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selec
Sep 6, 2003

If you’re interested in whether history rhymes, repeats or parodies itself, it was literally on this day in 1990 that the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador gave the infamous incubators testimony. A story that was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, before it all fell apart. 33 years ago today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony?wprov=sfti1

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selec
Sep 6, 2003

Collapsing Farts posted:

That's what I'm saying, Hamas is objectively loving horrible. Their entire core and identity is not "save palestine" it is "destroy israel" and it has been the case for 30 years. Almost any other governing body for Gaza would be better than one that has the sole objective of waging eternal jihad until they can eradicate "zionists" and establishing an islamic sharia state. This isn't some strawman poo poo either, it's in their own words.

How do you convince Israel that's what they want, when the incentives all seem to be for the people in power to prefer genocidal assholes? And in fact, can't Israel, through arrest and assassination, decide what the leadership of Hamas looks like, to some degree?

The entire dynamic of the situation is weird because Israel has enormous control over Gaza, and can basically pick a lot of the factors they're going to be working "against," if you can be said to work against something that is largely within your control.

Basically, if the militant right wing that's been in charge for decades obviously prefers Hamas over some more reasonable group which may or may not even exist at this point, who exactly do you see putting that alternate group forward and empowering them?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Maera Sior posted:

Yoinking this from IVFW, because it's behind a paywall at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-security-failure.html

From my read, it seems like they were complacent, watching the wrong direction, and didn't get communications until it was too late.

Not to mention the several obvious design flaws built into the system. No hardened backups for the mission critical comms? Your lowest bidder had you blind and deaf, what are the billions we send over there even going to? Incredible self-own there.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

zer0spunk posted:

I really can't tell you how to solve it, but you aren't the first person in history to realize that conflicts continue unless you do one of two things; dismantle the enemy in such a way that they can never recover and cease to exist, or convince them to join you in a way that becoming a mutually beneficial ally with shared growth far outweighs the desire for conflict

you can see that with germany in ww1, which got you the enemy state of germany in ww2..and that's one of many many examples

I don't want genocide, but I also don't understand how to reason with anyone who does..they feels like an impossible ask

This is just like if England had Germany held as a captive population prior to both wars, and made it illegal for Germans to have concrete.

It doesn’t seem like a useful comparison tbh.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

zer0spunk posted:

I think it's pretty apt in the context of me saying (or more accurately agreeing with the last poster) you have two real options to end the cycle, the stick or the carrot. Half measures like sanctions lead to an environment that helped a second generation of conflict, granted that summing up a ton of other factors in ww2 up to basically a fraction of the cause is a little bit reductive, but you understand what I'm saying. You could swap japan here instead too..pearl harbor led to the extreme measure of Hiroshima as a response, there was no half measure and the world was worse for it..i don't want that path, and I think anyone else who is reasonable doesn't either

I also don't know how to solve a refugee crisis when the other bordering country flat out won't do anything every single cycle of this and gets no reproach

I think the refugee crisis is about who has the power—why should border countries be willing to fix a problem that is entirely under the control of a frequently-hostile neighbor? It’s like asking Canada to please accept all our people of color, because we can’t control our cops.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

zer0spunk posted:

Why should the other country on the other border which is also imposing a blockade take some responsibility for refugees? I know why they won't, they aren't shy about it, but I don't know why they shouldn't. I also know why you don't hear "death to Egypt" over it.

I mean, because people can accurately tell you the source of their problems? Israel is loving their lives up, it’s poo poo that the refugees have nowhere to go, but ultimately you’re gonna be more pissed at the guy bulldozing your house then at your neighbors who won’t let you come stay with them.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

zer0spunk posted:

The depressing thing is politically israel was starting to conceed, there was some small stablity for a minute in the region, and it looked like one of the biggest arab nations was going to normalize relations with them/recognize they exist as a state

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news...8f-67fc94e40000

That was september...

So was this..

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-saudi-defence-pact-tied-israel-deal-palestinian-demands-put-aside-2023-09-29/

when i said gazans are unwitting pawns historically, it's still infuriatingly true right now..hopefully the road to coexistence is open again after hamas is removed from power

What if they’re unable to remove Hamas from power?

