Shrike
43m ago
Africa is not realistically building postwar-capability strategic bombers on their own
What makes you say this? Egypt and South Africa have both built jet engines. That's going to be the hardest part of, say, a 1960s-era bomber.
The European naval strategy would have to be "go where the enemy isn't" - U-boats were raiding Cape Town by 1941, so the African navy would be pinned to defending key ports.
U-boats in 1941 get easily pwned by even Cold War ASW destroyers with helicopters. "Who would win: a pre-war U-boat with limited underwater capacity, poor speed, and terrible quieting, or an ASW destroyer with active sonar, a helicopter, and a towed array meant to detected nuclear submarines with rafted machinery" is the "nuclear bomb versus coughing baby" question of this scenario. Very plausible for a single African destroyer to detect and destroy these submarines at 60 miles. The main risk is running out of ammunition (assuming basic technical competency and that the normal ASW equipment has been retained on these ships, which might not be the case.)
I think the only more uneven match-up is African strike aircraft against the European surface fleet.
Shrike
1hr ago
It sort of depends on what you think is "irreplaceable." Africa manufactures their own RPGs, small arms ammunition, and bombs. Dumb bombs in particular aren't hard to manufacture at all, but plenty sufficient to sink European ships with ~impunity if you have jet aircraft. But I don't know how long the African air force could be maintained without technical expertise and spare parts from Russia and the United States.
Shrike
1hr ago
The main argument against the air force being an auto-win condition is that without (mostly American, a little bit of Russian) technical support, they will have a limited useful life span and/or run out of munitions. However "no technical support" isn't really specified in the prompt one way or another.
Air forces by themselves typically don't win wars, though, and I think that Africa would have a hard time invading Europe (and vice versa).
Shrike
1hr ago
Not just that - Africa is also reliant on commodity exports that would get wrecked by U-boats and commerce raiders. So no food and no money (except the suitcases of gold coming off of U-boats, courtesy of SIS and Abwehr).
I think that Africa's ability to defeat U-boats and commerce raiders is probably stronger than Europe's ability to field U-boats and commerce raiders, at least during the initial stage of the war.
The lack of food (if we're assuming they both get teleported to a world without preexisting trade) is going to be a massive problem. But this is also true for England, which imported even more of its food (although much of that was from other European sources)/
Shrike
1hr ago
The high tech planes Africa has mostly don’t have range to bomb prime Europe
Algeria has air-to-air refueling. Tangier is 1500 miles from Berlin, which is within ferry range of Algerian strike aircraft, so it's very likely they could refuel over France and strike anywhere in Germany or England.
I think the actual problems are:
- Not knowing what exactly to target in 1939 Europe (this problem cuts both ways, of course!)
- Not being able to run enough strike aircraft to materially disrupt industrial supply chains, and
- Russia (assuming they are included)
The African win condition is to shock Europe into surrendering quickly and/or do enough material disruption to buy time to get their own industry spun up. I think they would have a hard time actually doing anything besides temporarily setting back European industrial might with their current aircraft inventories, but I do think they could pretty much knock out European naval power.
Shrike
1hr ago
I think a lot of people who are heavily in Camp Europe forget about North Africa (which has, at least on paper, hundreds of F-16s and even a few more advanced aircraft, such as the Rafale and Su-57.) Algeria in particular would be a huge threat, as their Su-24s, 30s, 34s, and 35s have pretty good range. The entire Mediterranean would be a shooting gallery overnight; modern strike aircraft can sink or disable pretty much any combatant of the time with comparative ease.
German submarines (most of which I don't think can reach the Med in '39) will not help; the Egyptian navy (which has a number of ASW ships) would almost certainly eat them for lunch. You're trying to kill a ~modern ASW ship with straight-runners that can reach 4 miles on a good day, and even the least experienced destroyer commander can probably just turn his massive sonar on, spot you, and kill you before you can even get a firing solution.
