Sympathy for their PTSD
Sympathy for their PTSD
One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People’s liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don’t want to loose sight of humanity just because you’re committing atrocity.
I know that another driving force for the gas chambers was to preserve ammunition.
The earliest versions of gas chambers were essentially "piping truck exhaust into a building." They moved on from that in order to preserve metal (from the piping), fuel, and vehicles for other purposes.
They did it throughout the war and not merely at the start? So weird that there's photographic and video evidence of people being gassed in buildings then.
Edit - Here's evidence that the Germans used chambers (often called "showers") from 1941 onwards:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
While I'm sure vans were still used for their mobility/convenience and in cases where not many people were to be executed, Germany created extermination camps specifically to kill people (in more ways than just gassing) and those locations contained constructed buildings meant for execution with gas, not vans.
Even a few concentration camps had their own gas chambers, which were not vans, that were used to execute people that could no longer do forced labour.
Holy Shit Dude.
When extermination methods were tested to relieve the Einsatzgruppen which had up to that point in the war been shooting people close up, by hand, gas vans were used. As tests. Until Zyklon B was introduced.
I don’t know what you’re on, but it is a historic fact that before the gas chambers were used, gas vans were a method of murder.
Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets
Remember the amount of suffering a single human can help to alleviate is finite. You can’t save everyone, and you absolutely can kill yourself in attempting to save everyone. War is bigger than any one person, and there is a point where you have done what you can do and you have to make peace with that
I am so sorry for what you’re going through, and for what my country (the US) is paying for. But please don’t begrudge yourself a small break. You can’t help others if you can’t even stand up.
I’m so, so sorry. I wish our politicans would listen when we tell them to stop this madness.
was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
Yeah, they’ve really got PTSD from what they do. /s
Give me a fucking break.
I’m actually speechless.
I hope this guy suffers until his end.
He offed himself because he was about to get sent back out to do it again and apparently the IDF were gonna refuse burial because he was a chicken shit that didn’t want to squeeze the organs out of more children.
Some other people need to suffer from this story than the ones actually suffering.
Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.
Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they’re doing this because they think they’re the good guys/helping out.
We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel’s parliament that’s enabling this.
But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you’re trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it’s difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it’s not until you’re finished with your tour and you’re back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.
Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don’t humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.
There’s no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity was by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they’re all human, or we risk repeating history.
They made a choice, do not absolve people of what they are doing and continue to do, especially if its fucking genocide, that’s literally how these things happen as well as the Holocaust.
At some point, people have to stand up and say no, voice their concerns, and just simply do the right thing
How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.
Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.
Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.
Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.
I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.
the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so
Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.
Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.
Nah, you’re wasting your time I’m afraid. All supposed morals, righteousness, and outrage immediately go out the window when they can point to something bad a person has done.
And for the record, yes, what the person in the article did is abhorrent. It’s also not remotely surprising that it would fuck him up afterwards. But if you’re celebrating him taking his own life, you’re not any better at all.
You can preach empathy all you want, but your words reek of defense of an ongoing genocide. Would you do the same during the Holocaust?
“Oh hey sorry for the genocide but we need to have empathy for these Nazi soldiers so let them keep doing what they do.”
Straight garbage dude.
so let them keep doing what they do
Why would that be implied by anything I said?
I’m pretty sure they did.
Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic […] Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.
Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them “terrorists in their hundreds”. Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.
For many soldiers, the war against Hamas in Gaza is a fight for Israel’s survival and must be won by any means. But the battle is also taking a mental toll that, due to stigma, is largely hidden from view.
How naive of me to think “That can’t be a real article. Surely they wouldn’t publish themselves saying they crushed living and dead people by the hundreds with an armored bulldozer. They must know how abhorrent, insane, and shocking that sounds. Right?”
No. Of course the worst excesses of violence which had never crossed my mind are being done by the IDF. I’m… I have no words.
Complaining about how they don’t want to eat meat because it reminds them of fucking running over live people with a fucking bulldozer!
The dude killed himself because he was about to be sent back out and the IDF even was gonna refuse him a military funeral because he didn’t commit hard enough to genocide. While his family says he obviously wouldn’t have killed anyone cause he was a good boy.
Fuck all this. Fuck this bullshit take on how hard it is for the soldiers and CNN should maybe focus on how obviously evil the IDF and Israel is acting.
reminds me of this bit:
“not only will america go to your country and kill all your people but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
This is misinformation. The text in the sharepic is altered. Link to the original article. Original text:
“It’s very long,” he said, and it is urban, which means soldiers fight among many people, “the vast majority of them are civilians.”
Bulldozer operators are among those who are most directly exposed to the war’s brutality, Bregman said. “What they see is dead people, and they clear them (along) with the debris,” he told CNN. “They go over them.”
For many soldiers, the war against Hamas in Gaza is a fight for Israel’s survival and must be won by any means. But the battle is also taking a mental toll that, due to stigma, is largely hidden from view.
For many soldiers, the war against Hamas in Gaza is a fight for Israel’s survival and must be won by any means. But the battle is also taking a mental toll that, due to stigma, is largely hidden from view.
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the porgrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was aet up so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.