chapotraphouse

https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-a-tale-of-revenge

Behind the Bastards did them as their Christmas Good Guy Special. The Nakam were the ones who wanted to do a 1:1 mass murder of Germans for every Jewish victim of the holocaust. Later they went on to be architects of Israeli apartheid so the heroes became the villains regardless, but near the end of part two of that podcast they explore the interesting moral dimensions of the plan. Because the Nakam were going to poison the bread and water supplies of two cities, it was indiscriminate. One holocaust survivor answered the question "Would you have felt bad about that?" with "If you had been there at the end of the war, you wouldn't have said such a thing". The podcast's position is that killing six million Germans wouldn't have made the world a better place, but that what happened to the Nazis wasn't enough and their post-war survival meant every future genocide could be conducted without real consequence. However, they'd put the blame at the feet of the Nazis for those deaths.

I put it in the same realm as a slave rebellion. The slave owners are morally responsible for any acts that could be morally judged. Those acts can't be because the slave has to use every insurgent means possible in an irregular war without allies or guns. Every white face in that area not actively aiding the resistance is either directly involved in the slave trade, indirectly benefits from it, or is poised to legally inherit slaves because of their slaveowner father's choices. If the slaves wholesale purge the county like Haiti did its Big and Little Whites, it's raising the stakes of slavery to an existential level for every other white. You can save some money on labour but the cost of doing so is complete annihilation of everyone who bears responsibility for or benefits from the institution.

I don't know if I'd celebrate the Nakam's retribution had it happened but I'd certainly point to it every time some fascist opens their mouth. They can fuck around all they want but when it comes time for finding out they, their family, and their entire community get proportional blowback. There's now a social incentive for those groups to oppose fascism rather than gamble on it.