this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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The Israeli Jew is now a victim?
what
the people committing the genocide in gaza... has anyone thought about them and their feelings today?!
A people as a whole cannot be responsible for a crime, because there will always be members who did not have a say in committing it (children at the very least, and realistically some adults will object too). Stopping the genocide is a good thing, holding the decision makers accountable and doing what can reasonably be done to prevent another is a good thing, but holding another in retribution for the first one would not be.
This is not true.
When a sufficiently large part of a society goes along with mass high crimes such as genocide it is reasonable to collectively blame the whole of society.
I can't speak for Israel, but if you look at say russia, a strong majority (at the very least) are openly committed to genocidal imperialism and an overwhelming majority (~84%) are openly supportive of imperialism.
People come up with lazy arguments such as "they are all afraid!!!", when preference falsification can be measured and it's not a good result for the russians. A small minority falsify their preferences with respect to open support for genocide, but when it comes to imperialism (e.g. annexation if Crimea) preference falsification is literally at 1% or so for a totally adjustment from 85% to 84%.
I honestly don't know much about Israeli public opinion research, but I wouldn't be surprised to find damning results.
No. If 85% of a group is guilty of something, then to say that whole group is guilty, would obviously be false, because 85 is simply not equal to 100. If I round up a group of 99 murders, and stick you in a room with them, that does not suddenly mean that you are a murderer because "the people in that room collectively are murders". Otherwise, literally everyone is, because I can simply define a group of people that includes mostly people that have committed horrible crimes, plus any given person, and now that person is a "murderer", and I can rinse and repeat until everyone has been so grouped.
No, I disagree. You may think you are approaching this from a humanistic point of view, but your analogy clearly shows that you haven't thought this through.
A more correct form of your analogy would be to recognize that while 15 people in the room may not publicly condone murder, all their actions (such as paying taxes to support the other 85 murderers, promoting the legitimacy of the 85 murderers and their ideology) results in enabling the actions of the murderers.
This sort of sophomoric, faux-"humanistic" thinking is extremely common among those who are lucky enough to not have been on the recieving end of a genocidal society.
I had to listen to such (polite) arguments for 8 years (between 2014 and 2022) from close foreign friends (not randoms, they've lived in russia/Ukraine and speak local languages, so they have real world experience beyond abstract 100 murderers in a room thought experiments).
Of course after the full scale invasion, they gained a new appreciation for my arguements and worldview.
I don't think you've considered all the implications of what I said. Even something like "the rest of the people in society pay taxes, which fund the government that does the crime, therefore everyone in that society is responsible", does not work, because even that isn't going to be true for any society in the real world. If you want an extreme case, consider a literal child, suppose it's an Israeli toddler, for the sake of argument. It's very clear what society this person belongs to, they've not had the time or knowledge or ability to move to another one. It's also blatantly obvious that they can't have done anything, even some indirect thing like voting for a particular politician or taking a job at an involved company, to further the genocide, since they're quite literally incapable of being responsible for virtually anything. Any real world "people", society, ethnic group, whatever other similar grouping is going to have such members, and if it is physically impossible for those members to be responsible for something, it naturally follows that any statement that everyone in that group is responsible for some crime, has to be wrong.
People who have personal experience with something like a genocide, or defensive war, or similar attack, are exactly the wrong sort of people to ask about this. That might sound like a strange statement, but those sorts of situations force the targeted group to fight or die, and under those circumstances it makes pragmatic sense to dehumanize one's enemy somewhat. Violence has collateral damage, and in a fight for survival you cannot afford to hesitate to consider who exactly has done what, or linger in self doubt over if everyone your defense or counterack hits was deserving. People in such a case virtually have to adopt an attitude of guilt by default towards anyone they perceive as being on the other side, and that is understandable. However, a position being understandable or pragmatic is not the same thing as it being true, and continuing to dehumanize a group even after the fight has ended loses it's pragmatic value and can lead to more suffering. The original context of this argument was a hypothetical expulsion of Israelis to other countries. If one was in a position to do this, one would have to first be in a position to end the genocide going on against Palestine in the first place, at which point, the reason to set aside their humanity to facilitate resisting them would be over as well, they would already be defeated.
What exactly didn't I think through? You came up with a pretty convoluted example about 85 murderers that was honestly didn't communicate your point very well.
The baby example is better, it's much clearer and more impactful than the analogy with 85 murderers and some other people in a room.
But my question to you is; beyond the emotional component of bringing a toddler into the discussion, what is your argument here?
Are you saying that because I believe that russian society as whole (due to decades of research and well, historical facts in the last ~30 years) is responsible for the genocidal imperialism of their country I also think that we should be running polls to prove that a strong majority of russian toddlers support the invasion of Ukraine? The toddler discussion is a red herring and you know it.
The end result of your toddler polemic is that the existence of toddlers in russia means that russians society should never reflect on the choices they make, they should not (and cannot) take responsibility for their actions and in all cases they are absolved of any support for their genocidal actions, all because russian toddlers exist.
