Microsoft? The company owned by famous pedophile William Henry Gates III?

It’s a “yes, but” kind of situation. Israel absolutely funded and promoted Hamas with the idea that it would be a counterbalance to the secular PLO and cause infighting, but what ended up happening is Fatah and the Palestinian Authority became (by and large) willing compradors, while Hamas not only remained a resistance movement, but moderated their views over time.

The original Hamas charter was basically boilerplate antisemitism, blaming the Jews for the French Revolution, the Freemasons, and so-on, and stated explicitly that their fight was with the Jews. The updated charter of 2017 is completely different, in form and content the charter of a secular national liberation movement. The new charter rejects the idea that their struggle is with the Jewish people, but with the Zionist project. They still maintain Islamic framing, of course (“In the name of Allah, the most merciful”, etc.), but the actual content of their rhetoric is that of secular national liberation. They’re likewise allied with and have the support of secular resistance groups.

I shall not continue in this Socratic dialogue if you continue to ignore my arguments.

No problem. I figure at this point we can merge these two discussions into the same thread, so I won’t respond to your post in the Australia thread.

The thing is, you’re assuming a reasonable Israel that simply doesn’t exist, and you’re assuming that Hamas, PIJ, etc. also carry this assumption. But they don’t! They have, and had, a much clearer view of the situation and of Israel’s nature than you do. They knew prior to October 7th that Israel’s long-term plan was the expulsion of all Palestinians and the annexation of all of Palestine. The West Bank settlements continued to expand, and Gaza remained under siege. At the same time, all of the middle eastern comprador states were moving towards normalization of relations with Israel.

Their strategic calculus was that they had to make a move before it was too late - the status quo had to be disrupted, because the status quo meant the slow and total dissolution of the West Bank, reducing Palestine to Gaza alone, which Israel could continue to isolate and slice up at will. So, they made their move. I don’t think they expected Israel’s response would be anywhere near as extreme as it was, but they had tried the peaceful option - in 2018, the IDF responded to the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations in the Great March of Return with gunfire - live ammunition.

Israel did not deny that they responded to the protests with live fire, rather a senior IDF officer claimed that most of the deaths were unintentional, caused by ricochets or protesters suddenly bending over while the snipers had targeted their legs. (Haaretz) I’ll reiterate that, they responded to a peaceful protest by having snipers shoot demonstrators in the legs. 183 were killed total, including 35 children, 2 members of the press, and 3 health workers. 4 IDF troops were injured by thrown rocks. The statistics do show that the majority of the injuries were to the legs, with 4903 of the 6103 injuries from live ammunition being to the lower limbs, not including the 1576 injuries from bullet fragmentation, (UNHCR Report) but there is absolutely no way to justify firing live ammunition into a peaceful demonstration, full stop. “Shooting in the legs” is sometimes touted as something the police should do rather than killing someone, but a firearm should only be used in life-or-death situations, and if you are able to shoot someone in the leg rather than the center of mass, shooting is not justified. This is only amplified by the fact that the IDF soldiers were in no danger. Actually, it’s much more likely that the shooting of people’s legs was punitive. They blew people’s legs off for daring to approach the border wall - the Palestinian side of the border wall mind you, so it isn’t as if they had crossed any “border.” I’ll enclose a few quotes from the above linked report below, highlighting the incidents:

Israeli forces injured a schoolgirl (13) with bullet fragmentation. As she lay on the ground, four men attempted to evacuate her. The forces shot three of them, killing Marwan Qudieh (45) from Khuzaa village and injuring a potato seller and another man in the legs. One of the rescuers had to have a leg amputated.

Maryam (16), a schoolgirl from Rafah, was shot in the leg by Israeli forces as she stood with a small group of girls waving Palestinian flags, approximately 50 m from the separation fence.

Alaa, a member of the Palestinian cycling team, was shot by Israeli forces in the leg as he stood holding his bicycle, wearing his cycling kit, watching the demonstrations, approximately 300 m from the separation fence. His right leg had to be amputated, ending his cycling career.

Israeli forces shot Mohammad (17), a student athlete, in the back of his right leg as he gave onions to demonstrators to relieve tear-gas symptoms, approximately 300 m from the fence. His leg had to be amputated.

