kwackers wrote:pwa wrote:I wonder if that is the defence they wish to use. Ignorance, I suppose.
Except it's not ignorance.
It's not much different to flat earth, folk look for alternative "facts" and those facts are conveyed very convincingly - probably more so than the truth because when you remove the need to tell the truth you can bolster your lies with almost anything that suits.
Are ISIS evil? Almost certainly, particularly at the top because they're playing a game who's rules they've created.
Their troops on the ground? Much less so I reckon, there's a lot of brainwashing and disinformation being used to get them on board.
I think you make some good points.
If you identify with the civilian victims in Syria and are shown some of the horrors perpetrated on them, whilst at the same time looking at the West's indifference or complicity, it isn't such a huge leap to accepting that those fighting that regime are the goodies. Rather than compare them to the easily mocked flat Earthers, I'd have chosen the Western Communists who were defending Stalin long after the evidence of his atrocities was readily available.
I was to an extent playing Devil's Advocate by making the comparison between the jihadists and the International Brigade, it's always a bit daft to compare events from different eras. You could spend all day listing the ways they're not the same, even then you would still be left with some parallels and one of those is the divided public opinion on those who fought. At the end of the Spanish Civil War there were plenty trotting out the "They made their bed..." attitude, they'd have been happy to see Franco deal with them as illegal mercenaries. In papers released a few years ago MI5 kept tabs on many who returned, some had trouble getting employment, some thought their military careers in WWII were blighted by their history...
There's also parallels between Franco and Assad, in that the West keeps changing it's position of support and opposition, depending on who it is challenging those leaders, the British assisted both at different times. Assad's strategy of labelling all his opponents as jihadists worked, even when the figures showed most weren't.
It's not simple, any of it, a young woman got caught up in it and who knows why. I'm not suggesting she should be welcomed back with open arms, neither do I think she is evil and should be left to rot. The right approach IMO is somewhere between those two and it should be for those with a better understanding than those reading media reports to decide where.
A little off topic, but anyone looking for a flavour of what's been going on is Syria could watch "For Sama" I saw it at a screening a couple of months ago, it's now available on C4.