And at what point do we all as westerners feel like a military intervention to prevent (what seems to be a widely held opinion) genocide from becoming the SOP in ways that even people currently opposed to using that kind of language would not be able to disagree with? Say it does get reduced to a tent city, is there any level of atrocity we can expect to see that drives a coalition military to intervene, or are we all just resigned to watching it happen?

I think the latter is most likely. I don’t think we Americans have the stomach to call a genocide a genocide and take appropriate action. It’s just something we’ll all have to swallow and vote for unless you opt out of voting, which if you did because of ongoing support of genocide would make you seem crazy to most Americans, I’d think.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

mannerup posted:

that is a wild claim to throw out that his wife did it, I would be suspect of any source that makes that particular speculation for multiple reasons

This hearkens back to a simpler time on the internet, “wife-like typing detected,” a hoary fark.com meme based on a very similar explanation a poster gave himself when several of his posts were just straight up lies about some early oughts political debate. He just said “oh my wife loves my posts and she must’ve logged in as me to debate you too.” Just astonishing that we haven’t grasped that this rhetorical strategy contains enormous problems for your ongoing and retrospective credibility and dignity.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Madkal posted:

I think it's more to show that the surrounding allies are more interested in demonizing Israel than helping Palestinians. At least it was in the past when Egypt and Jordan were using the Palestinians as much as human pawns as Israel was.

I don’t think it’s possible for countries that don’t have the level of control over the lives and destinies of Palestinians to have “as much” culpability in their fate as the oppressive genocide being perpetrated by the country that does. Just from a moral, practical/logistical sense, that math cannot be made to work.

If you control something, you have a responsibility that nobody else can have because you have excluded them from influence.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Collapsing Farts posted:

You don't have to go to bat for the internationally recognized terrorist organisation tbh

Is “not falling for misleading propaganda” the same as “going to bat for” here? Is having a truer, more complicated understanding of history a bad thing?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

I mean, Israel as a state was founded with a significant amount of support from terrorist organizations like Irgun. There’s nothing novel about the idea lol.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Is keeping an apartheid state as bad as being a terrorist organization? To me, they’re basically the same thing. You could even argue the apartheid state is worse because they have the power to control their own destiny, which Hamas really doesn’t have total control over their own future the way Israel does.

How does the math shake out for having the power to starve or murder an entire people vs maybe just the desire to do so but no power to enact that?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

I can’t get my head around ignoring the faked audio. Like how do you trust a source after they try to pull that poo poo? Is it just “everybody lies, so what” and move on? Because that level of ostentatious disrespect for the people trying to make good faith arguments on your behalf seems rhetorically suicidal. Does releasing fake audio mean you are beyond caring what anyone thinks, and just feeding the people you need to feed propaganda to keep the cognitive dissonance tamped down internally? That’s the only sense I can make of it; they aren’t actually interested in convincing anyone, they intend to act with impunity, and frauds and faked evidence are for consumption by true believers, not intended for meaningful consideration by anyone else.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

I said come in! posted:

That student letter is a complete nothing burger. There was literally nothing in it that was said that was even remotely controversial.

Thus the need to come down even more forcefully and make an example of these people. Harvard is where we train future leaders, that’s where we grow our ruling class. You need to discipline them the hardest because even minor infractions are unacceptable from people you expect to sign off on even worse crimes in the future.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

The first three look like they could be at a family reunion at a Residence Inn.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Mid-Life Crisis posted:

Everyone who dies in Palestine is being labeled a martyr right now due to pressure via the press. I understand you’re trying to go Oxford dictionary on me and technical definition you are correct, but that’s not what’s going on in the press. They use other terms historically and are now appeasing to a religious requested alternative because the confusion is the intent.

Who is applying the pressure, and by what power do you think they are able to do so?

Would like to avoid conspiritorial thinking, especially with the long historical record of claims that “jews control the media” and make sure we’re not just doubling back to decide some other group controls the media. Can you explain how you think this works, and why people killed by an occupying state should or should not be classified as martyrs?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Mister Fister posted:

Yeah i'm delusional to think that a mob who pushed past security (who was trying to stop them) is totally not a security threat. Clearly the librarians who locked the doors to protect the students and the police who had to escort the students out were overreacting. Mobs have never gotten out of control in the history of mobs.

