That's like ~40% of the deaths in the current gaza war, except over just 2 days instead of 2 years.
Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct.
But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.
What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?
Which books say that?
I don’t think that’s a particularly established moral position.
I don’t know that anyone thinks a state’s violence against its citizens is less immoral. It’s more that countries are more hesitant to get militarily involved in the domestic affairs of another country because it would mean essentially declaring war against that state. But in a conflict between states, an outsider can more easily support one side militarily without declaring war against the other side.
That’s from my readings of philosophy.
But yeah, I do recognize the same sentiment as you found. I think philosophy itself is an answer: most philosophies explicitly champion dictatorships, under whitewashed terms. Ever heard something like “society is a big organ transcending individual needs”? We got it from Hegel.
Who holds this opinion?
>But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.
All of humanity cares less about when a government uses violence against its citizens than wars?
How can you possibly make this generalization when each internal conflict is different just like every war and how difficult it is to measure sympathy
I don't understand how you could make this claim.
"society is a big organ transcending individual needs”?"
How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?
Acceptable? It's more about the consequences or lack thereof, the incentives
History has shown that pretty much nothing happens to the regime unless two coalitions of countries invade from both sides simultaneously, and that's like, not going to happen
After studying Plato, Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, fascist ideologies, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This list is by no means exhaustive, just a few majors from the top of my head.
Sure, they didn’t just say “shoot people for power.” That’s a very shallow modern view. Instead, they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state, to society, to the group, the race, the nation, the economic class.
> How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?
The statement alone surely doesn’t. His philosophy does. For him, state is a sacred authority that transcends individual will.
Luckily we have largely moved past that view.
I think as a purely practical matter, moral outrage is shaped by who controls the information space. If you are a country being invaded, you probably have an organized, well funded communication department to tell your side. If you are an Iranian protestor, not only do you not have that, you don't even have internet at all because the state cut off all means of communication.
State authority exists in democracys therefore that's not an argument for dictatorships
>they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statism
Why is statism the only logical expression of extreme altruism? Jesus Christ was the ultimate altruist and is not a state. I can dedicate my life to only helping others over myself as an individual .
You're arguments and example are extremely poor because you showing evidence related to governments and states but your original claim was to one specific type of government, a dictatorship.
Jesus Christ wasn’t a politician so we don’t know. But we do know that religious politicians, past and modern, rarely respect freedom.
> you showing evidence related to governments and states
Not just states but statism, a system in which man’s life and work belong to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it. This provides the theoretical hardware for dictatorial control.
"No matter what your beliefs are"? Some people believe that Israel is trying to make the people in Gaza starve. If that was true, how would they not be a target?
Have we? I don't think the UN is going to invade Iran over this, especially after it went so well the last time with the US. And sanctions for Iran are already at the "you don't get anything" level, i don't think they can be ramped up any more. Morally sure, people now believe this is wrong while in the distant past they may have not cared, but practically not much has changed. The best we can hope for is an organized resistance that other large nations can funnel money and arms to.
If Aliceville attacks Bobtopia, there are existing military and civilian organisations in Bobtopia that can take foreign aid and use it effectively. The population of Bobtopia are generally going to support their homeland or at least be neutral, and are available for conscription so they'll do all the dying and international forces don't have to.
If Bobtopia just starts massacring its own people, then:
A) You have to dismantle those same military structures along with many of the civilian ones, and you're now in charge of building an entire government from the ground up.
B) Some of the population, e.g. the ones who were doing the massacring, are now shooting at you instead. Some of their victims are probably going to shoot at you too.
C) You can't exactly conscript Bobtopians during a civil war you started and have them be an effective fighting force, because they're not unified, don't have a government, and often hate you. If you try to work with Bobtopian militias, you'll find yourself embroiled in Bobtopian politics.
This all holds true regardless of who has to declare war on whom.
Strongly worded letters might not mean much, but at least they are on the right side of the issue, even if only symbolically.
And it’s not far fetched either: With a state‘s power structure ultimately resting upon (enough) support from society, there is an implicit legitimacy assumed in their actions.
The same can not be said about mass executions of citizens by an invading foreign power structure. Which is why you see the typical propaganda rush to make the victims look like perpetrators.
"We killed about 80,000 people by mistake" isn't the exculpation you think it is.
“By December 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry had reported that at least 70,117 people in Gaza had been killed. The vast majority of the victims were civilians, and around 50% were women and children. Compared to other recent global conflicts, the numbers of known deaths of journalists, humanitarian and health workers, and children are among the highest. Thousands more uncounted bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings. A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that traumatic injury deaths were undercounted by June 2024, while noting an even larger potential death toll when "indirect" deaths are included. The number of injured is greater than 171,000. Gaza has the most child amputees per capita in the world; the Gaza war caused more than 21,000 children to be disabled.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Russia has more than likely killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians since February 2022 but what is happening in Ukraine is not termed a genocide. Why? Because by and large it is Russian military personnel killing Ukrainian military personnel (and vice versa, of course). Why is what is happening in Gaza being termed a genocide? Because the Israeli military* is targeting and killing civilians. I'm not the one saying that, genocide scholars (among others) are the ones saying that.
