this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Today on german reddit (www.reddit.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by HogWild@hexbear.net to c/main@hexbear.net
 

Tl,dr: Today, someone made a post about the game Wolfenstein with the title "Nazis should be shot". People got up in arms, post got deleted, now the centrists agree that the left extremists went too far.

The post in question, translated by me:

Title: Since when has it become normal to openly call for violence?

It's honestly disturbing, how normalised it has become on reddit to ask for humas to be shot in the head. Regardless of where you stand: since when has this become an acceptabke statement?

What really maes me angry is not just the call for violence, but the intellectual hypocrisy behind it.

On one hand, people preach morals, humanism, "never again", peace and historical responsibility. On the other, the dehumanize humans and discuss their killing as a legitimate option. That's not a moral viewpoint, that's factually paradox!

Instead of engaging with the actual point, that calls for violence are always generally problematic, they just evade it. They use historical comparisons with completely different context, extreme scenarios or rethorical tricks. "Violence is not the solution" becomes "You want to stop extremists with nice words". That's not an argument, that is an intentional misrepresentation.

Even more absurd, when past catastrophes are used as justification to use violence today: "We should have been far more strict with them, far earlier" is used as a moral carte blanche to normalize similar thinking patterns today. History doesn't teach that fantasies of violence are legitimate, butn that they lead to Dehumanization.

And that's the problem: He who denies others the right to exist, adapts exactly the thinking pattern he allegedly fights against.

What also annoys me is the aggressive evasion of the topic. They don't argue, but label. They don't discuss, but accuse. They don't differentiate, but load it up morally.

Downvotes do not replace arguments. Historical analogies don't replace logic. And emotion does not replace reason.

I understand that political topics are emotional. But emotion doesn't justify intellectual impurity.

I don't care about party politics. It's about the principle: if we normalize violence as a legitimate answer - even rethorically, then we move the goalposts in a direction we were trying to avoid.

If the simple sentence "Wishing death upon humans is wrong" has become naive, well, then maybe we shouldn't talk about naivete, but how low our discussion culture has fallen.

I'm not angry about an opinion. I'm angry at the illiogical, the ignorance of their own inconsistency and this self-righteous escalatory thinking.

Violence is violence, even if you believe to be on the morally right side.


As you guessed it, the vast majority of replies agrees.

Unfortunately, I can't answer that post personally, as I have been banned from reddit for saying "trans women are women".

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[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I never understood the complete nonviolence people. Yes it's a nice dream but just look at the Ukraine. Should they just give up? Sometimes violence is necessary.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You should examine why you chose Ukraine as an example here rather than Palestine.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 0 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

All very valid examples of defense against an aggressor. Something I see as justified violence. Would you deny that the Ukrainian people defend themselves?

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 6 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Would you deny that the countries supporting Ukraine are the same countries supporting Israel in the genocide of the Palestinian people?

Why isn't the EU sending arms to Palestine so they can defend themselves?

Funny that, right?

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 16 points 23 hours ago

I'm not interested in moralizing negatively against the Ukrainians in this circumstance (besides the Azov types), my complaint is about the government. What do you think about the civil war that preceded the invasion?

[–] Kumikommunism@hexbear.net 11 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

It's not really about individual Ukrainians. Ukraine as a country made the obviously offensive action of trying to join NATO, which Russia warned them against. It's not a neutral action for the US to have military bases all over the world, surrounding countries they deem as "enemies". And thus, they cannot be acting "defensively". And they probably aren't even going to get to join now.

Communists almost unanimously agree that the victims of war are the proletariat in all the countries involved. (Except for those who profit from imperialism like the US)

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 12 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

They aren't complete non-violence. They support every single bit of violence enacted against those they deem undesirable, whether it is at home or abroad.

They oppose violence by proletarians. They support violence by the bourgeoisie. It's as simple as that. They pretend this is non-violence when in reality it is just anti-proletarian.

[–] WokePalpatine@hexbear.net 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Christopher Caudwell's book Studies In A Dying Culture and the chapter on Pacifism is really good and discusses this.

There is not much left of importance in bourgeois ethics. Chastity, sobriety, salvation and cleanliness have ceased to be topics on which the bourgeois feels very deeply. There is, in fact, only one issue on which the bourgeois conscience is to-day warmed into activity. Pacifism, always latent in the bourgeois creed, has now crystallised out as almost the only emotionally-charged belief left in Protestant Christianity or in its analogue, bourgeois ‘idealism’.

I call it a distinctively bourgeois doctrine, because I mean by pacifism, not the love of peace as a good to be secured by a definite form of action, but the belief that any form of social constraint of others or any violent action is in itself wrong, and that violence such as war must be passively resisted because to use violence to end violence would be logically self-contradictory. I oppose pacifism in this sense to the Communist belief that the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force.

