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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed 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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Actually, less than a month ago as I write, in a “type 1 conflict” in which America had no dog, two hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed.

Sorry, what? Can I have a link? I can't even find a Wikipedia article.

This sentence confused me as well, I knew he was referring to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as voxelvexillologist notes below but the 200k figure surprised me. The wikipedia entry states that 230k ethnic Armenians have been displaced by the conflict. I assume moldbug was using "ethnically cleansed" to mean "displaced" while I imagined he meant that there were 200 thousand casualties.

He uses the dictionary meaning of the term. The way everyone else conflates ethnic cleansing per se and genocide is, uh, atrocious.

Technically speaking no ethnic cleansing has happened though- the Armenians left on their own(and tbf, I would have too) without any coercion from Azeri forces except Armenia losing some battles.

I wonder why they decided this is the time to go.

They cleansed the same region of the Azeri population a while ago, did they not? The fear that what goes around comes around is hardly new.

The majority of colonial Europeans who left places that didn’t have extremely violent anti-white pogroms like Algeria left because they expected that there would be nothing for them if they remained, and they might get purged. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes less so, at least in the short term - the Europeans who held onto their property in 1997 in Hong Kong (many fled in the early 90s) made huge returns in the 2000s and 2010s. Similarly in Africa, some Europeans left at the ‘smart time’, on the eve of decolonisation, but others who held on in some countries (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia to some extent) often did pretty well. Even in Kenya, where Addio Africa shows British fire sales before the troops leave, the ~50,000 whites who held their nerve are often still there and still pretty rich.

This is a reference to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in which Azerbaijan recently (despite the presence of Russian CSTO peacekeepers) took control of the area militarily, followed by a large-scale emigration of ethnic Armenians from the area. Beyond that, it's complicated: I'm told the area's Azeri population faced a similar expulsion the 1990s, and there are various entangling foreign alliances (Armenia nominally with Russia, Azerbaijan with Turkey).

The Azeri-Armenian conflict goes back even further than that. Pretty much as soon as the Russian empire collapsed the two groups were fighting each other and didn't stop until the USSR regained control of the Caucuses.

Huh. The world's kind of scary when the US doesn't care about your conflict.

In some ways it's even scarier when it does.