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Why is the obvious World War II comparison of Rafah to the Warsaw Ghetto? I can think of a number of other plausible comparisons that are probably worth considering. This is, admittedly, a rather hot take, but why not compare Rafah to Berlin in 1945? After the Third Reich invaded most of Eastern Europe, including rampant raping and pillaging across the countryside, and that entire campaign of deliberate ethnic cleansing and genocide, nobody looks at the Allied decision to demand complete, unconditional surrender as unreasonable, or that they kept fighting all the way to Berlin. Nobody argues that Stalin was deliberately unprepared at the start of the war to justify flattening Germany and running parts of it as a puppet state for Soviet gain. Nobody of import says "countless German civilians died because Roosevelt and Stalin were unwilling to enact a unilateral ceasefire at the Rhine and the Oder." Nobody serious mourns the Volkssturm civilians (frequently children) that were handed primitive weapons for futile resistance, without also recognizing the broader context of the tragedy of the entire war. And I'm not even going to even try to deny that the Red Army was infamous for its war crimes against civilians in the East, or the decades of subsequent political repression the Soviets brought to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
The Axis powers entered the war in the late 1930s even though almost all modern historians consider their possibility of overall victory bleak. Maybe they could have bargained for an advantageous quick peace, but even Yamamoto has (possibly-apocryphal) quotes about expecting to lose a longer war. Hamas had even lower chances of winning in October. I'm not convinced that this merits assuming that either power, as the "underdog," merits obvious sympathy, although that seems to be in vogue these days in certain circles. Heck, if you look at ratios of civilian casualties -- as I've seen some argue makes Israel's actions unjustified -- America had almost none (generally counted as a few thousand if you include territories and civilian ship crews). The British claim 70,000. More civilians than that died in the Battle of Berlin alone, and Allied bombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the nuclear weapons.
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
Not that I'd wholly endorse Israel to hit Rafah like Zhukov hit Berlin: I don't think the situation really warrants it, or that the situations are immediately similar. Heck, I won't even try to argue that Israel hasn't committed atrocities in this situation. But on the other, it seems about as reasonable as comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, and I'd be pretty amused to see some Tankies argue that the Red Army was in the wrong.
A good article on this.
To quote myself:
If I'm reading this correctly, he means that in a conflict between a weaker party ("egg") and a stronger party ("high, solid wall"), he will always take the side of the weaker party, even if they're wrong and the stronger party is right. Which logically implies that, were Hamas ever to gain the upper hand, Freddie would immediately start supporting Israel. It likewise implies that he ought to have supported the Axis powers in the second world war.
The Axis powers were not the weaker party in WW2. They invaded and defeated various countries that were weaker than them.
The Soviets also did this against various countries not called Germany, so actually I disagree with even an analysis of WW2 that blames everything on Germany. Actually both national socialist Germany and the Soviet Union started the war in europe by invading various other countries and having the goal of hegemony in Europe and be inclined to attack each other too for such purpose. Add to that a quite mass murderous record, and not only modern analogies break down, but we ought not to take a pro USSR stance in WW2. You can have an anti-nazi position of course and I would agree. Both an anti-soviet, and anti-nazi position makes sense in relation to a pro human rights, national sovereigntiy, anti-invasion/attrocities/colonialism take. This isn't to say that taking a stance that "our atrocities are good and justifiable", is justifiable for the non Soviet allies, neither.
If you would like a good book to recommend that examines more the Soviet side and Stalin's machiavelian strategy, I would highly recommend Stalin's war for those interested.
They absolutely were. In territorial extent, in manpower, in resources, in number of factories.
