hopefully i don't get called a lib for this but i have been feeling quite a bit of uncertainty when it comes to Jewish people who have been indoctrinated into Zionism and Americans , and partially people from other western nations , who have either due to economic distress or due to indoctrination joined the military . don't get me wrong both are absolutely privileged , especially those Jewish people who live in occupied Palestine , however i feel that they aren't fully responsible for their harmful beliefs . of course this doesn't excuse acting on their beliefs , but from testimonies of people who have rid themselves of those beliefs its not an easy thing to do (i have been particularly affected by Matt Leib's , of the BadHasbara podcast , comparison between fighting off his heroin addiction and his Zionism) .
they are of course not the people who are most victimised , however i feel somewhat uneasy about blaming them for not doing the work of deindoctrinating themselves , especially as , especially those who joined the American military , they are really mistreated . a lot of propaganda is explicitly about making those who benefit from the ideology maintained by it to feel unsafe , therefore , in their minds , justifying violent actions .
like this mostly matters for those who are on the path if deindoctrinating themselves , even if they themselves have not realised that yet , for example a ex military member who is struggling with trauma over actions they made in while deployed or someone who has been raised in a Israeli settlement questioning the morality of living there , beyond the usual labor Zionist stuff . i definetly don't think that , sorry for the extreme example , someone who relives pressing down the trigger of a sniper riffle and the bloody effects of what happened after , especially if they were aware then or were made aware later that the person they killed was a noncombatant , that their actions were wrong . i think that helping them towards the realisation that its a wider issue is the better option .
like this isn't very well put together but like just wanted to throw this out and have someone say if i'm not insane or just the usual over empathic stuff .
on language
feel free to replace each usage of "person" with "entity" , i wanted to make this more readable to those outside the ΘΔ space
Might be the wrong question. I recall sharing a bluesky thread on here some time ago, where a person talked about the history of the last emperor of China and how the communists reformed him (not while he was an emperor, after they had power). This isn't to say reform will always work or is always the right choice, but in China's case, it showed what the program was capable of in bringing people around.
In an actual war scenario where you don't hold the power, it's probably just going to be "peaceful protest" silliness to think you can reform those in power (though you can still impact footsoldiers in the war, maybe more so if they are conscripts). But once you do have the power, the landscape can change drastically in that way. Now you're in charge of the propaganda engines and the normality of how the society functions.
Note that I've not said what's moral because I'm not sure that's really the important part here. The important part is the strategic success of liberation, decolonization, etc. Some moralizing will happen within that and some moralizing drives the motive to be in favor of those things. But ultimately, you have a need to succeed or else people suffer greatly. Whether everyone in the way of that truly deserves some kind of punishment in a moralistic sense is more about what is going to define the forces of liberation as a new society, and what is going to keep the power in their hands, than it is about what those individuals deserve.
There's a trope in liberal storytelling that goes something like: Oppressed group takes power or tries to take power, but they also agonize over how they go about it because if they do it the "wrong way", they will be "just as bad as their oppressor." Sometimes they make a pivotal decision that is merciful and this is supposed to make them stand out as moral compared to who they're fighting against. The problem with this is it ignores the conditions of oppression and simplifies it to discerning who is in the right based on individualistic morality, which gets into all the stuff about the "perfect victim" vs. not. It's a worldview that believes abuse of power is fundamental to possessing power, like a morality meter in a video game, rather than a product of other, more complicated factors. And that the only way to guard against this is to dilute power as much as possible (which can then lead people to a kind of anarchism worldview). I forget why I brought up this point and I'm spacing out on finishing it out, so I'll leave it here rather than try to hamfist a connection to the rest of what I said.
Edit: I think maybe the reason I thought of it was that how the new society acts on a moral level does matter, but it's not all-defining and somehow flips the dynamic into them as oppressor if they cross an invisible threshold of "bad version of liberation" like how liberal storytelling does it. A colonized people liberating from colonizers doesn't become colonizers if they are mean in how they liberate. It's just not how these things are defined as systems.
I agree mistakes will be made and moralism can't go on forever before intervention occurs.
I think power absolutely can and does corrupt, etc, especially if held too long by the same people. People in power positions should be rotated out to labor positions, and especially into the lowest paid physical positions, for a proscribed time. They can choose construction, beautification, service and hospitality with the same opportunities afforded to everyone else who do these jobs. And everyone who do these jobs should be afforded educational opportunities as available to any perceived elites, even if remedial education is necessary, prior.