naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
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Notes -
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
One of the most edifying experiences of my youth was an academic assignment in the GWOT era, when we were instructed to pick a terrorist group and study its formation and evolution. I knew everyone else would pick something Islamic, so I decided to pick something else to stand out, and I settled on Sri Lanka. For about 33 years (1976 to 2009), Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, where the two sides could be neatly demarcated into separate ethnicities, separate religions, and separate languages - not dissimilar to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Tamils were represented by the LTTE, which was a terrorist organization and a separatist group seeking to carve out an ethnostate from Tamil-dominated regions of the country. But the LTTE was also a remarkably sophisticated pseudo-state; most terrorist organizations don't have their own navy, air force, or intelligence apparatus, which are all things that the LTTE put together during their war against the Sri Lankan state.
I won't rehash the disputes and grievances of the war, since they are predictable and your imagination can reliably fill in the details from what you know of other ethnic conflicts, including the one in Israel. All race wars are eventually the same. Long story short is that tens of thousands of people died on both sides, and numerous foreign actors including the US, Norway, India, the EU, and the UN tried to intervene and broker a peace, and the conflict settled into a cycle of atrocities->diplomacy->ceasefires->new atrocities->new diplomacy->new ceasefires, on and on. And then in late 2006, the Sri Lankan government essentially said "fuck this", and decided to wage concentrated, merciless, full-throated war against the Tamils. They brought out the kinds of heavy weapons that you usually reserve for wars against foreign states, and they used them without hesitation, and with very little regard for civilian-combatant distinctions. They killed and killed and killed until the LTTE was begging for a ceasefire, which they ignored, and then kept killing until the LTTE was ground into the dirt, their leadership massacred, their leaderships' families massacred, everything destroyed - until the LTTE had no capacity to fight or do anything anymore, at which point the Sri Lankans declared victory, and the war was over.
None of this was "legal" or "ethical" or "moral". Countless crimes against humanity were committed. But the war was over, and has shown no signs of returning in the almost 15 years since its conclusion. No more bombs in public places, no more midnight massacres on farms and villages, no more burning streets. What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
I understand that it's difficult to convince Jews that genocide is the answer. But if Gaza had been erased from the world years ago, everyone from squalling infants to doddering grandfathers, you would not have this problem. We used to know these things - all the population transfers and ethnic cleaning that took place after World War I and World War II were done with the understanding that you cannot expect certain groups to coexist in the same space peacefully for long, and that an atrocity in the present may prevent a greater atrocity in the future. We pretend to know better now, and to what end? To keep money flowing to NGOs, and hand out peace prizes to each other?
I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
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