“The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war. It encompasses mass killings, deliberate starvation, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and prevention of births. Other acts include blockading, destroying civilian infrastructure, destroying healthcare facilities, killing healthcare workers and aid-seekers, causing mass forced displacement, committing sexual violence, and destroying educational, religious, and cultural sites. The genocide has been recognised by a United Nations special committee and commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, multiple human rights groups, numerous genocide studies and international law scholars, and other experts.”
One cannot blockade an entire population and not be targeting the civilians in that population.
“An Israeli blockade heavily contributed to starvation and confirmed famine. As of August 2025, projections show about 641,000 people experiencing catastrophic levels and that "the number of people facing emergency levels will likely increase to 1.14 million". Early in the conflict, Israel cut off Gaza's water and electricity, but it later partially restored the water. As of May 2024, 84% of Gaza's health centres have been destroyed or damaged. Israel also destroyed numerous cultural heritage sites, including all 12 of Gaza's universities, and 80% of its schools. Over 1.9 million Palestinians—85% of Gaza's population—were forcibly displaced.”
* with the backing of primarily the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany
https://www.timesofisrael.com/edit-wars-over-israel-spur-rar... https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/1pvs1b6/as_a_wikipe...
Problem even discussed and acknowledged by Jimmy Wales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U_aQWaxOTE
This is about what dedicated murderous goverments can pull off using conventional means.
But actually, the largest mass killings in history have been always performed by States against their own citizens and not by enemy states:
- Great Chinese Famine (CCP): 20-30 million dead. - Holocaust (NSP): 6 million - Holodomor (USSR): 3-5 million - Congo mass killings (Colonial Regime + Private parties): 1-5 million - Cambodian genocide (Maoists): 2 million - Armenian genocide (Young Turk / CUP) ...
The list continues, and remains mainly dominated by assassination's of the State against their own citizens. Majorly communist and totalitarian regimes.
The death camps were a practical end result of how much manual labor was required to line thousands of people up and shoot them dead. That’s what they were doing in Poland, to such extremes that is was literally more efficient to build gas chambers.
Most dead Jews were not German citizens and neither were the Poles who died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
The Nazis were still killing people in other places at the same time, so the deadliest day is probably much much higher.
The scale of the Holocaust is hard to imagine. Even just looking at very specific suranmes, there are 23,000 killed with the surname Rosenberg, 12,000 with the surname Adler...
https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results-na...
Funny that you say that, because the reason Iran is under sanctions is that Israel wanted it. Obama had agreed to a lift on the sanctions in exchange for a strict control on Iran's nuclear program; Trump and his cohort of rabid zionists remote controlled from Tel Aviv reneged on the agreement and restored the sanctions.
And such move will not change anything in this behavior just make some israeli farmer (maybe still employing some palestinians/arabs) lose some income.
The "Where's Daddy" program in Israel tells the opposite story. They take anyone designated a target, track them home, then send rockets to their home to take out their family.
There's dozens of documented events like this happening to doctors working to save casualties, finding out their entire family was killed.
After seeing the highly targeted attacks in Iran that Israel was capable of, makes you think that targeting families of aid workers was the point.
"On 9 October 2023, Mr Yoav Gallant, Defence Minister of Israel, announced that he had ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza City and that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel” and that “everything [was] closed”. On the following day, Minister Gallant stated, speaking to Israeli troops on the Gaza border: “I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against . . . Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
This was the primary method for groups like the Hind Rajab foundation, to locate these war criminals while they were vacationing in other countries to have them arrested on war crime charges.
They didn't need orders, they simply were never told no.
Also, the measures concluded in the end of the document are about ensuring this was a motivational speech for soldiers that are going to fight Hamas terrorists, not a vague statement.
They are and so were doctors, journalists and such.
If not, I don't see him making that distinction, by stating to block all food from entering Gaza and dropping all restraints for attacking Hamas.
I did not had he impression there ever were restraints when dealing with Hamas. So restraints were always for bystanders. Which were dropped.
I'm quite frankly quite appalled at the amount of apologists in this thread. Warning civilians is not an excuse to genocide them.
Demonizing one side is neither rational, moral, nor conducive to resolving the situation.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...
This is ridiculous.
I don't want to be a Hamas apologist; they're certainly brutally cynical enough to use civilians as shields, but in the case of Gaza, what else would you expect them to do?
Urban areas are strong defensive structures, and 75% of Gaza is urban. Where else would you expect them to fight? It would be unrealistic to expect Hamas to take on the IDF in open farmland so they could be annihilated by Israeli air power.
I'm quite frankly quite appalled at the amount of apologists in this thread.
Supporters of Israel ignore inconvenient facts and patterns of behavior.
The target in Gaza is, very clearly, to get rid of the civilians. Not only in Gaza but in the West Bank.
They want to annex all that if they have to kill civilians they will kill civilians. In fact, they don't even hide it, just go to check the statements from members of the Israeli government.
That's the reality 'no matter what your beliefs are', by the way.
Also, you think Iran is only sanctioned because of their nuclear weapons program?
If party A is using a human shield, and party B decides to kill the human shield to get revenge on party A, then who is culpable for the death? I don't think it's an entirely obvious answer. I don't think anyone who can easily and automatically put all the blame on party A or B has really thought it through.
This is very basic stuff.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...