People are going to tell me that the Egyptians are incompetent; likely this is true (certainly what I have read about them in the past indicates this; I don't know if they've gotten better since) but what we're talking about here isn't that much more advanced than "can you drive a boat and push a button" - even employing the weapons in the most brain-dead way possible will shred European navies of the day.
The case for Europe is that they will outlast Africa's modern munitions and equipment and crush them on the other side. I do think that's plausible. In actual ground battles, I am not sure that Africa will end up being favored if they run low on their qualitative edge (air cover, long-range missiles, etc.) But Africa actually does have its own defense industry; I think it's mostly for small arms but African countries have been able to make (for instance) jet engines and smart munitions in the past, and a quick Google shows they even have some domestic semiconductor production. It seems plausible that the actual end scenario is that African strategic bombers with chemical or even nuclear weapons are hitting Berlin long before the Europeans figure out how to push past the Suez (defended by more than 1,000 M1A1s!) On the other hand, it could be a situation where the Russians churn out so many T-34s that the qualitative edge doesn't end up mattering.
There's a lot of things that the scenario doesn't really specify (including the "win" condition and if countries would magically forget preexisting tensions or not). If 1939 Europe is transported to our world, then their trade networks get totally upset. But if it's modern Africa that gets transported to 1939 Europe's world, their trade (to say nothing of communications networks, etc.) gets tenderized. If the idea is "put them both on an infinite featureless plain" then I do think it advantages Europe relatively, since they will likely be able to produce what they need for their supply chain domestically.
Shrike
19hr ago
Sorry for the delay; I was traveling.
That doesn't mean that if not broadcast, they necessitate legitimate and reasonable concerns for malfeasance.
Right. I think it would be worse if there was less oversight, which you have suggested. I am open to concerns about live-streaming it. But making it less transparent than it already is would be bad, in my opinion.
Do you agree that when deciding to start a war against Iran on the basis that it's ruled by an an evil regime that hates America, as is so often alleged, that Iranian soldiers and their bases are legitimate targets, yes or no?
That's not the actual causus belli, but sure.
Or do you only believe that US servicefolk are exempt from being valid targets when others take issue with how America has been governed?
During a war? No, they are completely valid targets for the armed forces of other nations.
I'm not asking for what formal rules about declarations and acts of war say. I'm asking you, morally, what is permissible.
I think what the formal rules about declarations and acts of war say is very pertinent to what is morally permissible.
Or do you, like many Americans I converse with, instinctively believe that Americans are of greater moral value to others?
Americans are of greater moral value to me. They are not of greater moral value to God.
Where if they commit atrocities or represent the regime other allege are evil, that they can not be held accountable or be 'legitimately' targeted in the same way the US does to others?
Certainly, if a U.S. servicemember commit a crime he can and should be tried and sentenced before a duly constituted court in accordance with due process. Ideally that would be before the U.S. courts constituted for this purpose, but I have no moral objection to a U.S. servicememember being tried by a duly constituted foreign authority if there is no more appropriate venue and they respect due process (there may of course be various legal objections to such a state of affair).
The only legitimate ways to wage war are conveniently conventional and appeal to the perceived strengths of the US military. Dropping bombs on targets of convenience via air is legitimate, strapping a bomb to your chest and walking it towards your target of convenience is not.
Well, yeah. That's the thinking on just war that we inherited from the Europeans. Of course I think it's possible that Americans have always had perhaps a slightly different perspective on war than Europeans due to exposure to fighting a neolithic civilization (which was largely out of mind for Europeans).
I'd argue the vow itself is functionally ceremonial and irrelevant in the modern world. As it does not represent anything real or serious to many people. Regardless of whether we think it should or not.
I don't think this is or should be the case.
Whilst feeling of betrayal or the knowledge that someone wants or wanted to murder you carries more of the emotional weight.
I think murder is wrong even if no betrayal is involved. By itself the knowledge that someone wanted to murder me would carry very little emotional weight to me.
You're going to have to clarify
Okay. I said this before, basically, but I will restate it. Your article is all war dead. Not all of those people were killed by Americans. It's like counting everyone killed since 2020 as being COVID victims.
