this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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I wonder if a lot of people's idea of war has been shaped by the recent American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars of choice where at least in theory American soldiers were fighting largely for the benefit of the natives. Countries that believe they actually need to win and don't have the option of just giving up and going home fight wars in a very different way. Consider for example World War II, the proverbial "good versus evil" war fought by the generation that originally came up with the comic book characters you read about. The Allies certainly didn't hesitate to kill enormous numbers of Axis civilians in the course of destroying military targets. (IMO the Allies actually went way too far and a lot of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan served no military purpose, but I suppose they were more worried about bombing too little than they were about bombing too much.)
The total war tactics of WW2 are unthinkable by modern standards, but it’s hard not to sympathize with an outgunned army fighting for their home. They fight because they’d rather die than lose.
Maybe instead of fighting people in that position, you talk to them and work out a peace deal. If they’re willing to be reasonable, end the violence.
they've shown time and time again, through actions and words, that they are not
Exactly. Netanyahu and his gang of corrupt zealots can't be reasoned with.
There is, but it'd require gasp giving up on their expansionist ambitions, and the only one willing to do that was Rabin, who got assassinated for it.
If the Israeli occupation of Palestine stops, Hamas will either disappear on its own, mellow out into a normal government or become just another terrorist organization like the IRA in Ireland. That's usually how it goes.
How long will the mellowing out take and how many Israeli civilians will die during that? Half of the people in Gaza were born after Hamas came into power.
Ireland is a viable economy on it's own. The average education level in Gaza is abysmal, there are no resources, little farmable land,... There is no perceivable way for Gaza to function as a independent part of Palestine independent of either Israel or Egypt. So what's the plan here?
Egypt wants nothing to do with Gaza anymore. I don't think anyone in Israel would support incorporating Gaza into Israel and grant citizenship to it's inhabitants.
Just closing the border and largely keeping out there is what Israel did the last two decades and that is exactly what ended up in an unprecedented terror attack on Israeli civilians.
I mean we can look at the Irish government for inspiration. When you sign a treaty to end a century conflict you tend to be pressured by your people to keep it.
The Gazan economy used to mainly rely on cash crop exports, but we all know what happened there.
Just closing the border? At this point I find it hard to believe you're discussing this in good faith, but anyway no, that's not what Israel is doing. Gaza is subject to a land, air and sea blockade that makes it so, in short, Gaza isn't allowed to have any contact with the outside world unless Israel approves it. That's not keeping out what is there, that's a military occupation.
If Israel continues to treat the Palestinians as they have historically done so, it's likely there will always be a Hamas or their equivalent.
Do you think Israel will?
Yes.
Hamas attacked on October 7th. Not the other way around.
Didn't happen in a vacuum though, did it.
Do not confuse me saying that with sympathising with Hamas. It is possible to recognise that both sides have bloody hands, and have done for decades.
Can you explain what you mean by "Didn’t happen in a vacuum"?
Best I can figure is that you disagree with the act itself, but agree with their motives or desires. But I really don't want to assume, and would prefer to understand from you.
If I keep poking you in the eye for decades, wouldn't you eventually get tired of it and punch me in the face?
Except in this case "poking you in the eye" is killing people, including old and young, journalists and doctors, poets and farmers, cutting off food, water, and electricity, displacing millions, invading homes, destroying farms and infrastructure, and restricting freedom of movement.
What about when the Palestinians tried to overthrow the Jordanian government, and when they successfully did it to Lebanon?
Both sides have been punching each other. There needs to be an independent party here, like a two state solution. Guess which side rejected that though?
Israel? I wrote a big-ass comment talking about this before so I'll just copy and paste from it.
Oslo accords: Negotiations were progressing until Rabin got fucking assassinated by a Zionist terrorist, at a time where the Israeli right was actively calling for his assassination. Netanyahu, who came in his place, called the whole thing off.
Camp David: The then-Israeli foreign affairs minister stated he wouldn't have accepted the offer if he were in Arafat's place. The Israeli offer was that bad, and they weren't willing to compromise.
The 2008 Olmert offer was mostly behind closed doors so nobody actually knows what was going on (both sides blame each others for not following up on negotiations), but from what we do know the offer included keeping an unacceptably large part of the West Bank (about 10% by the Palestinian calculation).
2014 offer: The American envoy stated that the blame for the failure of the negotiations (not an offer, since Israel didn't actually offer anything) lied squarely on Israel, and specifically Netenyahu. That's how uncooperative Israel was.
