“If you kill a killer the number of killers in the world is unchanged”
“So I should kill multiple killers”
“Hol’ up”
I've wondered since I was a youngin
Submitted 3 weeks ago by s@piefed.world to [deleted]
https://media.piefed.world/posts/zy/r0/zyr05XP2qwnpvRm.jpeg
Comments
Stern@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
“Tonight’s the night….”
-Needlessly creepy breakfast montage plays-
Koarnine@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Hol’ up Wait a minute Kill that fash Put a brick in it
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
sips tea Ah … come, sit with me for a moment. The tea is hot, and such questions are best answered slowly, with a warm belly.
It is natural to feel anger when one has been wronged. Even the gentlest river becomes violent when dammed for too long. But we must be careful, my friend, not to mistake the force of our feelings for the wisdom of our actions.
You ask why one should not kill their oppressors. The answer is not because they are strong, nor because they deserve mercy, nor because the world would punish you. It is because when you choose to do evil in the name of justice, you quietly invite that evil to live inside you. And once it is settled there, it does not leave easily.
You may believe you are striking only your enemy, but violence has a poor sense of direction. It spills into the soul, changing the person who wields it. The moment you decide that a “good reason” excuses a cruel act, you teach your heart that cruelty can be justified. Soon, it will begin to justify itself.
Oppression is a heavy chain, but hatred forges a second one, but this time around your own spirit. If you destroy another to feel free, you may discover that freedom never arrived, and only the destruction remained. True victory is not standing over your enemy’s body. True victory is refusing to become what hurt you. It is choosing a path that allows you to look at yourself in the mirror without turning away. The right reasons lose their meaning when they are carried by wrong actions. Like tea made with poisoned water, no matter how fine the leaves, the cup will only bring sickness.
So no - do not kill your oppressors. Not for their sake, but for yours. Because the most important battle is not against them, but against the part of yourself that believes goodness can be built from blood.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Nah, fuck that. What are they supposed to do? Roll over and continue being oppressed? End your oppression not just for your sake but for the sake of everyone else whom they may oppress too.
orwellianlocksmith@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, those in power always preach peace to preserve the status quo. But what about the suffragettes? The black Panthers? What about the Italian resistance? What about the Warsaw ghetto uprising?
Sometimes it’s not about our souls, not about our own psychical wellbeing. It’s about the liberation of all. About justice. About making the bastards pay. About showing the world that there’s a limit to what people can be made to do and suffer.
Violence is the last resort of the desperate, no doubt. It’s not fun. It does taint. It’s fucking tragic.
But we are living in increasingly desperate times. Who can deny that? And its just not about us as individuals anymore. That’s the message here.
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is beautiful and I want to agree with you.
Mostly I disagree that violence taints your soul permanently. I believe it is this line of thinking that has led the repetition of violence throughout history. Those who wish to do harm are never treated with strongly enough and so they persist. They are readily allowed access to others to harm as they please. Perhaps we can stave off states doing it with the right government types but there will be those in the general populace that desire harm for others and they will strive to upend that government at all times.
My opinion is: oppression deserves reciprocal violence an order of magnitude above and immediately.
CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I disagree that violence taints your soul permanently.
This depends upon your own morals, personal justifications, and probably a ton of other factors.
I think the idea is that it’s something you are going to have to live with, one way or another. You might hurt an innocent by accident, do more damage than intended (most people would struggle to live with having killed someone, for example), or even harm yourself irreparably. You might cause people to look at you differently, you might have the wrong information, you might change the course of your life permanently.
Violence is a very complicated subject, but perpetrators of it are, indeed, always marked in some way by it, just like every other experience you have.
Silic0n_Alph4@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Cor, it’s a good job Hitler killed himself instead of somebody having to live with that evil, init?
Furbag@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks Uncle. I’ll meditate on your wisdom.
Cargon@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Can’t kill your oppressors if they kill you first! You won’t have to worry about ectoplasm-based chains when you’re dead!
maga_is_death@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is a fantasy land take that has no basis in reality or human history. At some point, it becomes a matter of physical well being for yourself and those around you. Telling people to just suck it up and take a beating/killing for the benefit of their “soul”…my god. Rejoin the real world buddy. It can be a scary place, but at least it’s real, not whatever bizarro world you are speaking from.
You let bullies walk on you, and they will keep doing it. The only thing that will stop them is letting them know that they will pay a real price if they keep at it. Trying to spin this “peace at all costs” worldview is intellectually dishonest and counterproductive.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Iroh is not a pacifist. He is just very selective about the use of deadly force.
Iroh tries to teach zuko how to kill his enemies unflinchingly with “cold-blooded” lightning, and when that fails, teaches zuko to redirect lightning, which he knows is, and makes clear to be, explicitly deadly force, “to turn your enemy’s energy against them”. He acknowledges that, if he were to defeat Ozai, it would be “brother killing a brother”, because there was no realistic world in which Ozai could be contained without leading to his death. He accepts that his granddaughter “is crazy and needs to go down”.
