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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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That's fine, you just keep winning until they are thoroughly beaten down or all dead. There are few political problems that cannot be solved with sufficient application of violence, supposing you have the capacity to apply it.

Worked like charm in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winning pitched battles is one thing.

Having a population of civilians that is really keen on backstabbing everyone with a yankee accent is really hard to govern.

The US cared about civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. At first we were trying to win hearts and minds, not subjugate them under our boot. By the end that was gone, but we never tried a serious campaign of crushing them and genocide was never on the table. (In Vietnam, of course, there was another superpower-backed army)

Those arguing that Reconstruction wasn't tough enough have no similar compunctions about subjugating Southerners.

I am fairly sure. I am talking about logistics though. The nazis had better technology, better records, much smaller (and better pacified) territory than the south, targeted a way smaller percentage of the population and they still managed to half ass the thing.

As far as genocides go, they didn’t half ass it, 85% of Jews in nazi occupied territory were killed. And if you’re talking about resistance movements in general, it was mostly pretty minimal for much of the war, particularly in Western Europe.

I think Nybbler's referring to the genocide option, or even the decimation option (every time there's a revolt, kill a random 10% of the population).

Killing 100% of the population of Iraq would, trivially, have prevented any uprising. It would also, of course, have been terrible.

In Vietnam you don't even need to go that far into "lol war crimes"; simply being willing to invade North Vietnam (and fight the PLA) would probably have sufficed, although that's a huge expenditure of men and money.

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