The majority of Trump supporters are in favor of bombing targets even with a great risk of civilian casualties. That's a valid plurality, I'd say. It's an interesting article in any case, that validates my overarching point as well
So I am glad we finally got to polling. I can't access the underlying details of either poll, but looking at the first one, the framing "The US should NOT use airstrikes if it meant killing innocent civilians." Remember, as I phrased it earlier:
You, of course, will not be able to find any actual polling or research suggesting that a plurality of Americans support bombing innocent civilians. You will argue that they support it from a consequentialist framework because they agree with actions that lead to the bombing of innocent civilians.
This seems to me to show that Americans accept the collateral damage, not that most Americans support bombing innocent civilians for the sake of bombing innocent civilians. However I rather wished I had the foresight to have included that turn of phrase in my original argument, which is rather weaker due to the lack of it.
It seems like you sometimes accept that proportionate collateral damage is acceptable, so I assume you would be with the majority of Trump supporters on this one?
Beyond that, if you're willing to risk your own civilians as victims then you can do that.
It's entirely rational for a state to treat its own civilians as different from other civilians, because it has different duties to its own civilians. However Americans do of course risk their own (usually soldiers) when they conduct airstrikes. Fratricide is actually a pretty serious threat.
The original point was about the validity of military targets. Nidal chose to wear that uniform and then used that uniform to advantage himself on the battlefield against his enemy. You can execute people for that, which America and others have done. But that's, again irrelevant to the point.
I think it's pretty relevant to the conversation of whether or not Nidal Hasan - who voluntarily swore an oath, betrayed it, and used his uniform to kill a number of his fellow soldiers (and one or two civilians, depending on how you count) - is a sympathetic character.
Shrike
4d ago
"Middle Eastern ancestry" part is by far the most important thing there.
I doubt this is true, statistically speaking - keep in mind that US Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry. I think "radical Islamist beliefs" is actually the most important thing.
Your new one is conceding that he's a middle eastern terrorist (from the US, with US citizenship, which is true).
I think there's a big difference between saying someone has ancestry of a place and suggesting they come from a place they don't!
If a white guy, or a black guy or a Mexican guy converts to Islam and kills a bunch of soldiers, there's not much that can obviously be done about it. If an Arab does it the obvious implication is simple. Stop importing Arabs!
While I am in favor of greater immigration restrictions, I think you can be more imaginative about solutions here. Hasan probably could have been stopped by paying attention to what he was telling his coworkers, and you know, that might also catch the white guy too.
If Romania revoked this guy's citizenship would you say he's no longer a Romanian?
That's an interesting question. If he was born in Romania and didn't have the citizenship of another nation, yes. Otherwise, no. But this is firing from the hip, I'm open to an illustration that this is absurd or contrary to normal and/or legal use.
People from Muslim backgrounds are many orders of magnitude more likely to become Islamic radicals and it is willfully ignorant to say otherwise.
Well - if your baseline is "all people" then yes, obviously Muslims are more likely to become Islamic radicals than anyone. However my guess is that (at least in the U.K., maybe in the U.S.) a convert to Islam is actually more likely to become an Islamic radical than a person with a preexisting Islamic background. This is me firing from the hip again, feel free to correct me if you have stats handy, but it's not uncommon - for instance, the shoe bomber was a convert, and he wasn't the only one.
There also seems to be a specific issue (as there was with Hasan) of second-generation radicalism, where people whose parents aren't particularly extreme or even devout have kids who become radicalized.
Shrike
4d ago
You provide no argument, you've just asserted that this is secretive somehow again and again.
It's by definition more secretive the less transparent it is.
But you don't engage with it. Instead you assert the American perspective.
What do you mean, I don't engage with it. I have at least some understanding of it (despite what you might think) but I don't agree with it. Do you?
From his perspective he was.
This might be true. I don't agree with his perspective. Do you?