Is there a particular campus protest you think this would relate to? Do you have any examples of a campus protest in the US from the last…50 years that reflect what you’re trying to envision here? Because this is ridiculous face-above-a-flashlight posting from where I’m sitting.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Kalit posted:

IMO, you probably shouldn't be giving this tweet any more publicity. This is an extremely lovely thing for antisemitism.org (or whatever) to do and giving it any more attention seems like a terrible thing.

What’s your strategy for ending this practice besides putting your head in the sand?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Hamelekim posted:

At some point countries in the region will have to take military action against Israel when Israel goes into Gaza and the deaths increase. The people in those countries will riot and threaten to overthrow their autocratic rulers if they don't.

There is a reason that leaders in the region have backed away from normalization with Israel, and it has nothing to do with a change of heart.

You, and a lot of other people would be extremely well-served by reading a new book by journalist Vincent Bevins, IF WE BURN. It tracks the history of and reflects on the success or lack thereof of protest movements around the world in the last 10-15 years.

TL;DR is ask the people who filled up Tahrir Square if they felt like they got what they wanted, or if they ended up with something quite different than what they wanted. But seriously, read that book. Protests aren’t enough, and may in fact be counterproductive depending on how they go. You might end up empowering the very forces you opposed if they can hijack it, which happened globally several times in recent history. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Hamelekim posted:

Logic and reason. Why have the rules including Saudi Arabia turned away from normalization all of a sudden? Why do they have to be seen to be on the side of the Palestinians all of a sudden if they aren't in fear of their own population? They certainly don't care, but protests around the region for the Palestinians seems to have been the trigger.

I mean even in Egypt you had protests where protesting isn't legal and they didn't do anything to stop it.

We don’t know that they have turned away from normalization. It’s a very common tactic in governments of all types to delay a process or desire rather than abandon it, wait for your disorganized opposition to wear themselves out/the moment of contestation to pass, and then pick up where they left off.

Like how American legislators of both parties still periodically go back to looking for ways to cut Social Security. They will keep trying, their incentives are such that they have to keep trying, and what the little people need or want doesn’t figure into it.

Governments are like a dude who only stops cheating on his wife long enough for her to stop checking his phone so thoroughly.

They don’t fear their populations so much as they have a strategy for managing negative PR. Going back to the husband example: wouldn’t he just stop cheating if he actually respected or feared his wife’s opinion or actions? It takes a lot for a protest to actually succeed, the vast majority fail, and there are really well-worn and documented tactics governments of all flavors can and do use to ride out the turbulence then go ahead and do what the ruling class wanted to do in the first place.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Hamelekim posted:

I know all about the failure of protests to affect any real political change. It depressed me a great deal at the time when I realized that nothing was going to change. The reasons for the protests are different though. I'm not saying that they will affect positive change internally, but that it could cause them to act militarily in some fashion.

Maybe it's a false assumption, but I hope that they will, because otherwise everyone is going to just stand by and watch a genocide occur and do nothing.

I might read the book but I don't really want to because it will just make me depressed.

You only have to feel depressed if there is no other way. There are other ways, read your Lenin and Mao. You don’t have to agree with their goals, but their tactical and strategic analysis was correct, and there are frameworks you can adapt to modern contexts.

I’m sorry the future sucks, but doomerism and refusing to look won’t make it suck less. You’re already gazing at the horror, might as well learn while you do it, IMO.

People can be mobilized en masse—they will get into the streets for a good cause. This is self-evident, as we have seen recently and in the last 20+ years, they will get out there! That’s very optimism-generating for me! That there is a lot of organizational and educational work to be done to make those mass mobilizations effective isn’t a cause for depression. The people will be there in the streets, as we see; it’s just a problem of getting them to do something more effective once they get there. It’s not an easy job, but it’s a job that’s been done effectively in the past, and can be done effectively again.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Pvt. Parts posted:

I'm not sure you're actually suggesting, even with full knowledge of the security apparatus Israel has been forced to create as a result, that she has somehow innumerably profited from being surrounded (historically in some cases, presently in others) by enemies, including Palestine, and should now repay that back? That every $10,000 Iron Dome rocket which shoots down a $500 Qassam rocket is somehow a win for Israel and their tab is running up? It's easy to make a point when you ignore the blatantly obvious.

