Just reposting this excellent point from lemmygrad
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Gestures broadly at the Russian Civil War that happened anyway.
Here's a rule for those of you at home, don't machine gun kids.
Look at Mussolini's granddaughter now. They didn't finish the job.
If she's presents anything more than an annoyance on Twitter I'm sure the Italians will flip her right-side up.
I'm not ecstatic about it, but in the words of Brace Belden, ya gotta do what ya gotta do
Eh, I think it was necessary. I think the argument Robespierre made against Louis was also cogent for the Romanovs
The notion that printed symbols on a paper can change whether or not you should machine gun kids is silly, please refer back to the previous rule.
I'm not asking you to feel bad that it happened, I'm just making sure we're all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I'm honestly shocked that this even has to be said here, let alone that apparently so many really aren't on the same page that machine-gunning children is both wrong and unjustifiable.
Eh, I know it's a minority position on the left but that's why it's a drum I beat every time it comes up. Unironically forced me back into religion when I realized that leftist politics without axiomatic moral grounding results in disaster.
Now I go to leftist meetings to avoid being useless and Quaker meeting to avoid being terrible.
I don't know, if the marxists or anarchists I work with irl ever said that kind of shit, I wouldn't work with them anymore (and we have discussed the topic). Simple as a that. Personally, I'm an atheist and haven't come up against any contradictions between my leftism and my morality or humanism. But if religion is what it takes for people to recognize that killing kids because of some hypothetical future scenario is wrong and will never be justified, then I say keep the churches full.
Agree ti disagree then
How are we supposed to convince people of our vision of a better world if we can't even get the easy stuff like "don't murder children" down? Christ even the liberals have the sense to pretend to feel bad about drones strikes on weddings when pressed.
I also think murdering children is bad. I think the specific situation with royal family of a monarchy is significantly different. Reducing my opinion to "machinegun kids lol" strikes me as very bad faith.
Either way I don't really think what you and I think of the murder of a royal family more than 100 years ago matters enough to get into an argument that can only sour relations. Seems unproductive. I apologise for making the mistake of stoking this argument.
I'm not looking to sour relations and am not going to take your position on the matter personally, and it's not that you stoked this argument, it's that I'm actively evangilizing a humanism first leftism. I think as soon as machine gunning kids enters into the political toolkit, regardless of what problems it resolves, we've lost the plot. Whatever nuance you want to inject into the scenario is fine, but at the end of the day it does boil down to you thinking that under certain circumstances it's acceptable, so I don't think I'm unfairly characterizing your position at all.
It doesn't seem to me like you're evangelizing a human first leftism. It seems to me like you're reducing a complex argument to "you're celebrating the killing of kids, and you think kids should be killed" you've compared it to the dropping of atomic bombs on two cities.
Again I'd sincerely urge you to read Robespierres arguments against king Louis. It is not a question of punishing an individual, but eradicating a system. Those children existed as parts of that system, and would in most circumstances always exist as that. Pretending like the fear of counter-revolution being fomented once again decades later around the figure of a royal heir as some statistical unlikelyhood, is absurd when we can see exactly that having happened throughout history. As you said yourself there are still bonapartists, orleanists and the like. There's no romanovists. While the orleanists are ridiculous now, they did previously and successfully lead a counter revolution. The bonarparists did as well.
In this sense the fear of the children becoming some later legitimising fixpoint for reaction is not some person "peering into the future", it is us peering into the past. Those children did nothing wrong, but by virtue of the system they were at the top of, they would forever be threats to the USSR. In this way those children were as much a victim of the system as anyone else dying senselessly.
literal infanticide becomes a political necessity as a product of MONARCHY
If they wanted their children to be safe, then they should not have forced them to be the sole inheritors of a brutal dictatorship
Just because people stomp up and down about 'political necessity' doesn't actually conjure that ideological abstraction up into material reality. China didn't machine gun Pu Yi and incidentally, their communist party is still running the show. I don't know how difficult it is not to machine gun a 13 year old, and no amount of "you made me do this" are going to change the fact that we're the ones making the (erroneous) decision to machine gun 13 year olds.
Kind to people, ruthless to systems, folks.
