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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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And that this action makes the abduction, rape, torture and murder of over 1000 civilians a legitimate act of warfare and retaliation?

No. It was totally a crime against humanity, an atrocity. It totally justified occupying Gaza and ruling it as an occupation force for a generation. (It arguably did not justify starving Gaza, though.)

The question how much sponsors should be held responsible for their proxy forces is not as clear as you make it out to be, though.

Consider Operation Condor, where the US intelligence community sponsored violence against left-wing activists (some of whom were doubtlessly inclined to violence, while others were clearly not), violating their human rights in the process. Obviously the US did know what was going on and could have exerted pressure, which places them in a similar role as Iran wrt Hamas. Would it be fair to call the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance the part of the US military that functionally exists to murder Argentinian intellectuals, the implication being that attacking GIs stationed Germany is fine because US (proxy) forces are already committing acts of war against you?

I think no country in the world really follows consistent hard and fast rules about what kind of aid to enemies preserves neutrality (like Europe giving missiles to Ukraine) and what kinds of aid is an act of war (like providing nukes to Cuba, which Cuba then launches against the US).

I do not mourn Soleimani, but I think that his assassination did little to diminish the capabilities of Iranian proxies but contributed to further escalation, which ended up hurting civilians in Israel, Gaza and Iran. (One could also debate why he was not killed by Israel giving that the proxies he was coordinating were mostly murdering Israeli citizens.)

Sometimes violence is the best option. You gun down the bad guy and save the day. Sometimes it leads to utter disaster. By my reckoning, Franz Ferdinand was a piece of shit monarchist whom I would not have mourned. But killing them did not solve the relationship between continental Europe and monarchs, at least not until millions had died, so him not getting killed would have been of instrumental value. I feel similarly about the late Ayatollah.