Israel is a weird, distortive, ethnonational project. What it isn't is a money making scheme.

It’s place in the global order is absolutely part of the neoliberal scheme though. The need for an unshakeable ally in the region where a lot of oil is is what drives our relationship.

We don’t actually care about what Iran does internally, we care because they don’t comply with the neoliberal order. We’ll cozy up to any autocrat or dictatorship or monarchy so long as they don’t gently caress the money up and are willing to play ball. So while Israel itself might not perceive itself as playing that role, and few citizens of any nation state comprehend these relationships at that level, to me it’s quite obvious that if Israel suddenly started behaving internally in ways that impacted the global neoliberal order, they’d be a pariah faster than you can say ethnic cleansing.

If you gently caress with the money going where it’s supposed to (upwards, out of your smaller country, and into investor pockets) you’re a problem. That’s the dividing line. You can do anything you want internally and the US will have your back because the money is what matters, the rest is PR.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Isn’t a military “hostage” just a POW? Why don’t we use that language for them?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Viller posted:

You were stroking Israel's "security capibilities" dick yesterday because they operate a 2 million people prison. Running your mouth about them exporting it all over the world because they are so advanced!

And now "its impossible they know about tunnels they've been working on for 10 years!"

Make your mind up dude. Whatever fits your narrative I guess

Cops aren’t notorious for being discerning customers. They buy that fraud-rear end ShotSpotter thing still. The way that Israel treats Palestinians is a marketing program for them. Do you think cops care more about effectiveness than looking cool and having new toys to point at poor people? That’s a market that doesn’t punish functional failure.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Discendo Vox posted:

Under the current moderation rules we are not allowed to refer to any of this. We are required to entertain users who do this, forever.

We could just collectively mute the person and then enforce solidarity around that.

I’ve said it in CE and I’ll say it here: if the institutions of governance are either unable or unwilling to meet the need they ostensibly exist to meet, collective action is required. Read Lenin, folks! We all have the power to stop reading bad posts, a better thread is possible.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Hebron is a nightmare rn for anyone who’s not a settler:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/5/like-a-prison-the-palestinians-in-hebron-living-under-israeli-lockdown?utm_source=pocket_reader

quote:


Following the shocking October 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas, Israeli soldiers came without warning to Palestinian shops in Hebron and ordered their owners and workers at gunpoint to close shop and stay home.

In online community chat groups, word trickled across the neighbourhoods of H2: Any Palestinians found outside their homes would be shot.

Settlers are playing dress-up in military uniforms and torturing people, which is like, probably already a death squad, but if not technically, is a hair’s breadth away from it.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Jaxyon posted:

I posted a video earlier of a woman visiting her parents hometown of Hebron.

Part of it was an old lady having to scale a building because she wasn't allowed to use the street her house was on. Every day.

I think there’s a real job of work to be done sending people who lived under Jim Crow over to Israel to talk to people and compare what they go through with what happened in our own country. You wouldn’t even need to go to Gaza or the West Bank, just talk to Israeli Arabs about their schools, how marriage works between Arabs and Israelis, or same-sex marriage still being illegal there.

I think that would do a lot to push sentiment and get people asking what the hell is going on there and why we fund it.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Best Friends posted:

How could one even get that information out there in the west? It would be labeled as antisemitism by the mainstream if it wasn’t simply ignored, just like the protests now. Social media services would be pressured to categorize it as harmful misinformation. Sharing it could open people to genuine legal trouble in several western democracies.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-germany-palestinian-supporters-say-they-struggle-be-heard-2023-10-19/



https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/20/palestinian-tiktok-instagram-algospeak-israel-hamas/

The ideal would be to send people under the aegis of an org like MSNBC (lol, I know) and you could do one better by tracking down Jewish freedom riders and organizers from the era and having them go along to. You’d get riveting footage, I suspect, as people who lived under and fought these kind of policies were bearing witness to the version of them at play right now in Israel.

I don’t hold out hope that this kind of reporting would be undertaken, but it’d be nice to see.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

On the topic of how we can know whether or not to trust IDF/Israeli PR on these things, I think there's something going on in the meta that might be important to think about.