If you want to pretend that the motives of the shooter don't matter, go ahead. But I think they do.
I don't think I've been pretending they don't matter.
And I think that a military like the American one, that has done some many horrible things in the service of a demented foreign policy can't play victim or hide being international law, sitting on a throne of dead women and children. That were to the US at the time 'convenient targets' they later choose to call 'Collateral Damage' after the women and children dead are counted.
Well, do you agree with collective guilt, or not?
If it is wrong to kill people who are not directly guilty of a crime, then what Nidal did was wrong. If it's not, why are you complaining that the U.S. did it?
I sense, generally, that you disagree with actions taken by the United States government and therefore sympathize with Nidal. But I'm not getting a clear ethical framework for why you think what Nidal did was right and what the U.S. did was wrong.
There's no argument. Just an assertion that, to you, Nidal did wrong based on specific premises.
Well...usually if there's premises there's an argument.
What's your argument that what Nidal did was good?
I don't think oathbreaking is the main problem when people commit a mass shooting. I think you're just being obtuse to rhetorically distance yourself from the moral arguments made by the victims of Americas zionist foreign policy.
I think there's actually a huge moral valiance to oathbreaking. A single person killing his wife is much more evil than a single person who uses a nuclear weapon to destroy an entire carrier battle group, killing thousands of people including any civilians who happen to be onboard. Do you disagree?
Did any of the civilians bombed by the US?
See my question above.
I'm familiar with the death toll and the number I mentioned is generally accurate, depending on how much faith you put in US universities doing research into the topic.
The link that you provided does not substantiate your suggestion that the US military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East throughout the Global War on Terror. It substantiates that hundreds of thousands of people were killed, which I did not dispute.
I maintained that many Americans generally were not, given the repeat support they show for bombing innocent civilians.
You, of course, will not be able to find any actual polling or research suggesting that a plurality of Americans support bombing innocent civilians.
You will argue that they support it from a consequentialist framework because they agree with actions that lead to the bombing of innocent civilians.
Very well: are you opposed to any action that might lead to the deaths of innocent civilians? Do you condemn all acts that lead to the deaths of innocent civilians?
I'm saying that when you don a military uniform, you represent that force.
And Nidal Hasan chose to don that uniform. He should have represented that force, instead of some other force (be that the Taliban, Palestine, the mob, whoever.)
And the history of the native Americans, who never in their thousands of years of history on the continent did anything to make it into America as it is generally known to be
Kind of a weird thing to say, given that nobody can think of American without thinking of cowboys, and nobody can think of cowboys without thinking of Indians.
Shrike
4d ago
When you say that an American became an Islamic radical and shot up a military base, it buries the lede.
No, actually, saying precisely this draws attention to what happened. Saying he was a Middle Easterner, as you point out, is not to say anything unusual. It turns off the brain, or at most makes people think "who let him into the country?" or "how did a Middle Easterner join the military?" when in fact he was born here. Whereas as you say, Americans rarely shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. You can actually just say "Nidal Hasan was an American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry who joined the U.S. Army. Inspired by his radical Islamist beliefs, he carried out a mass shooting on a military base." If you substitute out "American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry" with "Middle Easterner" you make the sentence substantially less informative.
If he were a black guy or a white guy or even a Mexican-American who had converted to Islam and done this, sure, that's an American guy who became an Islamic terrorist. But his actions were clearly that of someone from an unintegrated Middle Eastern background who happened to be born in the United States.
It seems to me that if a black, white, Mexican-American or Arab American shoot up an American military base for the cause of Islam, their actions are all about equal. Hasan's might strike one as less unusual because his familial background was Muslim, but if a white guy attacked a bunch of US soldiers in the name of Islam, he's not somehow acting less like an Islamic terrorist because of his skin tone.
I don't think you can just normatively decree that anyone with an American citizenship is American
The guy is American by the legal definition of such. If we can normatively decree anything it's that we should respect definitions. And he wasn't even an anchor baby, so there's really no wiggle room to insist he came through on a loophole.
it doesn't really make any sense to insist that the perpetrator is actually Romanian even though he's a Romanian citizen from Romania.
