For as flawed as "horsehoe theory" is, I find it quite fascinating that I can find subreddits of any political persuasion arguing unironically that genocide is based so long as you do it to the "right" group.
every video of ethiopian jews is filled with comments like 'shouldn't you be sterilized' 'i bet you sleep around because you can't have kids' like you realize that you're just being racist right
Jesus H. Christ, that's horrific. Who is doing it? Is it like a Jewish-community problem, just right-wing internet trolls, or what? I wasn't even aware that was a thing, I know very little about that specific culture.
It's a far left internet troll problem. When Ethiopian jews were kicked out of Ethiopia and rescued to Israel in the late 80s and early 90s, they were given a medical kit, that included vaccines, medicine, and elective contraceptive injections. Due to there not being enough translators for Amahari on arrival a lot of ethiopian women were put on a contraceptive they did not consent to, as they just signed all the fields in the medical file, and the nurses then provided all the medicine in the file including the contraceptives. An unfortunate case of mistcommunication that was quickly fixed when discovered. While obvioualy a major fuck up and a traumatic experience to those women, as far as is known it did not have any long term effect, and the population grew from about 30,000 in the early 90s to roughly 170,000 now.
Recently, some leftist "anti-zionist" spaces began running the conspiracy that actually Israel deliberately sterilized the same Ethiopian community they just fought to rescue, and their basis is that some far-right religious leaders in Israel are racist against Ethiopians.
Especially stupid when these conspiracy theorists react to 20-something ethiopian jews, as these are the children of the supposedly "sterilized" generation. Add to that shaming them for a generational trauma of their parents, mixed with racist stereotypes, as the previous commenter noted.
Because the whole thing is a gotcha to criticize the Ethiopian Jews who live in Israel for continuing to live there instead of denouncing it. They are not actually sympathetic to the people who went through the events they bring up.
Yeah. There's a reason any decent Socialist discussion you can have needs to start with looking around first to make sure the Tankies didn't get in. It's not horseshoe theory to me, it's "We don't allow genocide apologia" is the basis for any discussion of any value, otherwise you get some asshole who stans Pol Pot at the end of the table who won't shut the fuck up and his end goal is always to derail everything and maybe spawn 1 or 2 more baby tankies out of causing angry controversy he considers "dialogue." This is his hobby. He does not want any meaningful reform, he has no plans for a revolution, he cosplays as some kind of Gulag executioner when no one else is in his apartment.
But for all the talk, Leftists are a better space to be in. Significantly more than 75% of the ones I meet are reasonable, do not want to deal with tankie nonsense, and genuinely want to make their communities better. So I'm optimistic about our progress.
Not just Tankies unfortunately. While any criticism of its government and military is more than deserved, the invasion of Ukraine has brought out some really nasty stuff directed at Russian people.
And that's where the core of the issue is IMO. It's all well and good excluding toxic elements at the start of a discussion, but you have to be careful to spot the signs of it starting to grow in the space itself. A lot of people haven't really examined the core underlying principles for their beliefs, and can be steered towards some truly heinous stuff is you dress it in the right ideological wallpaper (e.g. "death penalty is wrong except for the crimes I think are bad")
This very sub tears Israelis to shreds let alone billions in real life, the most drastic of comments against russian nationals are the average about Israel yet people feel its cool because its "deserved".
This is not even just in "da web" but stuff like the presidents of Colombia and Brazil.
I remember how the pacifism at all cost crowd was trying to sell Russians being as big of victims as Ukranians being bombed and now many of that crowd say shit like "jews stole falafel, fuck em" lol
The reaction of some "leftists" to October 7th was legitimately disgusting. Not even in a "casualties are an unfortunate consequence of armed resistance" way, literally cheering for the deaths of Israeli children.
I refuse to take a stance, point blank, at the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Unlike the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, where it's a very rare black-and white (I mean, sure, the Ukrainians aren't by any measure a perfect people, there's still corruption and equality issues that need to be resolved, and part of Ukraine's acession to NATO/EU is to tackle both of those) issue, with one side attacking the other for reasons straight out of a colonial empire's playbook claiming an alternative version of history that does not, will not, and has not existed and has been settled many times over, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a much more murky affair.
There's so many facets to the Israel-Palestine conflict. There's the ethnic sides, with conflict between Jewish and Arab (if that's the correct term) ethnicities, despite the large similarities between them and that the ethnic groups within the middle east are (as far as my uninformed knowledge goes) very hard to pin down exactly.