And that should be all peace negotiations with Israel since the Oslo accords. The idea that Palestinians rejected peace is pure Israeli propaganda.
Israel attacked, at a minimum, 17 years ago.
Blockading a country is an act of war.
So, in WW2, the vast vast vast majority of the fight against "evil" was done by the USSR, because the Third Reich had, as one of its pillars, the destruction of the workers' movement and the enslavement of the Slavs. The USSR lost far more than any other party to the war because the Third Reich made the war of choice, dehumanized the Slavs, and engaged in genocidal mass murder as a choice. The USSR defeated 80% of the Third Reich's forces.
On the flip side, the American and British government and business communities were pro-fascist. They funded the rise of the Third Reich, they funded domestic and international eugenics programs, they were deeply invested in apartheid states and women's oppression. (By way of contrast, the Brits and Americans used women as prostitutes to support the war effort while the USSR had women all over their military as snipers, tank operators, pilots, machine gunners, etc.)
So given that context, let's look at the end of the war and what happened after. At the end of the war, the US wanted to make sure that the USSR didn't liberate the rest of Western Europe from the Third Reich because they were anti-communist. The USA led the Western allies to Germany to create a border with the USSR (also a member of the allies, remember). It was this insistence that divided Germany into East and West Germany. Berlin was in East Germany because the USSR was the predominant victor in the war.
But then what of Japan. Before the USA nuked Japan, the USA and Japan were negotiating terms of surrender. The USA had made a very strict and ultimately untenable set of terms. Japan replied that they needed some domestic face saving in order to prevent their country from descending into violent and bloody internal revolution immediately. The USA received that message, and then chose to nuke 2 civilian cities. There was no emergency. The US wasn't fighting for survival. Everything had already been secured. The USA was in active negotiations and Japan was participating (albeit through third parties because of the political sensitivity). The USA made an active deliberate choice to nuke civilians unnecessarily.
Why? Because communism was their real enemy. It was the reason they got involved in the war, it was the driving force behind their strategic decisions. They got involved against communism, they went to Germany against communism, they partitioned Germany against communism. And they nuked Japan as a show of force, or to demonstrate how bat shit they were, to create conditions of fear and restraint.
But if that were true, then wouldn't the USA have just launched a war against communism? They did. They launched wars of choice against Vietnam and Korea. They destroyed Cambodia. They bombed Laos. The most bombed countries in the world were bombed by the USA, with multiple countries having the USA drop more bombs on them than all bombs dropped by all parties in WW2 combined.
They continued their eugenics programs for 20 more years after WW2, they advanced their chemical weapons programs and deployed atrocity after atrocity in these wars of choice, mostly against civilians.
Are people in the USA used to wars of choice? Yes, because in essence all USA wars have been wars of choice, even before the USA existed. Was it a necessity to invade The Phillipines? How about Grenada? Overthrow the Iranian government? Afghanistan in the 80s? Was it an existential necessity to genocide the indigenous peoples of the Americas, poisoning their water, destroying their ecosystems, destroying their agriculture and their sources of food?
The entire Western European project, which became the North Atlantic project, is about wars of choice - brutal wars of choice of genocide through war, through rape, through collective punishment, through environmental devastation, through eugenics, through slavery, through death camps, through occupation and extraction. The number of necessary wars the USA has been in is so vanishingly small that the very few exceptions prove the rule.
Ignores the fact Stalin sided with Hitler and invaded Poland. The Allies also had a substantial supply train back and forth between the UK and Russia to help fight the Germany army there.
Governments were shits back then across the world. As for the Eugenics, that was how the world worked. You are using the current standards to demonise the past. We know the past was broken, that is why we have change. Eugenics is still a thing today. There will always be those who think they are better than everyone else. As for using women for prostitutes, just read on how the Russians treated the German women. Or more so what is happening in Ukraine right now.
Countries have been funding partisan groups and wars for time immemorial. The enemy of your enemy is my enemy etc. The west is funding Ukraine right now. Ukraine is funding partisan groups in Russia. Russia in turn has mercenaries from all over the world. The Wagner group is active in many areas.
No they were not. The emperor of Japan refused to surrender, the Allied forces did not see the need to offer good terms. There is a famous scene in the movie Oppenheimer, where Roosevelt gets the news of the successful test of the nuclear bomb at the Potsdam summit. Good terms are at the behest of the position you are in. Japan was not in a good place.