When he chooses to take back Ba Sing Se, does he go in covertly and retake the puppet state from the occupying troops by forcing a surrender or a diplomatic solution? No, his opening move is to generate the largest ball of fire possible, then hurl it at the titanic wall, which not only does the camera show us has many people behind it, but which Iroh is ready to obliterate, soldiers and all, sight unseen. He does what must be done. Violence is his last resort, but he clearly has no moral compunction against using violence against the violent. Deadly force is met with a redirecting blow, carrying that same energy or more. In the first season, when he believes the fate of the world hangs in the balance, he threatens and uses deadly force “tenfold” that which is exacted upon the moon spirit. There is nowhere in the show that Iroh says that death is never the solution. The only reason we don’t see the deaths of the many soldiers occupying Ba Sing Se at Iroh’s hands (as well as all of the other times he has caused soldiers to be buried under their own boulders, breathed fire into their faces, or otherwise used violent infernos to defeat enemies) is that it was depicted in a kids’ show. The only person in the series who maintains that deadly force is never the answer is Aang. Aang only manages it in the finale by Deus Ex Machina because he’s the chosen one (and the protagonist of a kids’ show).
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also the video does make a good point that “winning by being good” is inherently tied to Western thoughts/culture and Iroh may have a different perspective being Eastern coded. And also being like, an ex general, and using violence at the end of the show…
Rooskie91@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Cycles of violence.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The price of empire
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
[deleted]queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.
wpb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is silly. Everyone knows, historically, you stop opressors by asking nicely. Maybe go into the street in a funny costume or something, organize a singalong. Violence is what the baddies do.
lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Follow Albert’s Path:
epicthundercat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Naw write then a STRONGLY worded letter. That would have fixed Hitler and Mussolini.
sureshot0@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Write a strongly worded letter, and then tell your nonspeaking autistic manservant that you want to become a superhero. You can pretend to be a cowardly dandy and your assistant can pretend to be deaf with an intellectual disability.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Signtist@bookwyr.me 3 weeks ago
There’s a reason it’s pushed so hard, and it’s because people in power don’t want to lose the golden goose that is American apathy. They can oppress us as much as they want, and we think having the moral superiority of taking it on the cheek makes us strong. It doesn’t.
lena@gregtech.eu 3 weeks ago
I hate this trope, such unoriginal writing
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s Cold War propaganda.
KombatWombat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Tropes can easily become cliches if done poorly, but in essence they’re just common concepts in storytelling. The idea of having a protagonist struggling with finding what lines they won’t cross, and accepting what consequences result, can make for a really compelling internal conflict. And having a no-kill rule is often a practical one for longer series in particular.
Imagine if Batman’s rogue gallery couldn’t be re-used unless the writers had them always be able to get away when their plans are foiled. When Batman instead sends them to jail, they can be shelved for a while without making Batman look very selectively incompetent at actually catching criminals. Instead, it’s justified as a principle that he upholds, while giving the writer opportunities to also show character growth for villains. And if you argue he should focus on the greater good by permanently eliminating threats, then it can be viewed as a character flaw that gives him depth.
s@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
He’s interacted with the trolly, now he’s responsible for the one death and must be punished accordingly
Enkrod@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
True, the guy who killed Hitler was basically Hitler himself.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 weeks ago
The good version of this is in Transformers One.
spoilers
Orion Pax and D-16 just lead a revolution to overthrow the state, and are deciding what to do with the old head of state. D-16 wants to kill him and burn this motherfucker to the ground. But Orion reminds him that they’re creating a new government with their actions right now, and they need to embody the principles they want to see. D-16 doesn’t want to hear it because he’s angry. Orion gets in the way, and D-16 shoots him.
And that’s how Orion Pax gets the Matrix of Leadership and becomes Optimus Prime. By thinking about the future and what sort of world his actions are creating.
Schmoo@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
It’s the difference between defense and vengeance. In Transformers One they had already defeated the big bad and had the support of the other transformers, so killing him then was an unnecessary act of revenge. It’s different when you’re still fighting and the big bad’s death could make a difference in the outcome.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s okay. Become the monster so that they can feel the same fear for its safety as the rest of us. Force the empathy.
Saapas@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
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Fucked
s23b@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
That’s about the least Iroh thing to say. Congrats for the quality shitpost I guess.
BambiDiego@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It’s not the least Iron thing to say. Even he said “Azula is crazy, and she needs to go down.”
Maybe not kill, but definitely take down and away from wider society to live in a dark, small place.
s@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
It’s Iroh-nic, don’t you think?