Israeli forces shot Yousef, a student journalist, in the legs with two bullets in immediate succession. He was wearing a blue vest marked “Press” while photographing the demonstrations approximately 800 m from the separation fence. His right leg had to be amputated.

The above incidents are by no means an exhaustive list - remember, there were 4,903 leg injuries from live ammunition over the course of the protests. There were also plenty of people shot in the head, 70 fatally, over the course of the demonstrations, and I am not inclined to believe that all of those were accidental. Here’s an example of one of the shots to the head (one of the non-fatal ones):

Israeli forces shot a schoolboy (16) in the face as he distributed sandwiches to demonstrators, 300m from the separation fence. His hearing is now permanently impaired.

These incidents establish that maiming with live ammunition was a specific policy of the IDF during the 2018 Gaza protests, and that fatalities were a perfectly acceptable consequence of that. Before October 7th, it was a common sight in Gaza to see someone limping around on crutches, having had their legs amputated a few years later after Israeli snipers targeted them. Was there widespread outrage among the Israeli public at the abuses by their military? No, rather 61% of Israelis believed that the IDF’s handling of the situation was appropriate.

In this context, how is armed resistance not justified? What would you do if you were born in a fenced-in refugee camp, under blockade your whole life, bombed periodically when someone fought back against the colonizers who forced your parents or grandparents into said camp, and who blew your legs off if you dared to peacefully protest near the containment wall? What do you think is an appropriate response to such oppression and murder? A sternly-written letter?

It’s made out to be a very complex situation, but it’s relatively simple. Israel conquered and colonized part of Palestine, and kept pushing and pushing, despite peace treaties and international agreements, to take more and more of it. Palestinians were (and are) noncitizens with limited rights, under the control of and subject to abuse by Israeli troops and settlers. The US-friendly Arab dictatorships in the region were all in the process of normalizing relations with Israel, and the ongoing apartheid and slow-motion expulsion was going to continue without opposition until there was no Palestine left, and all Palestinians were forced to live in exile (ironically echoing the fate of the Jews after the revolt and the destruction of the second temple.) Israel left Palestine no other options besides military action or accepting its slow and inevitable disintegration.

So, they made their move, and they caught the IDF completely off guard. Israel responded genocidally, with a total blockade, bombing of every square inch of Gaza, and unmarked free-fire zones in which civilians could be shot at will, tempered only occasionally with a brief, partial ceasefire, or a brief easing of the blockade, only to resume in earnest shortly after. Gaza has paid dearly for daring to resist its slow destruction, but Israel has also paid with thousands of deaths, with each Israeli life lost being seen as infinitely more valuable than the innumerable Palestinians they murdered.

More importantly, they have become an international pariah, as have their American backers. In the long term, they will not recover from this. They’re hated by the majority of the world, and viewed as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany. As their right wing extremists grow more influential, they will continue to push for more land, and a more total domination over the middle east, and one day they will bite off more than they can chew. One way or another, Israel will either have to reject ethnic supremacy and accept Palestinians as full citizens, or it will collapse.

Nor can Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, apparently.

No bodies, nothing to count. The death toll therefore doesn’t increase.

The Germans did not start off the Holocaust by immediately rounding up and exterminating the Jews. They started through deportations (check), then by mass killings in the areas they took control of through conquest (check, though with some qualifiers), and then finally only settled on extermination in death camps. Israel is likely going to pass a law calling for mandatory execution of all “terrorists”, which in Israeli rhetoric means all Palestinians. They’re very far along on the road!

You seem to be taking the liberal Zionist position that a democratic Israel can exist alongside a penned-in Palestine, a captive nation with limited rights where people exist as noncitizens (but aren’t exterminated, as the right-wing Zionists support). I am telling you that is a dead ideology, and it was always self-contradictory in the first place. It’s a relic from a time when a country could be a “free democracy”, but racially discriminate against citizens or colonial subjects. When black Americans couldn’t vote, when “democratic” France could keep Algerians or a dozen other nationalities as colonial subjects in their own countries, or when South Africa could be a democracy for the white minority and an occupying power for its black residents. It is a fundamental contradiction to believe in rights for one group but not another (for whatever, I’m sure, complex and nuanced reasons), and so the tendency just going all the way into racial supremacy as the right-wing Zionists have done.