If Chinese rebels new this online argument was going to happen they probably would've killed whoever this guy is that they let live.
The last "Emperor" of China
The notion that anyone can peer into the future and see all the possible outcomes to a sufficient degree of certainty to claim that the only possible outcome is to kill the kid is also very silly and Madeline Albrightesque.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children. It's terrible, but Tsar Nicholas shouldn't have created a situation where he made the existence of his family so dangerous for everyone else.
Shooting a specific Royal lineage doesn't change anything about the possibility of reinstating the Monarchy. The white's didn't evaporate after the executions in the same way that the coalitions didn't evaporate as soon as soon as Louis XVI got the chop, and the House of Windsor doesn't quake at the thought of the current Jacobite pretenders. . The notion that the fate of the revolution hangs in the balance of Alexei's life is some grade A great man theory nonsense.
There are still Stuart and Bonapartist pretenders, the presence or absence of heirs isn't what determines if you have an armed Royalist insurrection against you, as evidenced by the fact the civil war continued long past the murder of the royal family.
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn't need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
the kids were an issue that could have been mitigated
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I mean, they fail even a basic "ends justify the means" test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don't think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it's algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Well let's strip out the euphemistic cover to the following.
What specifically did that involve? A smidge of killing possibly?
Fuck you. Killing children is never necessary. If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say.
Children were never the oppressors you fucking ghoul! You remind me of the goddamned apologists for the US nuking Japan "anything done in the name of furthering the goals of my side, even deliberately to innocent people born in the wrong place at the wrong time, may seem icky but thems the way it is. I'm just being practical." Not only does the argument rest entirely on a possibility of what might happen, it's completely unjustified regardless.
I don't think it's fair to equate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the injury and radiation poisoning and genetic defects of countless more to killing, what, 5 children? That's absurd. You're blowing this completely out of proportion.
You can argue it's wrong but I can't imagine getting upset over something like that. There's a simple matter of scale to consider.
And again, that's exactly what the fascist apologists for the dropping of nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians say.
"I can't imagine getting upset over something like child murder." I almost put in one of the disgust emojis here but it felt like it was too light-hearted for the disgust I'm actually feeling right now for people I used to think of as comrades.
Lol holy shit 5 innocent people were killed a hundred years ago and you're throwing around "people I used to think of as comrades" because we're not clutching pearls hard enough over it.
What a ridiculous thing to care about. Do you support revolution? You realize that lots of innocent people would die in a conflict like that, right? Way more than 5, I can tell you that! Revolution is not a dinner party.
I'm sorry that I don't consider the lives of royals to be worth more than other people. Kill the lib in your head.
"lol, you actually care about innocent people? What a rube! What a LIB!"
And no, I don't give a shit what you clutch pearls about - I mean, I would have thought someone interested in liberation would give a shit about human beings, but maybe that was naive of me - I'm said the "former comrades" thing because I expect the people I consider comrades not to support murdering the children simply because those children were born to their (and my) class enemies.
And get the fuck out of here with your "ooooooooh, but that's ReVoLuTiOnN!!" schtick. You're like the fucking reactionaries talking about those woke tankies for being upset by the "collateral damage" of all those Iraqi civilians. Oh boo hoo, innocent people. Who gives a shit about them, right? That's just WAR. Yeah, no shit people die in war, but you pretending that that's the same as there being innocent people who are your prisoners and are defenseless, literally children who at your mercy and then choosing to shoot them... That kind of false equivalency and gross disregard for innocent people truly is beyond the pale.
Kill the reactionary chud in YOUR head.
So yes, fuck you. You are no comrade of mine, just as no apologists for bigotry, SA, fascism, or in this case, child murder, are. It's like that Che quote "if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine." Well, you clearly aren't because you clearly don't give a shit about injustice, so long as it's perpetrated by those you deem to be on your side.
Comparing killing the Romanovs to not only dropping atomic bombs on civilians, but also to the Iraq War you really have no sense of scale at all huh.
I really don't care about this at all, I'm sorry it makes you so upset.
Like a 12 year old? I guess that's the part I don't understand.
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn't mean it's likely.
Are we idealists with a great man view of history now? Do we think these symbols actually hold real power to sway a insurrection's success one way or the other?