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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Compare the British in Northern Ireland

You mean the British soldiers who opened fire on a peaceful protest completely without provocation, killing fourteen people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)) ? The British security apparatus which provided almost all of the resources to a paramilitary organisation on one side of the conflict, while British soldiers had an explicit policy of shooting members of opposing paramilitary organisations dead on sight? The British security apparatus which urged the members of a separate paramilitary organisation to assassinate the Irish Taoiseach?

"The British soldiers brought peace to Northern Ireland" is certainly not my understanding of the period 1960-98, some of which I lived through. I accept that the Troubles was a much less brutal conflict than the Israel-Palestine war (although I wouldn't say Israel is solely to blame for said brutality), but the British military and security apparatus deserve a great deal of the blame for needlessly escalating it.

14 deaths in Northern Ireland becomes so famous people know the story 53 years later. Israel kills hundreds of people a year during a peaceful year and tens of thousands during the war. The Gazan war had as many dead in a month as the troubles had in 30 years. It was about 360x more bloody.

The IRA was also significantly less bloodthirsty than Hamas, their goal was to maintain a low level insurgency until Britain ceded the six counties to the Republic of Ireland. Hamas by contrast wants the Jews wiped out.

You're also failing to take population into account. The current combined population of Israel, Palestine and the West Bank is about 15 million people. In 1948 it was about 2.2 million. Let's average that and say the combined population is 8.6 million in the period under discussion.

The Troubles were almost entirely confined to Northern Ireland, only occasionally spilling over into the Republic and the British mainland. To keep things fair, I'll exclude any deaths which took place outside of Northern Ireland, per this table. The population of Northern Ireland was 1.5 million in 1966 (when the Troubles began) and 1.7 million in 1998 (Good Friday Agreement), giving us an average of 1.6 million for the period.

  • 3,272 deaths against a population of 1.6 million = 214 deaths/100k

  • 100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million = 1,221 deaths/100k

So the Israel-Palestine conflict is only 6 times as bloody as the Troubles, not 360 times. And that isn't even taking timescale into account, as the Troubles went on for 32 years while the Israel-Palestine conflict has been ongoing in one form or another since 1948.

  • 3,532 deaths against a population of 1.6 million, over 32 years = 7.2 deaths/100k/year

  • 100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million, over 77 years = 16 deaths/100k/year

So only slightly more than twice as bloody as the Troubles.


*Roughly.

But by the same token, I'll note that Hamas claimed nearly half as many lives in one day (7/10) as the Troubles did in 30 years, almost all of whom were civilians. It seems to me that you're being rather selective in your condemnation.

First off the British military wasn't incompetent enough to get pwnd that hard. The Israelis were defending military outposts with hundreds of soldiers and got owned by men in sandals running over an open field. Of the 797 civilian casualties a large portion was killed by Israel blasting the area and preferring to kill civilians rather than letting them be taken prisoners. That is a civilian to military casualty rate well below two civilians killed by Hamas for every IDF soldier.

What is your basis for the claim that a large portion of those casualties were killed by the IDF?