You are not doing the russians (including russian toddlers) any favours by playing along with their victimhood narratives and giving cover for their worst instincts. They invade a region of the country, start mass summary execution of civilians in occupied territories, using castration as a routine form of torture of POWs, siege multiple cities to dust, keep 10 of thousands of civilians in concentration camps, steal hundreds of thousands of children - and then comes and CarbonIceDragon and says:
"No, this is all just a coincidence or bad luck. This has nothing to do with russian society. 85% of the population (even with adjustments for preference falsification) supporting the annexation of Crimea (across half a decade of polling) is irrelevant and should be ignored."
Do you think this sort of attitude is beneficial for the future well being of your russian toddler? Be honest.
You bring up "dehumanization". Are you sure I am the one who is engaging dehumanization?
The reason I ask is that to me you are engaging in infantilization of russian society. I am showing them a measure of respect by recognizing that they hold responsibility for their actions and they are not a nation of 150 million toddlers. I am saying they have agency and choice and they can handle people evaluating their behaviour.
It goes both ways. Having no connection/knowledge to a region is the slam dunk of impartiality that you think it is.
The toddler thing wasn't a red herring at all. It was extreme case reasoning. I didn't even suggest the toddler was Russian or that the line or reasoning I was using only applies to certain places, so unless you think that I wish to infantilize literally every person in existence, using that example wasn't that either.
The point I was trying to make with it was simply that societies (as a whole), are fundamentally, definitionally I'd even say, incapable of making choices. This is because societies are not people. They are made up of people, but a society is not a person unto itself.
A society isn't even really an organization, because it has no mechanism for collective decision making. There are often organizations associated with a society, such as governments, but these do not have perfect overlap as not everyone in a societypeople generally be subject to the one associated with that society, nor do their decisions often align perfectly with those of many of the people within that society, nor do all societies even have one (if you wish to use Russia as the example, there are Russians that live outside the jurisdiction of the Russian state, Russians that disagree with, actively fight against, or simply do not know about that state, and for that matter people from other societies that do live within the jurisdiction of that state.)
What societies are is simply a box to sort people into, because people think in terms of labels. The nature of human psychology is such that we need to put everything, even ourselves and others, into various boxes, to understand who we are and what everyone and everything around us is. I bring up dehumanization though, because humans do not fit perfectly, into any of these, and insisting that the boxes do describe people perfectly dehumanizes them. It strips them of their individual differences and declares that anyone who can be fit in a certain box, is interchangeable with another who does. Insisting that a society can be responsible for something does just this, it ignores what any individual person has or has not done and reduces them to merely what language they speak or what culture they're associated with or what set of arbitrary lines on a map they were born inside.
If Russia is to be the example, then I can use a personal one: I have a childhood friend from Russia. He hasn't lived there since around elementary school age, but he was born there, has a mother who grew up there, speaks the language, used to visit family there (for obvious reasons he hasn't been back in quite a number of years, but still). He considers himself Russian still, and ticks enough of the boxes that I'd imagine most people would accept that. Am I to go to him, ask him "Why did you invade Ukraine?" and then demand he face some kind of penalty? What was he supposed to have done differently? all, he hadn't any say in the decision to seize Crimea and then invade the rest of Ukraine, he's never served in Russia's military or sent them aid, never worked their factories or even any kind of job there.
If 85 percent of Russians have done something worthy of punishment, or Israelis, or Americans, or Chinese or any other group of people you can think of, and you have the means, then by all means, punish that 85 percent. But why does the responsibility of those people transfer onto the other 15 percent? Because it is logistically easier than trying to figure out what each individual person has done?
If I can say "the people invading Ukraine are Russians, therefore Russian society is to blame and every Russian person can be punished" or "the people conducting a genocide in Gaza are Israelis, therefore Israeli society is to blame and every Israeli can be punished" (like the original post was talking about and which I disagreed with), can I also say "The people invading Ukraine are humans, therefore human society is to blame and every human person can be punished"? If not, is it because that box is too big, and includes people who are not involved? And if so, why can I not then say that about the Russian box, and insist on choosing instead the box that contains only the people actually responsible, even if the latter box should the majority of the former? If having the majority of the bigger box
I know that I'm not really very good at getting my points across, the frustration of that is why I tend to take hours responding to things, trying to phrase what I'm trying to say in different ways in the hope that at least one of them is clear to any given person, but this is one of those things that just seems so fundamental and blatantly obvious to me that I honestly struggle to understand how it is even possible to disagree with it, let alone to appear to take offense to it somehow (at least, that is the tone I get from some of your replies).
... are you alright?
bringing much needed diversity of opinion to whatever this circle jerk is.
It reads like all you're contributing is a series of non-sequiturs.
The brain bin they're from must be admined by Abbey Normal.
I always took it to mean that the brain in question had been binned.