Israel isn't trying to convince anyone, they've already decided the sides are clear, and that what they want is to send clear messages to people already in their camp to tamp down any doubt or cognitive dissonance they might experience seeing stuff like kids being dragged from rubble.

It's the Nigerian Prince Email method. The propaganda has to be pitched in such a way that people who might doubt are not going to be convinced, but those who are already in now have a new piece of content to latch on to that helps batten down any doubts.

Nigerian Prince emails suck on purpose because they're at the top of the funnel. You don't waste time on creating the most-perfect seeming scam, because ultimately it can never hold up if somebody's going to google the email and find out what's going on. So you pitch it to people who just aren't the type to google up an email they receive, who just take that email as it's given for being factual. So you actually don't do any work to spruce it up more than you need to, because that adds a lot of people to your funnel you're not ever going to get to the bottom, to the Give Money stage of your process.

I think this is the most generous reading you can give as to why so much of the IDF material we see around seems kinda amateurish to downright obvious bad-faith frauds--stuff so bad that even nominally mainstream sources will start to say "We don't think this is authentic," like the alleged phone call recording that had bad grammar, wasn't representative of actual local speech, and had other issues going on with the audio data itself that made it seem apparent to investigators that it wasn't authentic. They aren't trying to convince us, they're trying to firm up existing support.

That's on purpose. Israel has been long able to leverage enormous pressure via social media or other channels, but that's always been routed through already-existing Zionist channels. The Canary Mission, for instance, is a relatively successful effort, but built entirely on the institutions being targeted (as a way of targeting individuals who in some way depend on that institution) being 100% aligned with Zionist understandings of the world. This used to be a very reliable method, because there was little to no meaningful mainstream pushback against that worldview, and the people who did hold opposing worldviews had very little power, even in so-called Leftist Academia.

This comports with the sophistication of their other propaganda and influence operations--from a technical perspective it can be argued that aside from the US (which buys a lot of this capability from Israel) no state has the ability to spy on an individual better than Israel. They will get into your phone if they want to. They are the definitive State Actor when you get IT Security people together to talk informally. So it's reasonable to say that their non-technical influence operations would be as sophisticated, and if you look at the dominance that Zionist views have held in American politics up until like, last month, that's been borne out by results.

It does reflect really poorly on people who consume that media uncritically, or less critically, because it's essentially saying they've been the target of a successful scam operation, one not intended to take the riskier path of engaging with your rhetorical opponents on any meaningful level, which if successful would widen support for how they're handling the conflict, which you could argue is basically impossible for them to do in the face of the footage emerging from Gaza. If you were an Israeli political operation or IDF propaganda shop, the far safer route is shoring up support where it exists, and not risking trying to do the kind of diplomatic work, which would in fact probably lessen support from your existing die-hards, as they would see it as rhetorical compromise with people they see as not worth the time of day.

edit:

This is not to say that they're not suffering from the Hiring Pepes effect--we've seen this in America, where political shops will hire on true believers and suddenly WHOOPS the messaging sucks because it's being developed from the donkey brains of these true believers not tested against existing metrics. But I don't think that would entirely explain just how amateurish a lot of what we've seen has been.

selec fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Nov 8, 2023

selec
Sep 6, 2003

MikeC posted:

No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand.

Is the position of folks like Selec that the IDF manufactures questionable evidence to justify their attacks on suspected Hamas targets with an IDGAF attitude to being mistaken or collateral damage? Or is the position that the IDF actively picks targets to kill civilians en masse and that the Hamas target angle is entirely a smoke screen?

There is a petty wide gulf between the two stances imo.

I’d lean towards the former—they may have bad intel, or a standard of evidence similar to Obama-era Military Aged Male for counting anybody in a demographic cohort who died in a drone strike as a militant. Probably both.

But I also do think they specifically target some high value civilians, like journalists, who they see as “not really civilians” due to their role in making the IDF’s life harder.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:

South Africa, India, the 1989 revolutions, the color revolutions that followed. Portugal, The Philippines. The defeat of the Soviet coup in 91. End of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Overthrow of the South Korean Junta. End of one party rule in Taiwan.

