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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.

But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.

So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.

Isn't it less about representing a recognized state, and more about wearing uniforms and obeying an authority that can order a surrender? There were Confederate partisans, but the Confederate armies wore uniforms and surrendered when ordered. Pirates do neither. Hamas doesn't wear uniforms, and I doubt that most of them would surrender if their leadership in Qatar suddenly said "it's over now, we've lost the war: Israel is too powerful, and we don't want innocent Gazans to suffer any more".