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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.

I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.

What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?

Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.


No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.

In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.