There’s a pretty big body of research that says nonviolent resistance is about twice as effective.

STRONG, STRONG recommendation for you specifically: read IF WE BURN by Vincent Bevins. Just came out. History and analysis of horizontal protest movements that starts around the time of the Arab Spring, and looks at what worked, and what didn't. Whole thread would probably enjoy it!

selec
Sep 6, 2003

rscott posted:

Nah man he's just using "Black on Black crime" except international relations:
https://twitter.com/_RichardHall/status/1745532415785791866?t=sJUHyFZpvC-tHdwcaqtD3A&s=19

Telling a bunch of South African lawyers to go back to Africa. Hmmmmmmmm. Not a great look, John!

Seriously this dudes staff must have lost a bet or something coming up with this. How is this the best answer they can come up with?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

There’s news to talk about :

https://x.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1748041495670882364?s=20

The strikes aren’t working, but they’ll continue, I guess.

Want to get more context on this but it seems like Netanyahu has decided on a prix fixe menu and Apartheid is all that’s on it:

https://x.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1748032045396222267?s=20

selec
Sep 6, 2003

https://x.com/mj_lee/status/1748475734568444173?s=20

Ahhh gently caress this guy doesn’t have internet or what?

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Discendo Vox posted:

Once again, I am begging you to consider where you are getting your information from.

Should we trust this guy more or less than an Israeli spokesman?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Darth Walrus posted:

bleak lol that the US's response to Israel being officially put on trial for genocide is to defund refugee services in Palestine:

https://x.com/robbiegramer/status/1750895411563213272?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q

This is like when you forget your wife’s birthday until you’re driving home after work and desperately praying that some takeout from Culver’s can be seen as a romantic meal.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

NYT has started an internal investigation in the Intercept story about the atrocious rape propaganda.

Naturally, to uncover why their editorial processes broke down and why the published such dreck, right?

Nope, it’s a leak investigation to find out who is contributing to their humiliation by airing out the details. Their instincts are impeccable.

https://twitter.com/charlottetklein/status/1763258371925217709

selec
Sep 6, 2003

Nail Rat posted:

What in the world would it take for the Biden fucks to admit it's a genocide? I'm guessing there is no line.

Asking an entire ruling class to take on an enormous narcissistic injury like this is just a non-starter. It’s absolutely never going to be on the table. Too many Ivy League people raised to never admit fault and never break ranks. What would the incentive be to do it? To be a good person? We’re so far past the point there would be any positive outcome for anyone to do this in the current status quo.

selec
Sep 6, 2003

kiminewt posted:

Those are some big accusations against Germany there, which I've never really heard of. Anywhere we can read about that?

The reparations money did go to individuals effected by the holocaust, this much I know. Germany also readily gives citizenships to Jews whose ancestors' German citizenships was taken away from them which isn't super in line with what you're suggesting.

I can contribute and tell you that Germany absolutely did a poo poo job of de-Nazification, to the point it was obviously a PR effort moreso than an effort to root out an ideological tendency. Convenient scientists and administrators didn't get de-Nazified, they got golden tickets to the US or other allied nations, or had their records sealed so they could be reliable administrators who were ideologically guaranteed anti-communists, which was more important than anything to the West at that point.

Germany has had a former president and a former chancellor, both former Nazis. They had a finance minister who was a former SA member. Gerhard Schroeder, a name some of us might be familiar with--former Nazi. Hell, they had a minister for Displaced Persons who was a former Nazi because irony was apparently illegal post-war.

And don't even get into the postwar shenanigans former Nazis got up to. Israel literally hired Nazi war criminals:
https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-nazi-fugitives-hired-by-israel/

Postwar Germany was whitewashed. We needed them to be staunch anticommunists way more than we needed them to actually root out fascism.

So that particular claim is rock-solid IMO.

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selec
Sep 6, 2003

I think it’s safer to say that Germany has a very confused and incoherent understanding of what its role should be. If you’re freezing the bank accounts of a Jewish organization, and demanding a list of its members in 2024, because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, you are maybe in a state of confusion and desperate thrashing.


https://euobserver.com/world/158293

It’s wild as hell over there right now, just completely drunk on ideology.

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