But modern war is also distinctively bourgeois. Struggles such as the last war arise from the unequal Imperialist development of the bourgeois powers, and earlier wars of bourgeois culture were also fought for aims characteristic of bourgeois economy or, like the wars of the infant Dutch republic, represented the struggles of the growing bourgeois class against feudal forces. In its last stage of Fascism, when capitalism, throwing off the democratic forms which no longer serve its purpose, rules with open violence, bourgeois culture is also seen as aggressively militant. Are we Marxists then simply using labels indiscriminately when we class as characteristically bourgeois, both militancy and pacifism, meekness and violence?

No, we are not doing so, if we can show that we call bourgeois not all war and not all pacifism but only certain types of violence, and only certain types of non-violence; and if, further, we can show how the one fundamental bourgeois position generates both these apparently opposed viewpoints. We did the same thing when we showed that two philosophies which are apparently completely opposed – mechanical materialism and idealism – were both characteristically bourgeois, and both generated by the one bourgeois assumption.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1935/pacifism-violence.htm

[–] WokePalpatine@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago

Radlibs got pegged and called out in 1938.

This ‘revolutionary’ liberal, this hater of coercion and violence, this lover of free competition, this friend of liberty and human rights, is therefore the very man damned by history not merely to be powerless to stop these things, but to be forced by his own efforts to produce coercion and violence and unfair competition and slavery. He does not merely refrain from opposing bourgeois violence, he generates it, by helping on the development of bourgeois economy.

To-day, as the bourgeois pacifist, he helps to generate the violence, war, and Fascist and Imperialist brutality he hates. In so far as he is a genuine pacifist and not merely a completely muddled man hesitating between the paths of revolution and non-co-operation, his thesis is this, ‘I hate violence and war and social oppression, and all these things are due to social relations. I must therefore abstain from social relations. Belligerent and revolutionary alike are hateful to me.’

But to abstain from social relations, is to abstain from life. As long as he draws or earns an income, he participates in bourgeois economy, and upholds the violence which sustains it. He is in sleeping partnership with the big bourgeoisie, and that is the essence of bourgeois economy. If two other countries are at war, he is powerless to intervene and stop them, for that means social co-operation – social co-operation issuing in coercion, like a man separating quarrelling friends and that action is by his definition barred to him. If the big bourgeoisie of his own country decide to go to war and mobilise the coercive forces, physical and moral, of the State, he can do nothing real, for the only real answer is co-operation with the proletariat to resist the coercive action of the big bourgeoisie and oust them from power. If Fascism develops, he cannot suppress it in the bud before it has built up an army to intimidate the proletariat, for he believes in ‘free speech’. He can only watch the workers being bludgeoned and beheaded by the forces he allowed to develop.

His position rests firmly on the bourgeois fallacy. He thinks that man as an individual has power. He does not see that even in the unlikely event of everyone’s taking his viewpoint and saying, ‘I will passively resist,’ his purpose will still not be achieved. For men cannot in fact cease to co-operate, because society’s work must be carried on – grain must be reaped, clothes spun, electricity generated or man will perish from the earth. Only his position as a member of a parasitic class could have given him any other illusion.

[–] booty@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Should they just give up?

Go there yourself or shut the fuck up. Who are you to insist that the people of another country futilely fight to the last man from the comfort of your home? Go fight.

[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I don't insist that they continue the fight, I just see their fight as self-defense and therefore just.

[–] InappropriateEmote@hexbear.net 10 points 20 hours ago

Yeah, all those civilians press-ganged into white vans to be made to die as canon fodder on the frontlines, they sure do insist on fighting! It has nothing to do with the gun to their back that will kill them if they try to go back home. And it sure is a just war they're fighting against that eeevil Russia who ~~invaded out of nowhere because they're big meanies~~ entered into a civil war already going on in Ukraine where literal fascist militias with full government backing, support, and high military direction were killing civilians in the east and helping Ukraine conduct an ethnic cleansing of it's eastern population.

You have no clue what any of this is about. Ukraine should stop fighting, and it shouldn't have fought to begin with. If it hadn't been literal neo nazis empowered by an anti-democractic coup government that started shelling Ukraine's Donbas ("their own people"), murdering civilians, burning trad unionists alive by the scores, etc., then Russia would never have had to intervene. Fortunately, the fascist government in Ukraine never stood a chance long term (or even short term, if Russia had so chose) chance against Russia, even with Ukraine's forced conscription and obscene gobs of funding from the US and Europe. The sooner the fighting stops, the sooner Ukrainians - many of whom have zero desire to fight let alone die for what they know is a bullshit war - will keep getting turned into pink mist. This doesn't even get into how it actually would have ended years ago through peace deals if the fucking interfering US/EU who would not tolerate a deal, particularly through Boris fucking Johnson, hadn't insisted Ukrainians had to keep dying for the sake of western bourgois interests.

Whatever avenues you get your "news" through have been filling your head with bullshit propaganda and your understanding of the situation is significantly worse than if you had never even heard the word "Ukraine."

[–] CitizensTyrant@hexbear.net 12 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

You seem to lack an understanding of what exactly lead to the current situation in Ukraine and what the war actually is.