JTarrou
1hr ago
It is not. It is illegal to do that in the country next door, to the degree anyone feels like enforcing that law. No one at Nuremberg was convicted of mistreating Germans. Once again, this is one of those sovereignty things. It is not against international law, and is outside the purview of outside governments, for a government to use force to move or eliminate any portion of their population. These are internal matters.
It's not against the law for Iran to kill protesters, though we may use that for political advantage. It's not against the law for Hutus to genocide Tutsis, which is why no one did anything except the Tutsis. Where things get dicey is when people are being killed in an argument over who is the sovereign power. In those cases, it matters who wins militarily. Might does not make right, but it does make sovereignty, and sovereignty has certain rights.
JTarrou
18hr ago
It doesn't. It's just confirmation bias. Plenty of countries have some amount of "military policy" about displacing groups of people for any number of reasons. This is not new, it is not distinct, it isn't even illegal. It's part of the "sovereignty" that allows countries to make deals about territory and absorb population transfer.
JTarrou
21hr ago
All colonial partitions had displacement and some amount of killing and chaos. See also: the balkans, India/Pakistan, the US etc. As these things go, taking the worst possible interpretation of the documents here, it's barely on the scale. When India was partitioned, anywhere from half a million to three million people died or were killed and twelve million or so were made refugees.
Once again, we're supposed to care because jews act exactly like everyone else when they have to form a state, only a bit less so. States are force and violence. They cannot be created nor destroyed without force and violence. Some people have to win, and some have to lose. The alternative is the status quo.
A lot of british loyalists got run out of the states, their land stolen, and many were just killed. The Revolutionary war went on some years after Yorktown, ugly local fighting crushing the rest of the loyal colonial Americans, and subjecting them to the new revolutionary order.
This is all thin gruel. None of it creates a legal right of return, any more than Benedict Arnold had a right of return to the US. Any more than muslim refugees' grandchildren have a right to their ancestral home in India. Any more than the Hindu refugees' grandchildren have a right to enter Pakistan. This is how partition and population transfer work.
The Arabs ran all teh jews out of their countries, Israel took them. Israel ran a minority of the arabs out of their new country, and the arab countries did not take them. That's the real difference here. It's the hereditary refugee status of the Palestinians, and the refusal of their part of the partitioned territories to take them, and the failure of their own politics to produce a government that can even negotiate with the Israelis.
JTarrou
1d ago
Trump is really going for the hat trick in his first year. I'm ambivalent on the long-term wisdom of the military operations, time will tell. But, at least in the short term, this stuff looks very good for Trump, and Hegseth, despite being panned as a lightweight, is at least delegating like an absolute champ. The first and second Iran operations and Venezuela are some of the wildest operations to be successfully pulled off by any world power, ever. And they're all in the first year.
My theory is that Trump does things that everyone else does, just louder, and more obvious. This dispels the illusions in some ways, makes the machinery of superpower status too plain. Who knows what the long term effects will be?
Trump is one of those guys Dan Carlin talks about having a "reality distortion field" around them. Historical figures who warped their societies and history itself around their ideas and goals. Ironically, it worked best on Carlin himself.
JTarrou
2d ago
As with any country, it varies widely based on region, neighborhood, class etc. In the middle-class districts of the major cities with squishy lefty politics like all middle-class districts of all major cities? Yeah, women about, very loose interpretations of hijab etc. In the Iranian analog to Oklahoma or Alabama, not so much.
The pro-western, pro-israeli, pro-shah groups of Iranian society have always been around, their more vociferous members live in the west now. They are influential, because they are the economic middle classes, and secular elites. But they are not a majority of the country by any stretch. As with most countries, the vast majority of the population is lower and working class, more religious, more nationalistic, more bigoted against outsiders than the college professors and the accountants. And generally harder on their womenfolk.
There is a very direct comparison next door in Turkey, where the same western-oriented secular modernizers have the same political outlook, despite differences in culture and religion to Iran. It's just that Ataturk was better at it than Reza Shah, and so when the religious nationalistic backlash came, it stayed within the bounds set by his government, rather than producing a revolution.
JTarrou
3d ago
I'm happy to stipulate that the Israelis and a distinct population of western jews both punch above their weight class in terms of media and political lobbying. But it's a big world, and there's a lot of weight classes. The motte is that jews are disproportionately influential. The bailey is that they outweigh realpolitik involving actual heavyweights like China.
There's also significant disagreement even among Israelis about policy, and obviously between western jews and Israelis, so the effects of their influence and lobbying is a bit muddled.
JTarrou
4d ago
It is wildly intolerant to you that a jewish person own a slate of failing media companies and niche AWFL providers? Hamas has a huge western media slate. So do the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and the Chinese and Koreans and Germans and Russians etc. etc. Basically everyone with a billion dollars to burn is using it to try to get five billion dollars out of the US government.
Rishi Sunak, former British PM, is now on the board of Microsoft and Anthropic, and an advisor to Goldman Sachs. Is that perfidious Albion?
Gerhardt Schroeder (sp?), former German PM is now on the board of Russian energy monopoly Rosneft.
God only knows how many corporate boards all the various pardoned Bidens sit on.
If this state of affairs is wildly intolerable to you, I suggest you go through the groups/countries alphabetically. That way we can see how many you left out before you get down to "J".
That's a pretty high heat-to-light ratio of a headline.
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