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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger,

This statement completely ignores the actual debate at the time, which was the choice between bombing military targets or attacking civilians. Both types of bombings happened during WW II. The available evidence does strongly suggest that attacking civilians creates desires of revenge and thus support for politicians who advocate for the war, rather than making people surrender.

In actual reality, the civilian population of Germany never forced their government to surrender to make the bombings stop, and neither did the people of England, despite the V1 and V2 attacks. And even the Japanese surrender after the nukes didn't result from a lack of support from the people, but the leaders deciding themselves that dying to a nuke was not a sufficiently heroic death for their populace unlike running into a machine gun fire with a bamboo spear in your hands.

So do you want to argue that Hamas can be persuaded to surrender by bombing civilians? My judgment of their ideology, which is different from that of the WW II Japanese, is that this will not happen.

Note that one famous case where the populace did force an end to the war, which is Russia during WW I, didn't involve attacks of the Russian population.

Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated

I do, so I guess that you are just in a bubble where you don't read these things?

if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them?

Well, if you believe that every bomb is hitting Hamas and no civilians are being killed, then it makes perfect sense that you would disbelieve that the bombings can turn neutral civilians into supporters of Hamas, because they want revenge.

I prefer the facts over falsehood, though.