this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
268 points (95.3% liked)
Ask Lemmy
39675 readers
1781 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can't oversimplify the world in to "our side" and "their side," and say "if you're not with us, you're against us." There are countless different sides and there are factions within those sides that have different motivations and agendas. That's simply a fact, and to pretend otherwise is just lazy.
Pacifists are generally more correct than most people because they've figured out the "no war" part of "no war but class war," and the vast majority of war is not class war (or is perpetrated by the ruling class). I'm not a pacifist but I have respect for those who are.
To be fair, Orwell's argument is understandable in the specific context of WWII, but it is not a generalizable principle.
Technically, when it comes to violence, it is that simple. There is the side attacking you...and you.
When it comes to fascism, it's also that simple. You are either "with them" or you are on their list of eventual targets. Unless you do something to stop them, it's really just a matter of time before they get around to attacking you too.
You can support a group, but that doesn't mean they're on your side. And if you fight for them, and then they win, and then they fuck you over anyway, then you lost. Then what.
Fighting a war is nothing like fighting a person on the street. But even if you try to push the fighting a person on the street analogy, it still fails. If you know how to punch, and you're fast, maybe you can punch the other person in the jaw and knock them out. But then you'll have a broken hand, and you won the fight, but you still have to go to the hospital. Or maybe you could have run away and then you would have, I guess, lost the fight, but not really because you didn't lose anything and your hand wouldn't be broken. In other words, actually reality is not such a simple thing.
No, it isn't. Even in the purest, simplest scenario of like, crazy guy on the street comes after me for no reason, it still isn't that simple, because it's not a zero sum game of his interests vs my own. For him to assault me goes against his own interests, it's likely that he'll face legal or social consequences for doing so. At the same time, those legal/social forces are not necessarily "my side," they might act to protect my wellbeing (or at least punish someone after the fact), but I don't control them, and they may act against my wishes. For example, I might prefer that my assailant get rehabilitated rather than incarcerated.
This isn't even an abstract thing for me. I have a relative who used to be very mentally unstable, suffering from paranoid delusions, caused or made worse by the meth he was on, and the war he had fought in. He was a danger to myself and my family, and to everyone in the area. For him to get clean and find treatment that worked for him was in everyone's interest.
This is in the most extreme example of assailant and victim, and no one else. If you try to scale things up to a nation and pretend that there are only two sides, it's utterly ridiculous.
"My" side might forcibly conscript me to be sent into some pointless meat grinder, killing people who are in the exact same boat but who happened to be born in a different country. Are they not aggressing against me by doing that? Perhaps the real "sides" are the working people of both countries against the rulers sending us to die.
I think you're adding context that wouldn't exist in a real world situation.
If a crazy guy attacks you on the street, would you just stand there and let him kill you because of all those societal consequences that are working against him? If you just stand there and let him kill you, do those things go away?
Because unless you defending yourself is somehow the reason all those things happen to him, then none of those.things should have any impact on your choice to either live or die. Your choice is still binary.
I get what you're saying about trying to do something preventative to stop the violence from occurring, and that is a valid point. But it also completely ignores the violence itself. When you are faced with an imminent threat to your physical safety, that you can't run from...doing nothing is the worst thing you can do.
If your relative decided to actually do something to you or your family...would you have just stood there watching as he hurt them? Would you have just let him hurt you, all because rehab was a possible option?
That's the most extreme example of one-on-one violence. Them, or the ones you love. Them, or you.
As for fascists...even scaled up to the level of a country, it's the same choice. When the Nazis invaded a country, everyone living there was in one of two possible positions....you were either standing there watching your neighbors get rounded up, or you were the one getting rounded up.
If someone asks you to fight back to save yourself and your neighbors...no...they aren't the ones doing you harm. The invading force that's threatening your life, and the lives of those around you, is. You can either stand there and watch it happen, hoping it doesn't happen to you...or you can try to stop them before it does.
That's the threat of fascism.
No, because I'm not a pacifist. But what I'm saying is that this "with us or against us" argument is reductive and wrong. The question of whether pacifism is correct is a separate question from whether the "with us or against us" reasoning is valid.
I think you and I have very different understandings of what the term "forcibly conscript" involves. It's not "asking."
Not only that, but there are an enormous amount of assumptions that you're making here. Not every conflict is between fascists and non-fascists, as I said, WWII is an exception and you can't make a rule from that exception.
Provided that neither side is exterminationist in nature, the conflict may just be a question of which oppressor rules over you, and in that case, you are not fighting, "to save yourself or your neighbors" but to preserve the power of one oppressor over another.
WWI provides a very clear example of this, and historically, the pacifists had the second best take on that conflict, better that virtually anyone else in the West. Likewise in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Every one of those conflicts was framed as being "defensive" and "if we don't fight them over there, we'll be fighting them over here," again, pacifists were much more correct than anyone who participated in those conflicts.