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I think the main problem with the whole "punching up/down" or "egg vs wall" framework is that there's just no agreed-upon way to meaningfully determine which side is actually the stronger and the weaker side. In WW2, the Axis powers lost, so one could argue that, by definition, they are the weaker side, but then others could argue that merely losing to someone else isn't proof of being the weaker side, and we need to analyze the precise details of the situation. It's the same arguments that get brought up in playoffs or MMA fights of, "Did the better team/fighter actually win?" where there's seemingly no way for people to come to an agreement on what standard to choose for determining what "better" means; the very notion of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" is the point of contention. And so people just twist the logic and evidence in whatever way needed to to make the "side I like" be the "weaker" side and vice versa (or "better team" in the case of sports). It's just naked bias with extra steps. Whenever I see talk about "punching up/down," I mentally replace "up" with "direction I want to punch" and "down" with "direction I don't want punches going in," and it's a more useful way of analyzing the situation every single time.
Oh my god.
“Criticizing Nazis is punching down” is incredible. I can’t wait to trot that out at some point.
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I disagree. Many of the people who say they are punching up, are actually punching down.
Because there is such thing as who are deemed acceptable targets by society. Which can be observed by the laws, popular narratives, regulations and common practices.
That it is cultural far leftists with the whipping hand and chauvinists for their coalition of identities matters in regards to who we ought to focus upon.
Now, some progressives might have argued the same for some of their favored groups applied in the past. But whatever merit or not such view had in the past, their movement overreached and now it is the stage that this overreach has already happened.
What it means to punch up can even change through time, even if the rhetoric remains similar. This isn't to say that some rhetoric isn't inherently for something unjust, even if it comes from a weaker party. So, there are limitations on "punching up" even if some group is unfairly mistreated.
I agree with the later claim.
With the Israeli and Palestinian issue, one could pretend that expansionist Islamists or Jewish supremacists who want the entire so called promised land to be Jewish, to be victimized party.
At some level, some focus on "underdog" is like you say, pointless, because the "underdog" group is too wide, and it is in service in an agenda that misleads.
I do think there is a value both in WW2 and in other events, to also look at who is committing atrocities against whom. Are worldwide Muslims the underdog? No. Are the Palestinians the underdog and the more mistreated party? Yes. Does this mean they are morally pure and we should desire a reversal of the situation? No. Indeed, we ought not to put on any group an anointed permanent victim status, and be more skeptical. So, when pressuring, we should act wisely, not with limitless commitment and lack of skepticism. But who does it make sense to pressure?
Ultimately, I do think as you say we need to look cases on their merits, but I want to push back at completely de-legitimizing caring about who is the underdog, because it comes as a self serving narrative to excuse taking the permanent side of certain groups even while they have the upper hand and mistreat others.
Or we can say, that who is the aggressive party and is actually committing the most atrocities against others, is ought to be something that matters.
I am actually in favor of trying to combine might with adherence to certain ethical principles and to enforce good rules, so don't misunderstand my position as being about reflexively favoring weakness over strength. Even if I do sympathize over weak but genuine victims over strong predators. At the end of the day if I get what I want, those favoring good rules would be the stronger party.
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It can simultaneously be true that Germany is stronger than Poland and that the USA is stronger than Germany.
I replied to you prior to your edit - I'm just about as aggressively anti-communist and anti-Soviet as they come.
Well, yes, but if you sympathize with the underdog, the German invasion of multiple other countries is going to matter a lot. I am not convinced such sympathies that would lead someone to sympathize with the Palestinians, would have let to them to sympathize with Germany. Following such logic in a non stupid manner might lead someone to oppose the mass rapes or mass murder of Germans while the winning Soviet army was marching, or oppose the mass murderous Morgenthau Plan. But would that be wrong? No it wouldn't. It was also good that the Japanese after WW2 were not subject to being punished in the same kind they planned to deal with China.
I do think that saying things like "No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”", can lead to stupid conclusions though.
Trembling Mad calls this gerrymandering power. When comparing Germany and Poland, Germany is stronger, ergo Germany's the bad guy - boooo! When comparing Germany and the USA, the USA is stronger, ergo Germany's the good guy - yaaaaay! It entirely depends on how close you zoom in.