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Do you think that the white lotus took back Ba Sing Se without killing anyone with those 100-foot-tall walls of fire? No, you don’t expel an occupying force by just cutting the tips off of some spears. Avatar shows us the least-bloody parts of the recapture, but do not mistake Iroh’s depiction in a kids’ series for pacifism. Iroh is very clear, vocally, that violence is necessary in some cases. He teaches zuko to redirect lightning to send it back at the person who launched it, as he says “to use your opponent’s energy against them”. He prefers nonlethal methods, but that doesn’t mean he refuses to employ deadly force. He and his friends use fire against enemy metal tanks, which in reality would boil the soldiers alive. They use rocks to stop up the holes through which benders were actively shooting fire, which would rebound and fill the tank with that same conflagration. Those tanks get shot up hundreds of feet in the air and have hard landings on top of one another, which would not only concuss anyone inside to death, but would crush all of the tanks on the bottom. Iroh literally starts the liberation of Back Sing Se with a fire blast large enough to completely obliterate the titanic wall, as well as everyone behind it, in an instant. He doesn’t know how many soldiers lie behind that wall. He just destroys it, sight-unseen.
Hlodwig@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Bruh, you dont even have to use violence, if everyone stopped working, paying taxes and consuming anything that the bare minimum for survival, the country would collapse in less than a month.
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
How many times exactly has that happened in history? Revolutions are famously not peaceful. Not that they shouldn’t happen, they absolutely should, but the people in power don’t just go “oh shucks, guess I’ll give it all up!”
Hlodwig@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Almost once a year in France, global strikes that forces the government to roll back any time it tries to do something slightly too conservative.
Its called balance between power of the state and power of the peoples. In the US, peoples are just dumb sheeps.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
“But I can’t just KILL Ozai! wHaT aBoUt wHaT tHe mOnKs tAuGhT mE?” -The “hero” of the story lmfao
(yes I get it, it’s supposed to be a kids show, but still…)
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
evol@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Korra is also like extremely lib pilled (THe entire message is like “Extremism is bad folks”)
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They painted Anarchists as bad. But I say KILL THE EARTH MONARCH LMFAO. (Didn’t even watch the whole thing, got too boring, so I just read the wikis)
marcos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Historically, almost all social progress has come from stopping before you kill your oppressor and making him reorganize the system in a way that works better. Just killing the oppressor usually only gives you another one a short while later.
Also historically, a small minority of oppressors ever accepted a truce where they reorganize the system. And killing the ones that didn’t let people run the dice again with a new one.
gustofwind@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The oppressors are well armed and well organized through the time and battle tested bureaucratic institutions of the state
seggturkasz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Like we never tried this shit before… So who is the one deciding who gets taged as oppressor? Designate a “benevolent” dictator, or you vote on it, or just give everybody guns and make it a free for all?
Do you murder the oppressor’s children as well because they benifited from their perents behavior?
Where do you draw the line, who is an oppressor? Your boss, the cop doing her job, the train ticket expecting dude, someone stoping desperet people from shoplifting from her store?
What is wrong with you people? This is how some of the worst atrocities start.
khaleer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I mean, stripping oppressor of his power and letting him live “normally” is the cruelest thing you can do for such pitty people.
Janx@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
If we’re fine with resorting to violence to get what we want, we’re no better than them. If you kill a murderer, the number of murderers in the world remains the same…
BUT, this doesn’t mean we should never, ever resort to force as a final, last, desperate act, but only when there’s no other option.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Because I can’t afford to even travelbfar enough to give them a visit, for starters.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Because they can’t suffer if they’re dead.
Etterra@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Because I’ll end up getting arrested. I’m not lucky enough for a quick death.
E_coli42@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
motherfuck turning the other cheek
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Okay here’s an opinion that’ll get me down voted to oblivion but here goes:
Violence is like symptom management. If you’re hurting, seriously injured etc. get that morphine. But keep using it and it becomes dependency. It’s a short term solution to one specific problem and rarely solves the underlying causes. Unless you can do that, you’ll be back to using violence as symptom management. Only the next time you’ll need more of it, just like heroin.
wpb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Famously, the human rights gained by movements using violent tactics, such as the abolitionists, suffragettes, the civil rights movement, the ANC, were all very short-lived. Hollow victories, all.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Are you being sarcastic? Because we’re still reaping the benefits of all of those. Violently gained interracial marriage got legalized at 25% public support while peacefully gained gay marriage only got legalized at 65% popular support. Peacefully won trans right are more fragile than violently won labor rights.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Haiti should have just patiently waited to gain their independence.
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 2 weeks ago
No wonder states rarely solve problems! Their heroin usage is symptom management! /s
Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That’s an apt metaphor.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I get what you’re saying, where you need more solutions to a problem than just violence if you want long term change, but the metaphor you used implies that violence should not be considered.
Violence isn’t the answer, it’s an answer, one of many.