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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.

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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?

On the other hand... Japan surrendered to the US! How were the Japanese able to swallow their pride in the face of total nuclear annihilation and decide that bending their knee to the West and adopting all of their customs was better than going down in a blaze of glory? But yet the Palestinians find this utterly unthinkable?

Because Hirohito was more sensible than any member of Hamas (and perhaps any Palestinian).

Did Hirohito start the war? He certainly made the surrender decision but did he decide to launch Pearl Harbor?

Yeah, he signed off on it about a week beforehand, and was clearly on board.

See also the “Early Showa period” section of this article. He was actively involved in managing war plans, though surely not to the extent of Hitler or Mussolini.

After the bombs his answer to the question ‘what if they refuse to keep you as emperor, will we fight on? ‘ was ‘of course’. I always have to think of this ridiculous man when people talk of the mythical ‘noblesse oblige’. Here was a man considered a god, whose subjects were killing themselves and others by the millions for him, who could not even take one ounce of responsibility – think of others for one second. Had he never heard of suicide?

It’s human I guess – if you tell a man he is noble, he is godly, he will believe it – and question his actions even less than he would have otherwise. His instinct will never be to turn towards the ragged masses and ‘give back’ (As far as he knows, he did not receive anything from them, so he couldn’t anyway) or sacrifice anything. These strictly hierarchical relationships are purely one-way.

Ever notice that, as, you rise through a company , both your salary and the respect you’re getting increase simultaneously ? It’s not like your superiors help you more when you take out the trash because noblesse oblige. It’s not complicated, the lower on the layer cake you are, the more shit you take. And Mr. Hito was never taking and always giving.

Because to a monarchist, the king or emperor is not the same as a CEO. They are, literally, the soul of the country. Even if many Japanese people die, as long as the emperor is in place Japan remains. So ‘the emperor should step down for the sake of the people’ is nonsensical, it’s saying that you should accept absolute defeat in exchange for not-absolute defeat.

As @dr_analog notes, this is how you manage to make huge changes to the culture of the country without mass uprisings. The emperor is still in place and has publicly given his assent to the new direction. There is continuity in the most visible way. Japan is still Japan.

Obvious solution to maintain the institution while holding the man responsible is suicide. Beyond the man, I woud question why such an institution who failed and was largely responsible for the militaristic and anti-democratic turn of japan should have been maintained in the first place. They made liars of “unconditional surrender’ to maintain this joke of an institution. I’m sure a continuation of the nazi party in germany would have done wonders at stability and limiting riots and such, but hey, they’re the ones who made a mess of it all in the first place, and so did he.

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