I think this illustrates that "sympathising with the underdog" is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to take in assessing which of two more parties has the moral high ground - once we've established that the weaker party is morally superior, that incentivises bad actors to contrive a narrative in which they're the weak victimised party, Goodhart's law-style. But even in cases where everyone pretty much agrees on which of two parties is strongest and weakest - well, it's still possible to be both strong and morally upstanding, or weak and morally degenerate. Common, even.
A blind approach about anything is bad in general.
Sympathizing with the underdog has its merits, provided you try to think about the circumstances and aren't following a robotic logic and are very willing to update your logic. That right and wrong does matter, but certainly if you want to oppose the greater atrocities being committed, focusing on who is committing them matters. And having some flexibility in seeing what different civilian groups are more targeted, as different sides have the upper hand, is going to be helpful.
But you should have the foresight and know who you are dealing with, and ought not be a permanent ally of anyone.
A more wrongheaded approach is the one where certain groups, especially ethnic groups can do no right, and other groups can do no wrong. Which is ironically promoted by plenty of propaganda that tries to pull heartstrings of our sympathies of the underdog, or promote permanent victims by either distorting history, or cherry picking from issues that fit, but is misleading through the exclusion of other events from the dominant narrative.
So I do think there are limitations, in many approaches, including sympathizing with the underdog. But it does have some merit in a limited sense. For example, I blamed USSR but there are those who see them as the victimized party that can do no wrong, because of nazi attrocities and initial nazi victories. Not only that logic is wrong, but it also forgets the Soviet invasions and occupations of multiple weaker countries.
While that is possible, the discussion is about atrocities, invasions and ethnic cleansing so I don't think this analogy applies with the relevant examples. Israel is of course not morally upstanding and there is a worldwide backlash against them precisely because of their warcrimes against the Palestinians and also the rhetoric in those lines.
And that they are the stronger party is not irrelevant. Even if hypothetically both parties were immoral, the stronger one gets the backlash because they are the ones committing the atrocities. And it is the focus on the later that matters. It does make sense to focus on strong parties committing atrocities, but I certainly don't think we ought to be myopic about the dangers of weak, mistreated immoral parties, getting stronger of course.
It isn't as if much of the world that sees what Israel does far more negatively than you, are applying the robotic fallacious logic of siding with the underdog against morally upstanding stronger party, which is more of a strawman.
Well, if decolonization movement only opposed European colonization of their countries but didn't pretend colonizing European countries was decolonization, then that would make them a more ethical movement than it is. Who is making the aggressive action at others expense matters. And plenty of aggressive action comes from a stronger party towards a weaker one. Even if in some cases the party that is de facto weaker, is due to a lack of will. So, the "who is the aggressor/who is commiting attrocities" complicates things from a more simplistic underdog model, and there as explained previously even more things beside to add to ones model.
It does seem that the hostility towards the underdog model here is not in favor of a more accurate way that is more flexible to changing realities, but more to promote a more simplistic model that declares certain factions as "good guys", and excuse their actions in a manner that isn't really fitting. In fact, even in WW2, atrocities towards civilians committed by the allies, especially the Soviet Union, matter. Especially when one considers the murderous records of the Soviets against non Germans too. Not only is using WW2 as a card to excuse atrocities today, both morally and factually wrong, it usually comes along views that are incorrect about WW2 itself. Indeed, ironically even the non Soviet allies, if they followed even more along this logic of "can do no wrong" their record would be even closer to Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. Because there were people with such logic back then. That there is some difference, also relates to the existence of some backlash within their societies and the existence of people who didn't follow the logic of "can do no wrong". Like for example the backlash against Morgenthau's plan. And those who expressed such backlash sometimes got heat for it.
I find the use of the definite article here fascinating.
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The Germans and Japanese starving to death weren't POCs. It's that simple.
Decolonization means removing the colonialists. It's that simple.
Technically the Japanese were POC, but Asians have a weird place in the oppression stack.
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