Purposely killing civilians with improvised bombs or bullets is not less humane than using drones and hypersonic missiles to kill them in their homes and destroy their utilities all while they are sleeping. Or targeting emergency relief crews responding to a missile strike with another missile strike. The end result is still dead innocents. Russia kills its critics transnationally using chemical weapons and radiation poisoning. If you criticize the Russian government in Russia, you’re killed. If you’re gay you’re jailed. Women are losing their rights and protections.
Authoritarianism in the name of God (Islamism) or Nation (Ruscism) serves the same purpose. To subjugate others through violence.
It sucks that we are so crosswise with Russia that it can be hard to offer condolences or feel pity when they suffer a cruelty. Russia might have had it coming, like Israel did and the US does, but the people getting murdered aren't the ones making policy.
Its not really a contest. Russia has terrible practices but ISIS is still worse. Like the things you mentioned… its still worse to be gay or a woman in ISIS controlled territory and no rational gay person or woman would choose ISIS controlled territory over Russia. I would much rather be dealing Russian authorities, as bad as they are, then ISIS authorities.
I’d rather not deal with either. Whether they’re threatening to behead me or nuke me, they’re not rational actors.
Social media, specifically Twitter, is being overrun with misinformation. Now the current trending story is the shooters were poor migrants from Tajikistan who were offered large sums of money to go on a killing spree.
Russian propaganda has already put the blame on Israel somehow. And unironically I already called Russia a colonizer on the first page.
Would you support Russia bombing Dushanbe into dust and then re-occupying Tajikistan in retaliation? Because that is the next step using the Palestine Israel logic. It’s also par for Putin’s playbook. See Chechnya.
The people who died were people just like us. Even though they’re living under an authoritarian regime doesn’t change the common humanity of them. If anything it makes them more of victims as they live in a country where they can’t speak out against their government and are paying the price for the actions of their government.
This again gets to something I’ve been saying. We don’t like what Russia has been doing in Ukraine so we dehumanize the Russians even though most of the Russian troops dying are poor conscripts. We don’t like the Palestinians so we dehumanize them even though most of them aren’t Hamas fighters and many dying are children. Here in America we are seeing the similar rhetoric towards those migrants calling them “animals” out to “poison the blood of the country”.
Humanity has dehumanized others throughout history to justify killing indiscriminately. We have international laws to curb these tendencies. However, some today still disregard international laws, including terrorist groups like ISIS and Hamas, dictators such as Putin, and the current leadership and military of the Israeli government.
