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Palestinian uprising on a scale not seen in 50 years just started
(edition.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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This is what I responded to.
Not support. The right to loudly be 'happy'. There are 300 other people in this thread expressing support for Palestine and I haven't said a peep against any of them. One can and many have shown support without acting like it's Christmas morning and that there are nothing but candy and nuts on the horizon.
Oh, so you didn't actually find some celebrating to reply to, you found someone mocking someone else for their both sidesism and used the word happy as the slightest bit of pretext to go on a comment spree ranting about people celebrating the loss of life.
I'm sorry, your moral crusade is so clear to me now.
Look if no on is happy then don't worry about me, but given I'm getting the exact same "let people have their treats" response doesn't do much to convince me that's the case.
I guess I just don't understand what end you hope to achieve by policing people having a positive response to resistance against genocide and colonization.
Are you just hoping to extol the virtues of stoicism?
Because the point you keep trying to make over and over again is "you shouldn't be happy, do you know that resisting oppression will actually incite even more oppression?"
Which is barely half a step away from a general defeatist attitude. Your position is basically "You're allowed to show support, but remember to couch it in extreme pessimism about the hopelessness of ever changing the world for the better." With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I just don't understand why that's the hill you're choosing to die on. The most charitable interpretation I have is that you just picked a bad position to defend, and you need to stop trying to post through it
I'm extolling the virtue of sobriety, not stoicism. This isn't a football game where we get to cheer when good team score and bad team fumble. These are real lives at stake, and we should actually wait to see that this current uprising improves their lives before we decide it actually was a good thing.
If Israel launches a ground invasion (which they will) and kills 200,000 Palestinians, and you ask us "was this good" everyone here will rightly answer no. That won't stop the uprising from being justified and understandable, but it will from being good.
Liberationary struggle is not hopeless, that's clearly evidenced throughout history, but pretending every revolutionary act of violence no matter how ineffectual it is is good is exactly how you breed adventurism. We know this in a leftist context I don't know why it's so hard to transfer that to a Palestinian context.
You're just using the logic that rationalizes pessimism as a virtue.
"If I'm pessimistic and I'm right then I avoid disappointment, but if I'm pessimistic and I'm wrong then I can be pleasantly surprised."
Which, if that's the the worldview you want to adhere to them more power to you. But if the only thing at stake is whether or not you have egg on your face for something that is incredibly good and justified in principle but might maybe later turn out to have been a blunder tactically, then I don't see what's so important about making sure everyone else is as pessimistic as you choose to be.
The "real lives at stake" will be at stake no matter how we feel about it, because our input has literally no bearing on how Palestinians choose to resist. And I don't see how second guessing the people who are putting their lives at stake is the more principled stance to take which you must endure everyone adheres to. The fact they have enough hope and revolutionary optimism to take action despite suffering under decades of genocide occupation is itself worthy of hope and optimism.
I don't see how "wait and see" is pessimism. There are lots of immediate consequences that can be reasonable inferred (like the death toll from a Israeli land invasion), and those immediate consequences are on the whole bad, so a realistic, not pessimist take on the situation is that the next few days are going to be very unpleasant for the Palestinians even if they do achieve strategic victories in the end. Maybe I'm taking a more consequentialist tack than you, but a move that is justified on principles but strategically folly is still a bad deal in the end.
At least we agree on that.
I don't see how "wait and see" is so important of a principle that you must ensure everyone adheres to it.
But you don't have any special knowledge to evaluate whether it's a bad deal at this current moment. That's what's I'm describing as pessimism, and that pessimism is no more justified than optimism is.
To say that we all must share that pessimism does not seem to be necessary as a matter of principle, especially when the people who are putting their lives on the line clearly must have some degree of revolutionary optimism themselves or else they would not have acted. And they are in a much better position to judge whether their course of action is strategically sound than you or I are in.
I don't get to ensure everyone adheres to it, but if someone asks the hypothetical "why shouldn't I be happy about this right now", I'm going to chime in.
The bad aspects are baked into the cake. The only thing certain right now is that Israel is about to kill thousands of Palestinians, and I take it that we both agree on that. That's going to happen whether or not they achieve any strategic aims. It's not pessimism to acknowledge that any gains are going to have a steep cost, and that such gains are no where near as certain as the cost. Maybe they will come out on top, but they've taken a gamble and I don't feel bad for saying we should wait to see which side the coin comes up before celebrating.