Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/13/lindsey-graham-encourages-civilian-casualties-in-gaza.html
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No, he’s just parroting the language of dear leader to show how tough and manly he is… cause that’s what “real” men do in MAGA world… find ways to cause the most pain and violence on those they hate… It’s just more shitty, hateful rhetoric aimed at highly vulnerable people who they hope to see destroyed…
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He wouldn’t actually suggest the Israeli government nuke Gaza. Trump’s son in law has an eye on developing some beach side property there
Exactly. Probably also some pandering to a certain kind of Zionist christo-fascist too
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Yep, but to be fair, that’s, generally speaking, the same group of people…
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Um… it wasn’t okay.
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The more “pro life” they profess to be, the less likely they are to give a damn about mass civilian casualties and deaths.
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They only care about certain lives, not all lives.
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Except when responding to BLM, then it’s back to all lives. It’s Calvinball politics.
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Even then, no, they don’t care about “all lives” whatever they actually say, because they don’t care about Black lives.
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Nihilism’s a hell of a drug, man.
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100% agreed. It’s all just words, they don’t care about anyone or anything but themselves.
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Leaving aside the question of whether the U.S. was really faced with destruction when Japan bombed a Hawaiian harbor, this is a false dichotomy.
The relatively weak, ragtag Hamas does not pose a serious existential threat to the nuclear armed state of Israel. As is demonstrated by, for one thing, the latter’s ability to inflict death at more than ten times the rate of the former, let alone mass dispossession, starvation and so on.
Christ, what a pandering, melodramatic asshole.
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Yeah, comparing Hamas controlled Gaza to Imperial Japan in 1945 is a bit like comparing the Mayberry Sheriff’s Department to the NYPD.
ETA: It should be obvious, but just in case, I in no way mean to draw any kind of comparison between Sheriff Andy Taylor and Hamas. Sheriff Taylor tended towards pacifism, especially for a cop. I only mean to compare the relative powers involved.
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Holy fuck, the levels of perversity. I mean leaving aside that no, the atomic bombings weren’t okay (it’s just that America gets away with its war crimes), and that neither the US nor Israel were/are facing anything like existential threats (I mean, for fuck’s sake, trying to pretend the US faced “destruction” at the hands of Japan, when US forces have dropped more bombs on civilians on American soil than the Japanese managed…), the whole comparison is broken.
Leaving all that aside, and pretending the US was justified, the context is still completely different. The atomic bomb, as a military weapon, existed as a solution to the lack of real precision bombing in WWII. The combination of the imprecision and power of bombs at the time meant that taking out a single target required literally hundreds of bombers. Even if you just had purely military targets (and leaving aside the Allied bombing terror campaigns that targeted whole populations), the lack of accuracy necessarily meant killing a lot of civilians in the process of taking out military structures. Actual precision bombing developed subsequently rendered the atomic bomb strategically obsolete. On top of which, Japan was infamous for not surrendering, both soldiers and civilians, who were all expected to die rather than surrender. (Though in reality the lack of Japanese soldiers as prisoners of war was ultimately the result of American forces simply murdering any combatant who tried to surrender.) The argument was made at the time, perhaps not entirely disingenuously, that fewer people would be killed by shocking the country into surrender with a couple atomic bombs than by conventional warfare.
But of course Israel’s not going after military targets, they’re going after the entire civilian population. It’s indiscriminate. Even their precision bombing is targeting journalists, doctors, etc. - and incidentally killing their families and everyone around them. It’s genocidal. So Graham’s statement can be simply stripped down to a single proposition, “If it’s allowed for the US to massacre a bunch of civilians, it should be okay for (some of) our allies to do the same.”
These people aren’t nihilists. They’re worse than that - they have… certain beliefs.
e.g. Christian nationalism, white supremacy…
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It is remarkable how many people are unaware of that aspect of the war. And the fact that the firebombing of Tokyo killed even more people than the nukes.
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The whole narrative of “The US and its allies were moral paragons - especially in WWII” is pretty fucking perverse in the face of the facts. A whole lot of people should have been in jail for war crimes that weren’t, and only the historic scale of fascist atrocities kept people like Churchill, with his roles in genocidal British colonialism in Africa and India (and his specific role in the Bengal famine that killed millions), from going down in history known only as a monster.
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Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour!?
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Years ago I had a truck driver tell me he “wished we had nuked Russia” back during the Cold War.
I reminded him we won it (more or less) without killing millions of people and destroying our own environment, and that didn’t phase him.
It’s like the whole “zero sum game” thing with Trump. It’s not a victory unless the victor inflicts massive pain and suffering. “The cruelty is the point.”
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Oh, but don’t you know? The atomic bombs saved lives. And as we get further from the events, the number they are estimated to have saved keeps going up…maybe someday they will even have been responsible for preventing human extinction.
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My dad was a 18 year old radar technician about to be shipped out to the ground invasion of Japan mainland, when the bomb dropped and ended the war.
Maybe you should talk to some people who were actually there before you assert confidently that you know what should have been done better than they did.
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