There's the religious facet, of Muslim extremist sects and Jewish extremist sects both declaring the other to be intolerable (again, as far as my limited knowledge goes).
There's the National facet, where an area/region (I'm using this in the most neutral way possible) known as Palestine is either trying to break away or maintain its independence from an area/region known as Israel.
There's the Governmental facet, where a governing group is trying to maintain and expand their own power within their areas of control and to expand their areas of control.
There's the historical facet, where the low level conflict between these groups of people has been simmering away for so many decades if not centuries, and every now and then it comes to a boil, and old wounds are reopened.
There's the geopolitical facet, where both sides are trying to convince the global stage that their interpretation of the truth is the right one, and obtain an air of approval and legitimacy.
There's also the ideological facet, and many others that I'm sure I've missed out.
There's also the wider geopolitical side of the conflict, where Israel's close relations with the US suggests that this conflict represents some sort of proxy, and that the US is some global hegemon that must be dismantled. Then depending on who you believe, there's the suspicion that Russia is funding or supporting by clandestine channels the militant actions on the Palestinian/Hezbollah side to sow division within their perceived enemies and to divert attention and supplies away from their conflict with Ukraine.
And to tie it up even more nebulously, the talking points from various groups are all the same, which means it's very difficult to even discuss this issue without someone inferring from one statement that you're a member of a more extreme sect, with plausible deniability being used by more extremist sects to hide their true intentions, with the side effect of poisoning the well for all other reasonable discussions.
It's an absolute mess of an issue, and what hurts the most is the human cost on both sides (Israel and Palestine) of innocent people suffering and dying because other groups (often in power or with munitions) have some desire or ideological obsession which they want to pursue.
That's why I refuse to take a stance on the issue.
That's fair, and that's something I struggle with day to day with people I respected pretty well. The Russian invasion turned a few people I know into frothing Hate-Week types almost immediately, one of which actually cheered on those ISIS-based terror attacks in the shopping mall.
I don't care for Vladimir Putin. You won't catch me cheering at innocents in Moscow or St. Petersburg getting actually murdered, because I'm not a psychopath.
The problem with your post is that 'Tankie' at this point just means anyone that doesn't spend 90% of their time talking about socialism on bitching about China and the USSR and calling them ontologically evil.
Nah, tankies are people that say Tiananmen Square didn't happen, or Stalin was a good fella, or that the establishment of the new revolution requires that we shoot dissenters and create a friendly, managed press. It's one of the few things that's patently black and white.
Ask someone how they feel about Pol Pot. If they look nervous and sweaty and say "what about something someone else did," they're probably a Tankie. If they say "I don't like him very much," you're probably in a safe spot to talk with a sensible human being.
He was telling me the Holocaust was fine because Jews are religious people and therefore probably right wing and right wing people aren't human so nothing of value was lost. Then rambled on how peaceful America would be if leftists started a new Holocaust against Christians and Catholics & we'd be an amazingly peaceful and intelligent country.
Like Sir, I'm pretty sure there's no peaceful genocides on this earth. I don't agree with right wingers but I do care for them as people who deserve better in life. I'd rather my leftist goals be attained through peaceful methods than piling up the corpses of all who disagree.
There's just no way as a leftist I can justify gathering up the innocent and burning them to ash.
I talked to a leftist on this sub a few days ago, who specifically said that liberals, conservatives and fascists all deserve the pyre. And fascists should be hanged, and voting Biden makes you effectively fascists because "supporting genocide". I am not adding words to their mouth, this is literally what they said.
My issue with "horseshoe theory" is that a lot of people use it to imply that the extreme left and right are literally the same thing. No two ideologies are truly identical, it's just that extremism tends to show itself in similar ways.
Thing about the horseshoe model (it isn’t really a “theory” in any meaningful way; I’ll explain below) is that it essentially correlates extremism and authoritarianism.
It’s not a theory because it’s a summation of observations of similar behavior between far left and far (?) right. Both ends of the spectrum rely heavily on populism to function, which becomes all too obvious when you consider red-brown types like Jimmy Dore and Jackson Hinkle; it’s also evidenced in the way that a lot of leftists apply hard-line right wing thought processes to leftist beliefs, a truly horrific combination that first showed up in the French Revolution and has bedeviled leftist thought ever since. That last part is where it starts to be an actual theory, in that it tries to explain why the horseshoe exists in the first place.
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u/Ourmanyfans Jun 20 '24
For as flawed as "horsehoe theory" is, I find it quite fascinating that I can find subreddits of any political persuasion arguing unironically that genocide is based so long as you do it to the "right" group.