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.
Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
i sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life
d00ery@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
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.
Fosheze@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Wait… He crushed HUNDREDS of people with a bulldozer in less than 6 months‽ What the actual fuck.
jonne@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
Yeah, the IDF bombed buildings, then the bulldozers came in to clear the streets so the tanks could go through. At no point was anyone allowed to try to rescue anyone from the rubble, and those people are definitely not counted in the official death statistics. We’ll never really know how many people were killed.
Tyfud@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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
kmaismith@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
You are arguing for the dehumanization of the people of Israel. Dehumanizing the enemy is a reprehensible thing to do no matter the side no matter the conflict
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No Im not. You are defending the ongoing dehumanization of the people of Palestine.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
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.
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.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
Soulg@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.