You’re going to have to take a serious look at what’s happening, as you’re being led along into a very dark place. I’m sure you’re not a racial supremacist and your concerns are for the safety of the Jewish people, but that isn’t what the Zionist project is, and the liberal position is no longer tenable. What will you tell yourself when you look back and find that you supported a genocide?

It’s hard to say definitively - one of the issues in the Stalinist USSR was information feedback. There were strong incentives to exaggerating production numbers, and strong disincentives to reporting shortfalls. Basically, everyone in a position of power was terrified and covering their ass at all times.

What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is crash-industrialization. Stalin believed that the USSR needed to industrialize as soon as possible, with all other concerns (i.e. lives) being secondary. To his credit, this ended up being a spot-on assessment. Supposing they had a kinder leader rather than Stalin with his heart of steel, and they industrialized more slowly, collectivized agriculture more slowly and voluntarily, how would they have fared in WW2? It’s possible that the USSR would have been unprepared for an industrial war and the Germans would have won, in which case there would have been hundreds of millions of deaths.

Ah, and here we have it! Israeli officials state explicit genocidal intent, explicit dehumanization (“they are human animals and will be treated accordingly”), have an explicitly racially supremacist ideology and intent to annex all of Palestine and maintain a Jewis-majority nation, they impose a total blockade on a captive civilian population in Gaza and bomb it to rubble over the course of years while continuing to slowly annex the West Bank and expel the Palestinian population, and that’s just “collateral damage”. But the Soviets having a famine in all the major grain producing areas is a full-on genocide comparable with the Holocaust.

Yes, you may proceed.

No problem! Actually, I’m not specifically one of the “tankies” you’re contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.

The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn’t just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every “revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the “constitutes genocide” side is the more heavily politicized.

A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada’s highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Galizien’, and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.

You’re probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of “denazification”, but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community’s particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.

Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a “terror famine” developed.

There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.

Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don’t come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn’t constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the “double genocide theory”, is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” when they killed 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.

Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin’s crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.

It’s cheaper, easier on logistics, and it does its job fine. The Ukraine war has proved, once again, that no tank is invincible, and the greatest danger to tanks is from dedicated antitank weapons rather than other tanks.

Permabanned for “harassment”

It’s ammo’s job to detonate, you just don’t want it detonating too early, or in the wrong place.

They were using racist language! They called me a racist!

The famine hit all the major grain producing regions of the USSR, not just Ukraine, so it was awfully unspecific for being a targeted act of genocide.

They were exporting grain to fund their program of rapid industrialization, there was a crop failure, and they still exported the grain. Once it became clear to the Soviet government that there was a famine, they reversed course, but the damage was done. This was callous, an atrocity even, but it does not constitute genocide. The idea that it was a genocide was concocted by Ukrainian nationalist exiles (themselves SS veterans) after the war and used to equivocate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for cold war propaganda.

This is the correct answer. The autoloader also enabled them to remove one crew member, thus reducing interior space and increasing armor thickness for the same weight. Contemporary western tanks like the M60 didn’t have blowout panels either, so the argument that ‘the Bolshevik hordes have no regard for the lives of their peasant conscripts, while the enlightened west spares no expense to protect its precious troops’ holds no water

Overblown. Leopard 2s also throw their turrets when the ammo gets hit. Abrams have the blowout panels in the turret, improving survivability, but there is no tank in which having your ammunition detonate is going to be a good time.

The T-72 (the T-90 is just a highly upgraded T-72) remains an effective tank that can be produced in large numbers and has lower logistical requirements than the 70-ton Western heavy MBTs. It’s the same distinction as in WW2 between Shermans and T-34s vs. the German heavies - yes, at the immediate tactical level, the heavier tank is better, but at the operational and strategic levels, the lighter tank that’s available in large numbers and has a lower logistical requirement is superior

Comparing the all time number one genocide to something that isn’t a genocide is Holocaust denial

These fools aren’t familiar with the Architect, clearly.