Just reposting this excellent point from lemmygrad
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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
I mean they literally let him live after being a Japanese puppet during their atrocity spree in the 30's and 40's, so I think my dumb ass using him as a morality puppet would seem just about par for the course to them.
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.
Somehow I don't think they made this decision after siting down with a slide rule and a bunch of actuarial tables, so I don't know how they arrived at that balance of probabilities.
In reality it's more like cops defending their use of deadly force in any circumstances. They reckoned it had to be done, and their judgement is all that's needed to justify it, and now everyone else has to object to or rationalize their decision.
Sometimes people really do make decisions with uncertain and incomplete information, and sometimes people kill a black teenager for fun and pretend they feared for their lives. These are not the same thing. I wouldn't have killed the kids, but it probably saved a lot of other kids.
Why we don't say stuff like this? We can't tease out the tread of time and say 15 years late what our actions are going to cause. Not with any degree of certainly but also not with any objective or even methodical notion of "probability" that we seem so eager to fall back on. We can stand in the moment and make a decision. Do I shoot the unarmed kid or not? That answer is pretty cut and dry for any humanstic strain of thought.
The fact that I can conceive of a possible chain of events where that has unfortunate ramifications doesn't change that.