It actually does! If a guy is Romanian, he's Romanian. If a white person kills a bunch of white people for anti-white reasons (which is certainly conceivable) it still makes sense to call him white, too.
Yes, he was born in America and an American citizen but if he wasn't from an essentially foreign Muslim family he never would have acted the way he did
Do these sorts of "if a person was a completely different person they would act like they were a completely different person" counterfactuals really clarify these questions? Yes, if Hasan had been a different person, he likely would have done a different thing, I agree. But if your position is that only people from Muslim backgrounds become Islamic radicals, you're wrong about that.
Shrike
4d ago
I agree that "German" is a type of European, and "Germans" refer to people live in Germany, or it can refer to an ethnic group of Germans, typically of German linear genetic descent who live in Germany or in German enclaves or who otherwise have a cultural affinity to Germany, or it could simply refer to a German genetic line. The problem with using the last definition is that it often makes little sense to refer to people who are of one genetic group but another cultural-political group as belonging to the genetic group. For instance, referring to Fred Trump as a German causes more confusion than clarification.
And "Palestinian" has similar issues when used here.
If we're focusing on genetic lineage, it might be more precise to refer to Hasan as Arab or perhaps Palestinian Arab (since there are a few non-Arab Palestinians). If we're focusing on ethnicity in the cultural sense, I am not sure it makes much sense to refer to him as Palestinian - he can't speak Arabic, and as far as I know spent little if any time abroad. From what I've seen, he himself might have used the term "Arab" instead of "Palestinian" if you asked him to describe his ethnic or genetic background.
From what I can tell, whatever feelings towards Palestine or Palestinian identity he may have seen in himself did not play much if any role in the shooting - he saw himself as acting to defend Islam and the Taliban (which obviously are geographically and ethnically distinct from any Palestinians he might have sympathies with), not Palestine.
I think it's fine to say that he is of Palestinian descent, or that his ethnic background is Palestinian or Arab, or what have you. You can describe him accurately. But describing him as a Palestinian terrorist causes more confusion than clarification. It would cause similar confusion if you referred to Donald Trump a European political leader (even though Donald Trump is ethnically 100% European).
Shrike
5d ago
But if they think he may attack after the midterms, then their best strategy imo is to kick it off early and embarrass Trump and ensure a historic defeat.
I think this is correct, but I am not sure they have any real ability to do that. The best way to do it would be to hit US ships or aircraft on the ground, but Iran has proven incapable of hitting US warships, and we might be moving our aircraft back as well to make them harder to hit.
I think it's also true that if they did this, it would give Trump better political leverage to play against a Democratic Congress if he wanted to continue the war.
Shrike
5d ago
What we don't agree on is whether or not killing someone in private is 'secret' or not.
You specifically proposed "killing them in a manner not publicized and then announcing that they have been executed." That is secretive. I agree that the current American method of execution, which permits witnesses to attend, is not secret.
No, this is you looking at things from your American perspective
Actually, I am describing what I've seen on the Motte, a place we both comment on. You claimed, without providing any evidence, that "you and other pro-America guys on here...ultimately draw the distinction between good and bad, with America on the good side of every conflict" and are "completely incapable of recognizing any hostile act taken against them from the viewpoint of its perpetrators." I don't think this is an accurate description of Americans on here, even the ones I've argued with about foreign policy.
From the perspective of a Palestinian who is of a different ideological persuasion, America is still factually engaged in active warfare against people in the middle East. The soldiers in Fort Hood were not his countrymen or comrades but enemy combatants who play an active role in a military organization that has killed countless civilians in pursuit of an evil zionist ideology.
What's your point here? I don't think anyone is denying that Hasan sees the world something along these lines, although I am not sure this is exactly how he would articulate it.
Why would Nidal have to operate by different rules?
Because
- Nidal was not carrying out an act of war.