Damned if they did and damned if they didn't. The counter argument is that it has prevented the use of Nukes since then. Or rather anyone who commits to using one know exactly what they are doing. What is a certainty is that fewer died as a result of the bomb. Not the most palatable end justifies the means, I agree.
Japan was nuked in the fight against communism>? Stalin was making imperial demands. The land grab by the Russians was the beginnings of soured relations. Remember Russia was directly responsible for the UK and France entering the war when it invaded Poland.
As for the rest, no one could argue that governments have only just moved away from being shits. It is a recent thing, and not all governments are complying with the change in attitude. Judging the actions of the past by the standards of today is just a "better than thou ism". It is easy to be pompous and pious in the current environment. Not so much when the whole world is working to different values. I am 100% certain that they will be shits again should the need arise. Looking in the direction of Israel on that one.
We need the whole world to agree to not invade each other. We do not need to justify the actions of today by the misdemeanours of those in the past.
Your understanding of pretty much every single point you made is entirely ahistorical and inconsistent with actual records. However, it's 100% consistent with Western liberal propaganda including schooling.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement was made, according to historical record, to give the USSR a better chance at surviving the coming onslaught. There were no illusions on Stalin's part that the war was coming for the USSR as Hitler literally announced his intentions in Mein Kampf.
The idea that the USSR invaded Poland is a Western narrative reframing of the conflict between the USSR and the Third Reich.
The idea that allied supply lines are equivalent to millions of Soviet deaths is divorced from reality.
The idea that Stalin engaged in a land grab is equally a Western narrative reframing the post-war reality. The USSR marched all the way to Berlin. Every country they marched through had been destroyed by the war. The options were to leave them for the anti-communist to come through and attempt to destroy the USSR or stay behind and build self-governing Soviet republics. Unlike the land grabs of Japan, Germany, England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the USA, the USSR built democratic republics and gave them the right to secede from the union. The majority of people in the former republics have said, through polls, that dismantling the USSR did more harm to them than good.
In the years immediately following the war the USA built NATO, staffed it with Nazis, executed Operation Paperclip to distribute Nazis all over the Western hemisphere, and executed Operation Gladio to arm, train, fund, and organize fascist militias all over Europe so that if the USSR ever backed out of any place it would immediately be taken over by fascists. Then the USA went on a massive killing spree all over the world.
As for your incorrect understanding of the Japanese surrender, you need to actually read the historical record. The USA and Britain disagreed on the terms and the USA insisted in strongarming the negotiations. The Soviets were trying to negotiate with Japan, but the USA wanted the Soviets out of the Pacific. The Japanese were in active negotiations and after several back-and-forths the USA made the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese, imagining they were negotiating with rational human beings, rejected the terms and asked for specific conditions about maintaining their social institutions around the monarchy. The USA nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians in response.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it saved lives. Your entire framing is that the USA was allowed to just decide to do whatever it wanted because it won, up to and including nukes on civilians. This position is psychopathic.
Mother fucker it was only 80 years ago. Are you that fucking daft? The USA got WORSE in those 80 years, not better.
Comparing Wagner group to the Mujahideen is ridiculous. Just pure brain rot.
As for this ridiculous idea that governments are better now... Isn't it curious that it happened after you were born? Almost like now that you're here, things are better. Of course they'd have to be, otherwise you would be living in an evil empire. And you aren't are you? That would be terrible.
The reality is that the CIA still operates black sites where they torture people, the supreme Court protects them, the Congress protects them, the executive branch protects them. The US has invaded more countries after WW2 than before. In Libya, the country with the highest standard of living in all of Africa, the US bombed it to oblivion. After the president was lynched in the streets, Hillary Clinton, paragon of governments not being shits anymore, said "We came. We saw. He died."
The amount of violent oppression the USA has delivered around the world since the end of world war 2 is unfathomable. The School of the Americas, alone, is responsible for so much bloodletting, and that's just a fucking school.
Your entire world view is a collection of false narratives created by North Atlantic propagandists based on cherry picked facts that give them the veneer of authenticity. The reality is that the USA is the inheritor and current head of the 6 century North Atlantic project of global domination and nothing is off the table for them: nuking civilians, genocide, species extinction, child trafficking, systematized torture, overt military occupation, assassination, coups of democratically elected governments, medical experiments, apartheid, ghettoization, mass incarceration, slave labor.
Just because you're here now doesn't mean that suddenly governments are more rational.