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VENT: I feel extremely anxious about purported necessity of violence, cruelty (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago* by to c/chat@hexbear.net
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I lean leftwards because I want more people to get the help, dignity and peace they need and deserve. Now I feel a wave of being told to "harden my heart" and I feel scared and isolated. I don't have it in me to become a martyr and estrange myself from most people any further, I get nervous with the leftism I see so often expressed as wanting the bad people suffer, and that anything short of revolution is not just not good enough, but worse than doing nothing. And then I have constant guilt that I'm judging people more discriminated than me for how they express things; that my fears aren't valid and expressions of privilege.

By now I'm feeling emotional burnout, I get annoyed by any respone that isn't in-depth analysis because it just feels like watching the same responses happening over and over and never going anywhere.

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[–] 23 points 1 day ago (1 child)

I think the majority opinion on the site has long been the idealist position that sadism toward reactionaries is cool and good, which is simply backwards, but that needs to be separated conceptually for the inarguable necessity for violence to establish socialism because the masters of society, the owning class, will on the whole not simply surrender their power. If socialism could be established peacefully, that would be better, but either way torture, punitive execution (rather than the wartime necessity of killing actual threats to the revolution) and so on do not advance socialism.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    100-com Regardless of how one feels about the people who are openly licking their chops about Doing the Thing, history shows us that the Thing is still going to have to be Done. I think that how people process that knowledge is a matter of their own psychology, and I think a very common survival response to the looming threat of violence is to lean into it. I also think there's a normalizing social value to having a bunch of people clacking their teeth and banging their forks and knives on the table whenever an oligarch is around.

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