- Nidal is an American soldier who publicly committed to protect and defend the constitution and faithfully execute his duties. Perhaps oathbreaking is not morally cognizable to you, but it generally is not considered moral behavior. It would be similarly contemptible for Iranian soldiers to break their oaths and kill their fellow soldiers in the way that Hasan did, even if they did so out of sympathy for the United States.
If you are a combatant and see an enemy military base, it's a target.
And Nidal is not a combatant of a foreign army. What I am articulating here isn't some weird "American" perspective, we have customary traditions and international law that describe these sorts of things. Nidal doesn't fit the definition of an enemy combatant.
Some might even say that killing the innocent makes you a valid target for just retribution.
Did any of the people Nidal shot kill innocent people?
Maybe this is a point of confusion but the exact number doesn't matter.
Getting things right generally matters. If you are unfamiliar with the dynamics of the Global War on Terror and who killed hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Middle East, perhaps you should withhold some of your judgment until you have a better understanding of what actually happened.
Are you pretending you don't understand the moral culpability of soldiers in service of an evil regime? How does America justify killing Iranian soldiers? The same way Nidal does when justifying the killing of American soldiers.
Are you pretending American and Iranian soldiers are co-belligerents? Or than American soldiers swore an oath to uphold and protect the Iranian Constitution?
It's actually quite perverted to support the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people
Does it have to be hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Isn't it perverted to support the murder of...one person?
I'd still prefer to refer to people of European ancestry who have lived in America for some time as Americans, for the same reason I don't refer to Germans as Europeans.
In your definition, a black guy who ancestry has been in America for hundreds of years, or a Native American guy whose ancestry has been in America for thousands of years, is less American than Donald Trump, who's a latecomer.
Shrike
5d ago
The point I am trying to get at as regards executions is that appearances are important, and executing people in secret is a bad appearance. Even if you don't think people's executions should be public, you shouldn't want witnesses removed. Even if you can secretly torture people without leaving marks (which yes, we can) you should not act in such a way as to needlessly arouse suspicion that you are doing so.
I don't know. I based it on your reply to me here, where you acted with incredulity towards the assumed legitimacy of the targets of Nidal Hasan.
The problem with Nidal Hasan's target wasn't that he targeted soldiers. Iran has killed somewhere between a dozen and two dozen soldiers in our war with them and none of the American commentators on here have acted like that was illegitimate in the same way that Hasan's was (or as far as I can remember, at all) because Hasan is an American who turned his gun on his countrymen.
I don't think you can point me to a single star-spangled flag waver on the Motte that has argued that Artesh soldiers, acting in the normal course of their duties, should be executed for the deaths of US soldiers. I think you are mistaking your own ideas about what Americans think with what they actually say they believe. Perhaps you have had other experiences off of the Motte that I can't speak to, but what you are describing of your experiences here does not comport with what I recognize.
acting like a military base is a 'place of trust' and that the military personnel therein where defenseless, and therefor the attack was cowardly.
If you are a soldier and particularly an officer, then yes, a military base is a place of trust, and generally stateside on a military base US soldiers are disarmed, and will go to jail if they carry a weapon on base. (This is a sorry and facile state of affairs, and I think the current admin may be working to change it, which is good).
I am not sure I would say Hasan is a coward but shooting unarmed people is not generally what is associated with courage. I don't think Hasan acted much differently in terms of personal courage than any mass shooter, in the sense that he was brave enough to accept being shot by cops but not brave enough or willing enough to accept defeat to engage armed people from the start. I think that his target set could in some sense be seen as more "legitimate" than bin Laden's in the sense that they were primarily military, but also that his infamy should be greater because he betrayed a position of trust and violated the oath he took.
Or did they kill close to half a million civilians through war campaigns across the middle east?
Did American troops kill close to half a million civilians during the Global War on Terror? No, they did not. The majority of civilian casualties throughout the Global War on Terror were not caused by US troops. I suspect you know this, which is why you used the phrase "through war campaigns" thus absolving the people who actually literally did kill civilians of their actions and rhetorically placing it on people who were innocent of their deaths, while at the same time providing a defense (a motte, if you will) if someone pointed out the inaccuracy.
