who would you favor in an Iran vs. US/Israel war?

[Lief 🗽]

I would support the Iranian people.

[Lief 🗽]

He's not the one hypothetically supporting aggressor states in an illegal war, bro.

[Lief 🗽]

I'd not support the fascist theocracy. I guess that makes me a right-winger.

There are two fascist theocracies in this hypothetical, Gus. Please specify.

And of course you're a right-winger.

[Lief 🗽]

Of course neither Israel nor Iran is fascist, but I assume Gustaf was using the word as shorthand for un-democratic/nationalist.

[Lief 🗽]

There are people that actually want to create a Jewish state in Pomerania?

[Lief 🗽]

TNF's comment reminds me of a somewhat famous little two or three minute clip of a televised debate between William Buckley and Gore Vidal (famous because it ends with Vidal calling Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley responding by threatening to sock the "queer" (his words, said with a patrician non-rhotic effeteness) in the "goddamn face"). They're discussing whether or not it was right for police to attack protestors of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and Buckley (and the moderator) imply that it was, because they were waving Vietcong flags, and a similar hypothetical protest involving Nazi flags during World War II would have been similarly violently dispersed. Vidal, of course, defends their right to wave Vietcong flags, because as he points out there exists the mainstream opinion in America, Western Europe, and the rest of the world that the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country politically as they would like and the United States is wrong.

And I'm just afraid that TNF, who is by all accounts a very left-wing person, is representative of a problematic movement in the American left since the 60s where we are cowed into supporting military efforts that are immoral and wrong, because our opposition would be seen as wishing death on American soldiers. We are so afraid of looking like traitors that we are forced to cheer on American soldiers as they illegally pillage and bomb. Can you imagine, a few years from now when we are bogged down in Iran, anyone on television or in the mainstream political discourse defending some protestors waving an Iranian flag as they're beaten up and carried away? They'd be sold out immediately as the left hurriedly rallied around the American flag. It's really depressing. If a military action is wrong, then I want it to fail, regardless of whether or not the soldiers undertaking that military action are my fellow citizens or not.

[Lief 🗽]

Obviously I don't want individual soldiers dead on either side. (The whole idea of some grunt being told to go die on a battlefield by a guy sitting thousands of miles away in a comfortable air conditioned room is one of the most tragic things I can think of. It's the most complete dehumanization and mechanization of human-beings imaginable to reduce them to Risk pieces to be thrown at each other until one team runs out.) And I'd never give sh**t to an individual soldier because, let's be honest, they're much braver than I could ever hope in my life to be. But I don't know why it's wrong to hope the other side wins, if you think your side is doing something very wrong. I hate to Godwin's law this sh!t, but surely the Germans in the 1940s who wanted their armies to lose battles weren't in the "wrong." Now an American attack on Iran would be nowhere near as "wrong" as the Nazis conquering vast swaths of Russia so they could ethnically cleanse it and turn it into Lebensraum, but it would still be wrong.

[Lief 🗽]

Thank you Tweed. I've always believed that I do my best thinking at 2 in the morning.

[Lief 🗽]

Yes, very strongly.