Weekly Brief
US soldiers came back home from the Vietnam War to jeering crowds. Allied forces carpet-bombed and nuked cities to end World War II. Of course civilians die in wars. But wars are waged to be WON.
In review and in prospect
Ultimately, violence is really the only real way most critical of human conflicts are decided. Israel came into existence on the back of the powerful position the allied powers held in the aftermath of World War II and its hold on the territory now known as Israel was sealed by its people’s two decisive victories on the battlefield. Hamas also decided that the only real way to achieve goals is through violence. And this too is why terrorism exists.
As expected, there are now heated “debates” on the morality or ethics surrounding the motives and means either side in a conflict apply in their use of violence to achieve their ends. Palestinians make a good point on their argument that the state of Israel was imposed upon them by Western European imperialists. Israel too make a good point that a terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand innocent civilians started this. The retaliatory action taken by Israel, in considering its civilian toll in Gaza, remains a military one, the argument goes, because it pursues a military target with a resulting civilian impact. Hamas, on the other hand, pursued civilian targets on the get go and is, therefore, guilty of a terrorist action.
And so on, and so forth. In the end, the one with the more powerful army wins and gets to legitimise its preferred world order.
This is all a pattern that’s recurred many times before. The allied forces in World War II stopped the “evil” fascist empires of Germany and Japan by fire- and carpet-bombing cities in “strategic” bombing campaigns which all resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. When the US was embroiled in the Vietnam conflict, her soldiers came home to jeering spitting mobs. The common denominator here is that much of the judgement emanates from people whose only source of information on such events is mass media and not people who are staring at the situation from either side of a gun barrel who both shoot and get shot at.
In a war, the objective is to destroy the capacity of the enemy to fight back (and, in many cases, their long-term capacity to fight) and that often means both their physical and mental capacities. Peace exists only only on the back of a stark imbalance in military power — because one camp needs to be powerful and threatening enough to effect consequences on those who violate the rules of the world order they establish. That’s just the way things are. More specifically, that’s just the way humans are.
Last week’s blog posts
VP Duterte’s Performance Rating Drops Big, Speaker Romualdez Climbs In Latest OCTA Research Survey
October 30, 2023 by Oman
"Word is that Duterte had spent a previously granted P125 million of confidential funds to set up 16 satellite offices which is apart the six OVP satellite offices. These secret or rather not so secret satellite offices, says our source, would form the hub of her political operations throughout the country."
The Philippines abstains from UN call for truce because NOTHING justifies terrorism
October 28, 2023 by benign0
"Ultimately, however, much as we would like to think of these conflicts in terms of who is right or wrong, it comes down to who has the means to win such conflicts."