I think it is completely fine to criticize the outcome of the Global War on Terror (indeed, I have done it myself) and to say that the GWOT led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. I think it is wrong to completely ignore consequentialist reasoning. But saying that the United States killed half a million citizens across the Middle East is no more sensible than saying Al Qaeda killed hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners through war campaigns across the globe – arguably less sensible, since after all Al Qaeda attacked the States.
It's actually quite perverted to murder hundreds of thousands of people and then write a book about how horrifying that was. And then make a big deal about how bad you feel about that.
Off of the top of my head, there are only two Americans who could reasonably qualify, and I don't think either of them felt bad about what they did, or ever pretended to.
I think it's your ancestry. If you don't want to engage with the topic, fine, but these assertions are inane. A person born of two Palestinian parents is Palestinian. He proved that with his actions as well.
Very well. I shall expect you, then, in the spirit of self-consistency, to refer to Trump as a European leader going forward :)
Words are wind.
And to this point, Hasan did take a specific loyalty oath by virtue of being an officer. But at a certain point this is just a generalized argument against citizenship and even ethnic or kinship bonds. The traditional way of dealing with traitors (ethnic or civic) is to hold them contemptible, not to simply be built different and never have that problem.
I think it's pretty hard to argue that 'the American tradition' doesn't treat citizenship as a mere piece of paper when it literally gives it to the children of foreign criminals, allows its citizens to hold an unlimited number of other citizenships and doesn't have any substantial requirements to give it out other than 'you've lived here a while'.
And if you say citizenship is just a piece of paper, it's hard to argue against this state of affairs.
And that's without getting into the fact that for most of the country's history, it was illegal for citizens of one race to marry citizens (or chattel) of another race. That racialised understanding of the nation is the American tradition.
This is not really true, as a blanket statement; anti-miscegenation laws were never universal throughout the United States.
And it is declining at the very same time that the number of Americans who even like America is also declining.
This isn't true either – if you're going to lecture me about my own history and tradition, please try to get it right.
To speak in very broad terms:
- Each state had their own peculiarities in terms of how they dealt with Native Americans and blacks. It's certainly true that ethnic feeling was commonplace, but there was never some sort of universal understanding that was codified uniformly into law throughout American history, and (obviously) anti-slavery and, yes, what we might today call anti-racist sentiment was not uncommon in the United States even before it attained nationhood.
- I think it is wrong to model the halcyon days of Jim Crow racial restrictions as a continuation of unbroken American tradition from time immemorial. It can better be understood as a shifting attempt to control the black (and Native American) population – and in the specific post-Civil-War context of Southern Jim Crow laws, as resentment against the Yankee conquerers. This might seem like splitting hairs, but my point is that there was not (for instance) some a prior first principles deduction that blacks were inferior and so should not be educated; rather there would be a slave rebellion or a perceived problem with runaway slaves forging passes that would lead to bans on slave education. Or (to illustrate with a non-Southern example) black freeman could vote in Pennsylvania until 1838, when the Constitution was revised to specify "white" as the black population in the state and racial tension increased. Thus, from my understanding, it is best to model American racial restrictions as being reactionary instead of foundational. [Edit to add: I would say "often best to model..." – because, to my point, there's not really a one-size-fits-all American tradition here.]
- To the extent that there is an American tradition of a racialized understanding of citizenship and civic belonging, it has always been contentious, and it went into decline, not now, but rather during the Cold War. I agree that it's not unrelated – the Civil Rights era and Vietnam were a very divisive era in American society in part due to racial issues – but that was decades ago, not some recent development. What America is experiencing now more greatly resembles post-Reconstruction backlash (sentiment towards diversity is cooling, not increasing!) than some sort of terminal decline of ethnic sentiment, although things are different this time around.
I think the term 'multi-ethnic nation' is a contradiction in terms.
