this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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This is a perfect example of the kind of passively fascist mystical thinking that we westerners are trained to engage in, where Great Man Theory meets Triumph of the Will. What's so special about about these guys? Practically speaking, they're a hit squad who killed an old man in his house, that's their military specialty. But because that old man was Osama Bin Laden, AKA the Voldemort of the early 2000s, killing him must have taken something special. After all, he just walked out of the Afghan mountains one day, waved his Great Man Wand, and made 9/11 happen. Such a powerful and mysterious sorcerer of history could only be taken down by an even more powerful group of heroes, like the heckin Avengers. If Seal Team whatever managed to break into his house and shoot him in the face, then they must be those heroes. They killed a powerful named character after all, what chance does a bunch of nameless Chinese missiles have?
You’re absolutely right. The weird and stupid fascistic thought process to rationalize that your guys are superior as not just soldiers, but as human beings to enemy guys never fails to appear in any western discussion of conflict. It’s the same logic that online Rhodesia and IOF freaks (big fanbase overlap, not at all shocking) use all of the time lmao. “My team’s guys are super soldiers who are also cool and epic! Meanwhile my WEAK enemy can’t even compare!” Ok so like… what makes your enemy weak? If your enemies are so weak, why do you seem to obsess over and insist that you have and need the most elite soldiers in history? How do you know they are elite if they only fight weak enemies?
Russia-Ukraine did a decent job at proving these clowns on both sides of the conflict wrong. Every elite soldier or unit or weapon we hear about entering the battle that ”will definitely change the tide” becomes just as likely to end up as worm food as the average soldier, with no visible impact on the conflict.
Dehumanising the enemy, literally talking about them as if they don't qualify as human, is an absurdly common approach. It's clearly an effective way of 'other'ing, but it leads to completely unrealistic attitudes like you describe. There's a line that gets crossed between bigging up your team/talking shit about the enemy, and simply losing grasp of reality.
I do think it's an inherently fascistic process, and it's something I still sadly see in the left, including Hexbears, when talking about terrible people and class enemies. Obviously some are speaking in metaphor, but not everyone.
I think you're right about it being a reactionary tendency. While it's good for morale in small doses, I think it sort of...anaerobically metabolizes away your ability to engage with reality. Like in the absence of fresh data, fantasy begins to feed on itself and produce ever-stranger ideological metabolites
When all your national heroes are cartoon characters, all your plans start to read like a looney tunes episode