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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4247 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

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The other night my father rhetorically asked "I feel like asking Netanyahu, 'when has a terrorist group ever been defeated militarily?"

I immediately said "In Sri Lanka in 2009?" The reason it occurred to me was because of @CriticalDuty's write-up here.

Naturally, my father immediately commenced moving the goalposts of the question.

Out of curiosity, are there any other recent examples of terrorist groups being defeated militarily?

ISIS has been largely destroyed militarily. Even if it's not literally completely gone, it's a far cry from what it was at its height. The example of ISIS is also frequently invoked in Israel regarding what Israel should aim for with Hamas.

Marawi crisis? Featuring the Islamic MILF.

I learned about this from seeing a lecture PowerPoint with the cursed phrase, “105mm Gun as Direct Fire Weapon.”

Islamic MILF

Does Mia Khalifa have children?

Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.

Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.

Similar kind of highly motivated argumentation to how you cannot possibly stop illegal immigration by protecting your borders.

Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.

I wonder whether I do the same. Are there any standard conservative / libertarian / reactionary arguments that follow the same pattern?

Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:

  • There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.

  • The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.

  • Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.

  • It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.

Vast amounts. Forceful arguments based on tradition, existing law, the way things are usually done, a nebulous yet permanent human nature that can never be overcome, the obvious benefits of the status quo and the horrendous costs of change. It’s somewhat less hypocritical for conservatives to use these arguments though*. Besides, they are not entirely devoid of merit, in a limited form.

edit: * although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

I don't see how it's hypocritical, they want change to the extent that it returns things to what they deem the ideal status quo, not that even all conservatives can agree on which year that was. You might as well call liberals/progs hypocritical for not switching out the entire legal code on a monthly basis, at which point the word ceases to mean anything.

I'd say that conservatives want change to optimize toward a status quo which matches nostalgia instead of history, which is why the reaction to progression is usually reactionary. "Things were better when [annoying/dangerous/good-thing-breaking new thing] hadn't moved my cheese."

Of course, now that conservatives have Noticed the thing which steals skins eating nostalgia and shitting rainbows, and have named it Wokeness, the status quo is considered the only defensible position.

An argument I hear a lot in conservative circles is "gun control just means the only people with guns will be hardened criminals". I'm not saying this is never true, but it's a simple fact that there are many countries with strict gun control and in which even hardened criminals have a remarkably hard time getting their hands on a gun.

Hamas isn't really a terrorist group in the way that the IRA was, though. They're the government of a (previously) largely independent polity that ran its own foreign and domestic policy. The relationship between the IRA and the government of the Irish republic was often hostile or at least unsympathetic, even if many citizens weren't.

When it comes to Palestinians in general, Israel does engage in a lot of non-military efforts to try to limit terrorism. Some are flawed or counteracted by other things like the settlers, but most of the 'classic' civil counterinsurgency playbook (large scale economic investment, jobs, work permits, scholarships for students, medical treatment etc.) against insurgent militants is implemented in the West Bank.

It's easier both for domestic consumption and international relations (both with Western nations, which have themselves dealt with a lot of Islamist terrorism, and other Arab nations, who don't want to frame it as a 'war against Israel' that they might be pressured to take part in) for Israel to call the invasion of Gaza a counter-terror operation.

I think El-Salvador is a good example, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists, but the difference is nominal for all intents and purposes. If El-Salvador can within months with their shitty military..

I think that question unnecessarily invokes history and empiricism when it needn't be, because the question most normies actually mean to ask is "is it even possible?".

The answer to that is, if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan can be defeated, so can some rag tags in the desert. It's just that modern powers don't have the stomach to carry out a merciless campaign (high civilian toll) followed by prolonged occupation/brainwashing.

I don't know if Islamist terrorists in particular are a special case or not. My galaxy brained shower thought is that the Quran and the resulting set of potential downstream belief systems will almost always produce something that approximates Islamist/Jihadist terrorists, they never had a cultural moderation of the likes of the Nw Testament and the religion/scripture->lore is far too political to have any meaningful distinction of Church and State even in the space of conceivable ideas.

There are meaningful differences, though—I'm sure they'd immediately point to the palestinians thinking of themselves as a different people than the Israelis (which I would guess wouldn't be the case for the cartels), and, as you pointed out, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists. You can lock up all the cartels, but I haven't heard people suggest locking up the entire population of Palestine.

ISIS seems a better parallel to me.

I think China's treatment of the Uyghurs is an example of successfully suppressing Islamists. It's not exactly pretty, but it seems to work fairly well for them, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Western powers. They do seem to have the will to put boots firmly on their necks and keep them there for decades; perhaps that's what it takes.

I think there are a lot of big questions over what's happened in El Salvador that will take years, maybe decades to answer. Clearly it's an impressive achievement, on the surface of things. I suppose the question is how sustainable it is, what does the country look like in 20 years, etc.

El Salvador if true is one of the few cases where I had to "update my priors". I guessed that the demand for drugs are too high, and the money too good, and the cartels too scary and the officials too corrupt/scared, for anything to happen at all. Those caveats are the main barriers long term, but the fact that it happened at all is a surprise to me.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world. Jailing almost 1-2% of the population, that too mostly young males yet to pass on their genes, is going to probably change the genetic makeup of the country.

I think there was some element of genetic pacification in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations as well, since the unmixed indigenous populations there are generally more peaceful than their mestizo and white neighbors, while up north (and possibly down south in Patagonia too, but I haven't checked) the trend is the opposite.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world.

I've seen this idea bounced around by HBD-types and as far as I can tell there's not only no evidence for it, but evidence against it. Indians in Latin American countries are not broadly more criminal than whites. There's actually a negative correlation in Mexico between how native a state is and how violent it is. It's generally not Indians getting in cartel shootouts. Even as far back as the initial European contact, Spaniards always commented on the remarkable peacefulness and good order in Indian cities. Looking at the US, the hispanic homicide rate has actually been more than halved since the 80s, as the composition of hispanic immigrants shifted from largely-white northern Mexican Chicanos to heavily Indian Guatemalan/Salvadoran/etc. type laborers.

I’m surprised that it worked and my hunch is it wouldn’t be successful in many other countries in the region. I think it’s possible the military and police were less under the grip of the cartels than they are in other Central American countries, perhaps because the state was so dysfunctional that they previously operated with relative impunity and so considered it less necessary to takeover the institutions.

Algerian Islamists in the Algerian Civil War of the 90s?

The 1956 Battle of Algiers is another promising example of a successful counterinsurgency. The situation in Israel and Palestine today is eerily similar.

All the IS(is) pop-ups?

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