that the agreement they had with the owners was not an agreement at all.

That reasoning would still apply for the KKK trying to attack someone in order to create anti-KKK backlash.

You're really grasping for straws here.

Isn't it significantly different because the KKK is not an ethnic group? It's not even a village. There are no "civilian" KKK populations to blend in with, to get support from, to be hidden by.