Then America, Russia, China, the United Kingdom etc. have never been a "real" nation (and to a large degree, at least in the case of the United States, which I know best, I actually agree with this statement, albeit for somewhat subtler reasons).
Shrike
6d ago
I don't know the details of each state, but I think that something like what you are describing is typical. I believe there may be other outside witnesses as well.
Shrike
6d ago
The model of citizenship you describe is clearly incompatible with birthright citizenship, which involves handing out citizenship to babies of (both legal and illegal) immigrants.
Hasan's parents were, as far as I can tell, legal immigrants and became naturalized citizens (a bit unclear to me if that happened before or after he was born), so opposing birthright citizenship for illegal aliens doesn't really "solve" here. Giving birthright citizenship to the children of citizens is not much, if it all, different than the model you seem to think would be preferable, of being born into an ethnic group.
However, I don't disagree with the criticism. If I was King Of The World, citizenship (and adulthood, for that matter) would likely be earned by deed, not birth.
Describing it as just a piece of paper is simply being honest about the world.
I don't want to live in such a world, nor do I agree that that is an honest description of what citizenship has long been understand to entail in the American tradition, so I decline to follow your lead here.
Shrike
6d ago
If America truly is a 'proposition nation' with no ethnic requirements to be a member then pretty much. if America is simply a (very successful) economic zone where citizenship is just a piece of paper that grants you access, like a software key, then America isn't a nation at all.
I don't think these are the only ways to think about how citizenship and country work. There's an older understanding of citizenship that is more akin to being bound in a sacred pact – like adoption. As far as I can tell, ethnic groups all have some way of bringing non-co-ethics into the "in-group" ethnic circle. If you think Americanness should be an ethnicity, when is an idea that I am sympathetic to, then citizenship is that ritual.
I would argue that Hasan is 100% a middle eastern terrorist, even if he is also 100% a US citizen, because all citizenship is just a piece of paper.
This is precisely what I think we should all deny. "Citizenship is just a piece of paper" commodifies and cheapens citizenship, the opposite values you should be pushing if you want people to think in ways that are transcendent instead of being non-transactional.
Shrike
6d ago
Hiding it is really the worst thing you could do. If we're that ashamed of it we shouldn't be doing it! My aesthetics demand we embrace the brutal reality. Just like how I think if you want to eat chicken you should know what it's like to slaughter one.
I tend to agree with this. In the United States, we're very far removed from death.
However as a guy who has slaughtered hundreds of chickens I can tell you that if anything it makes you less sympathetic to their plight.
Shrike
6d ago
He's legally an American, yet clearly holds no bonds of brotherhood and fellowship for the rest of us. Instead, his true tribe is co-ethnics and co-religionists from the other side of the world
Let's set aside the degree to which is tribal affinity with co-ethics and co-religionists on the other side of the world is a deadly LARP and agree that this is true: claiming that he is Middle Eastern obscures this and the problem (which exists to some degree in America and from what I can tell to a much larger degree in Europe) of second-generation radicalization.
If you think it's bad that Hasan doesn't consider himself an American despite being one, you shouldn't confuse people into thinking he's not American by referring to him as Middle Eastern. You should explicitly highlight exactly what he was, and highlight how it came to be that he continued to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces despite expressing affinity with America's enemies openly.
to the point where he was willing to commit mass murder about it.
As we've seen in this very thread, calling him a "Middle Easterner" seems to make it easier for people to believe that what he did was not mass murder but rather a surprise attack on enemy combatants. It casts him as someone who was true to his deepest self and therefore in some sense admirable rather than someone who betrayed his most sacred confidences.
Right, but if "not very long" is, say, a month, that's long enough to clobber every European navy (at least the ones within reach).
I tend to agree here, although stuff like the RPG and modern towed arty is genuinely a big step up from what's being thrown around in 1939. The main advantage Africa would have would be modern NVGs and (more) modern tanks/AFVs, but I am not sure that's enough to actually be decisive.
More options
Context Copy link