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 don't think Israel needs to literally kill everyone, but they do need to institute some sort of radical de-Palestinization. Go in, establish total martial law, destroy all mosques, convert the entire population to Bnei Noach, ban the Arabic language. These people got self-government and immediately voted a literal terrorist cell into power. Israel has no reason to treat Gaza any more leniently that the Allies treated Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
There are further differences that seem to support your theory.
Nazism was also denounced by practically the entire world, or at least by those parts of it that had much influence. Since Islam counts as a religion and all parts of the world that have much influence have agreed that religions require protection, Islam receives protection in most of the world whereas Nazism did not.
The other very obvious difference is that Nazism had maybe a decade to take root, whereas Islam has had a good 1300 years. Nobody but a handful of German children, and those only briefly, experienced Nazism as a natural fact of life, whereas Islam is in the soil and water of much of the world.
The two don't really compare at all. So I'd agree with you.
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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 don't think Israel needs to literally kill everyone, but they do need to institute some sort of radical de-Palestinization. Go in, establish total martial law, destroy all mosques, convert the entire population to Bnei Noach, ban the Arabic language. These people got self-government and immediately voted a literal terrorist cell into power. Israel has no reason to treat Gaza any more leniently that the Allies treated Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
There are further differences that seem to support your theory.
Nazism was also denounced by practically the entire world, or at least by those parts of it that had much influence. Since Islam counts as a religion and all parts of the world that have much influence have agreed that religions require protection, Islam receives protection in most of the world whereas Nazism did not.
The other very obvious difference is that Nazism had maybe a decade to take root, whereas Islam has had a good 1300 years. Nobody but a handful of German children, and those only briefly, experienced Nazism as a natural fact of life, whereas Islam is in the soil and water of much of the world.
The two don't really compare at all. So I'd agree with you.
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