this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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I put human lives over political ideologies, and I'm pretty alone with that.
I'm a pacifist to the point that I'm opposed to the concept of "self defense" on a national level.
If someone tries to kill you, by all means defend yourself.
But this concept doesn't translate to groups of millions of people, killing each other for years over who's in charge.
Interesting. What do you think Ukraine should do then if not fight back against the Russian invasion?
What India did against the British – sabotage all Russian-led businesses in Ukraine, and refuse to cooperate with the occupiers.
It would lead to a great deal of suffering for Ukrainians, but the alternative against which this would have to be measured is the current war – with close to one million dead, several million displaced, and no resolution in sight anywhere.
Well Putin for sure would be happy if Ukraine would choose this path. He's quite used to brutally squash dissidents. Russia also has absolutely no qualm to disperse a group throughout their country to destroy their cultural identity. They are already doing so with the Ukrainian children they've kidnapped.
So sorry, but your proposal seems to be really naiv and not taking into account how fucking brutal Putin's Russia is to people stepping even slightly out of line.
Pacifists are always confronted with this criticism. Every time:
"This war is different. This war is justified, cause this attacker is truly evil. We need to stop this evil guy by all means necessary, even if it completely destroys the country we're trying to defend and kills an entire generation of its inhabitants."
I'm not naive, at all. I have no illusions about Russia. I just believe there is no option available that will save Ukraine, and war is always the worst option available. No matter how justified it was in the beginning, in the end all that's left is war.
Two things can be true:
We don't get to live in a world where doing the right thing is always simple and easy, or even a good option.
There is no peaceful discussion with fascism, the only language it understands is violence.
I'll shut up about it if a fascist movement has ever once been stopped by talk.
Sure wish we could put you in front of a long line of Ukrainian bereaved so you can tell them their family's deaths weren't the act of an evil man.
I wonder how many of them will spit in your face.
Putin ordered a false flag strike that killed russian grandmothers just to propel himself into office. He IS evil and your bullshit both sidesism deserves to be slapped out of your brain.
Your comment has nothing to do with what I wrote.
But yeah, I'd rather have Ukrainians spit in my face than go to war.
I'd rather be killed by Russians than go to war, for that matter.
It seems you have been so privileged to grow up in a country where mortal violence is not a pressing threat.
There are people in the world that would gladly kill you for your shoes, or for fun, or even for sexual pleasure.
What do you do when one of those people target you or your family?
There is no reasoning with them, there is no reaction except to run or fight.
Pooty poot sent orcs to kill Ukrainian civilians, the elderly, women, children. There are tens of thousands of people who will never see their families again, would any amount of talking or self-sacrifice stop them if they were breaking into your family house?
You have every right to choose to be a pacifist, and I guess there is some degree of self-satisfaction to it, but pacifism will not stop an violent madman if he chooses to target you or someone you love.
I defend myself and my family, with deadly force if necessary.
But as I said in another comment, war isn't self defense. It's defense of the nation, which is something completely different, although nationalists like to pretend it's the same.
What exactly do you think would have happened if the Ukrainian army had met the orcs with flowers and soft words?
What will stop Russia from doing the same to more countries?
The same thing that lead to the decolonization of almost all countries that were once occupied - it's neither possible nor profitable to rule over a populace that hates you and doesn't identify themselves as subjects to your rule in the long term.
And next up on the Disney Channel: The fall of the bad man because teh peepo don’t like him.
Ah, so we should just let them attack countries until the internal problems get too big and the empire falls from within? And those countries should just suck it up in the meantime?
Look, I have no good solution for this. No one has, the currently accepted solution is killing millions until the problem disappears behind the problems caused by the war.
I'm not telling anyone or any country what to do. I'm just saying, I won't ever support or participate in any war, defensive or otherwise.
No, the currently accepted solution is defending yourself against an invading force. Ukraine isn't killing people to solve the problem, they are killing them to stop themselves from being killed.
And what if your solution doesn't work? What if Russia just expands and the current regime stays in power? You'll take away the sovereignty of possibly generations of people, and continually condemning more and more to the same fate, until maybe things collapse. And even then you have no guarantee that whatever comes after the collapse is, in any way, better.
There's a quote on this topic that puts this into words better than I can:
So you admit your position doesn't solve anything.
Name one example from the past 110 years where war actually achieved the goal the "good guys" had before it started.
The Western intervention in Kosovo.
World War 2 is the most recent I can think of
Edit: Desert Storm
Hitler would have been perfectly fine erasing people and cultures from existence too. I mean, the Jews weren’t the only people who were going in the camps to die. Once he was finished there, nothing would have stopped him from erasing the next group of people from the planet.
I would imagine that some of the very people who ran the camps were next in line even.
My point was that the Jews wouldn’t have been the final target of the Nazis. They wouldn’t have stopped and held Arian hands in a circle dancing around a fire celebrating peace.
Like the point you made earlier about ruling over people who hate you and how hard that would be. It wouldn’t have been a struggle for the Nazis because they wouldn’t have just ruled over them. They would have executed and replaced them.
The goal in India wasn’t to eradicate the population, it was to subjugate the population. That’s brutal too, but not killing on an industrial scale bad.
I, like you, would not fight in a war. I will defend my little space with my little family with violence if I have to, but I won’t be violent on behalf of anyone else.
I wish everyone on the planet would think like you do, but they don’t, unfortunately.
World War 2 didn’t prevent the eradication of the Jews in Europe, though.
Only a few thousand who didn’t manage to flee survived.
It also didn’t prevent the destruction of an entire generation of men in the Soviet Union.
It didn’t bring about lasting peace, nor democracy. At its end, the next dictatorship was already on the rise.
Oh, and it killed 85 million people, 3% of the global population.
Any alternative result of non-intervention would have to be really fucking awful to be worse than that.
So the goal of the coalition was that Kuwait is ruled by a dictator the US liked instead of one they didn't like, the Kurds were massacred and millions of them displaced, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and a budding popular freedom movement in Iraq crushed by Saddam Hussein?
The goal of World War 2 was to expel an invading army from occupied countries. The goal of Desert Storm was the same. Desert Storm didn't overthrow Saddam, that was years later in the Iraq war
If that was truly the goal, then 85 million people died over which man is in charge, and nothing else.
No, expelling an army is always just a means to reach your goal, cause the army stands between you and control over the people.
I mean yes. What are you saying it was about?
Slavery in the USA South disagrees with that. It was very possible and profitable. It would have continued but armed conflict ended that.
The issue is the popularity of tribalism. A lot of people see an attack on people they "identify" with as an attack on themselves.
Tell me you 19 years old, without telling me your 19 years old...
I'm old enough to have talked to people who experienced WW1, as an adult.
You can be 19 and still talk to people who experienced WW1...
If you're 19 and had a meaningful conversation with people who experienced WW1 as an adult, those people would have to be at least 113 years old and still mentally fit.
In my case it was my grandma who hacked off the hand of a home intruder with a fire axe and threw it in a nearby river cause there was no police you could call in 1918.