quote:Originally posted by King of Men: However many it takes to make the Palestinians stop.
I think that there is only one way to guarantee that the Palestinians stop - and if you find that acceptable, then I think we differ substantially in our axioms of morality.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: However many it takes to make the Palestinians stop.
I think that there is only one way to guarantee that the Palestinians stop - and if you find that acceptable, then I think we differ substantially in our axioms of morality.
Not necessarily.
You could, theoretically, remove everyone from the area forceably, nuke the area until it becomes uninhabitable for multiple generations, and then offer both sides multiple options for new places to live.
Not exactly moral, or feasible, but it would get the fighting to stop, and would be less immoral than completely killing one side or the other.
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posted
I've already had this discussion in this thread, but to recap: The Germans, in 1945, stopped with something like 7% casualties. (More if you just count males of fighting age, of course.) That is, they did not merely stop the current round of fighting as they had done in 1918, but really renounced the goal of becoming Europe's dominant power. The Russians, likewise, stopped in 1917 after taking something like 5 or 6 percent casualties - not merely suing for peace and saying "We'll get you later when we've built up our strength again", but literally millions of Russians throwing down their guns and saying "Sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm going home". The French came very, very close to the same thing, and the Italian army never delivered another effective attack after the 10th battle of the Izonso. (Or 11th, or 13th, whichever. They were fighting for that river forever.) It is possible to make people give up, if you whack them hard enough, and 'hard enough' is not equal to genocide.
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But, to clarify, if it really were true that the Palestinians were a monolithic bloc of hatred who actually would have to be killed to the last infant to make them cease launching rockets, then yes, I think Israel would be justified in doing so.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: However many it takes to make the Palestinians stop.
I think that there is only one way to guarantee that the Palestinians stop - and if you find that acceptable, then I think we differ substantially in our axioms of morality.
Not necessarily.
You could, theoretically, remove everyone from the area forceably, nuke the area until it becomes uninhabitable for multiple generations, and then offer both sides multiple options for new places to live.
Not exactly moral, or feasible, but it would get the fighting to stop.
(emphasis mine)
I doubt it. It might serve to unite the Palestinians and the Israelis, though, if only against a common enemy.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: But, to clarify, if it really were true that the Palestinians were a monolithic bloc of hatred who actually would have to be killed to the last infant to make them cease launching rockets, then yes, I think Israel would be justified in doing so.
This is my last post tonight; a few comments/questions: 1)I don't find your examples compelling. Do you have examples where a grass roots freedom force or terrorist group was beaten down?
2)Given a) that it is in the interest for others in the region to maintain resentment against Israel, b) that the PLO, even when willing, was unable to prevent suicide attacks (so why believe Hamas could better?) what would Israel have to ensure further rockets won't be launched? If you were in command, when would you say stop?
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posted
I do not believe the PLO was ever willing, except as a very temporary (a week or two) measure. Which I believe they managed, more than once.
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quote:1)I don't find your examples compelling. Do you have examples where a grass roots freedom force or terrorist group was beaten down?
Yes: The Werewolves in Germany never amounted to anything. Do you have any examples where such a group accomplished anything without a large supportive population?
quote:2)Given a) that it is in the interest for others in the region to maintain resentment against Israel, b) that the PLO, even when willing, was unable to prevent suicide attacks (so why believe Hamas could better?) what would Israel have to ensure further rockets won't be launched?
There haven't been any suicide attacks for quite some time, to my knowledge. It's all in the rockets these days. Never mind whether Hamas can prevent them, is Hamas capable of organising them? If not, why would another group be capable?
quote:If you were in command, when would you say stop?
When the Palestinians rose in revolt against their Hamas rulers, and installed a regime willing to negotiate.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: I've already had this discussion in this thread, but to recap: The Germans, in 1945, stopped with something like 7% casualties. (More if you just count males of fighting age, of course.) That is, they did not merely stop the current round of fighting as they had done in 1918, but really renounced the goal of becoming Europe's dominant power. The Russians, likewise, stopped in 1917 after taking something like 5 or 6 percent casualties - not merely suing for peace and saying "We'll get you later when we've built up our strength again", but literally millions of Russians throwing down their guns and saying "Sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm going home". The French came very, very close to the same thing, and the Italian army never delivered another effective attack after the 10th battle of the Izonso. (Or 11th, or 13th, whichever. They were fighting for that river forever.) It is possible to make people give up, if you whack them hard enough, and 'hard enough' is not equal to genocide.
I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but for the American Civil War, it took something like 40% casualties to get the south to stop fighting, and even then they didn't really give up, they just shifted tactics from outright military action to guerilla attacks that lasted, in one form or another, almost another 100 years. Sherman at the outset of the war said that it wouldn't be over until 250,000 Confederate men died. It was a remarkably accurate estimate.
I do think that there is a point at which a people will stop fighting. I think it's a moveable bar with every culture and with different conflicts that requires a certain number of dead people before everyone is willing to call it quits and go home. I think that number will be very, very high for this particular conflict, especially given that a very, very small number of people can provoke such a large response from Israel. The number of people that need to sign on and stay signed on to a peace agreement is very, very high. Especially in a culture that has been indoctrinated to glorify death in a way that few modern conflicts have ( perhaps of the Japanese in WWII are an example), it will take a large number of such deaths to tip the scale from "sacrificing for the worthy cause" to "a cost too high." So long as they think they are sacrificing for a worthy cause, at least a small portion won't give up, and a small portion is all it takes to provoke Israel.
The answer for Israel, by historical standards I think, seems to be "go big or go home." Killing a couple thousand Palestinians is just going to piss the survivors off, turn world opinion against them, probably kill a good number of their own troops through attrition in an urban conflict, and at the end of the day they'll have to go home without their objectives complete, which is even more problematic because during this particular attack, they really don't have any achievable objectives to speak of.
If you want an example, look at what happened when they tried to smash Hezbollah in Lebanon. In many ways it was disastrous for the IDF, because of the long term political effects in Lebanon, because of their inability to actually complete their objectives, and because of the casualties.
And so I come back to Sherman and "go big or go home." If they want to break Palestinian will to fight through casualties in the way you suggest KoM, it'll require a big death toll. If they aren't going to do that, they might as well not even bother, as it'll just poke the bear without any tangible gain except some sort of morale boost, perhaps (which isn't actually tangible).
To offer an offbeat analogy: I think this invasion is Aragorn assaulting the Black Gates. What they really need is someone to throw the ring in Mt. Doom.
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"...be sure to include all the casualties from the rockets that have been launched from the region for the past 10 years."
According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs list of victims since 27Sep2000, 15*Israelis have died in rocket attacks. Looking at the list, I'd guesstimate an upper limit of 107 Israelis wounded: Palestinian rockets seem to produce a lower ratio of wounded per killed than the ~7to1 average.
The video Children of Hamas is a must watch, too. I think the link to it on the above page is broken.
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quote:I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but for the American Civil War, it took something like 40% casualties to get the south to stop fighting, and even then they didn't really give up, they just shifted tactics from outright military action to guerilla attacks that lasted, in one form or another, almost another 100 years.
40% in the actual fighting armies, possibly. Nowhere near that in men of fighting age; something like 8-10% of the total population, which is the number I was giving for the Germans and Russians. Let's try to compare apples to apples, here.
And what guerrilla action are you referring to? There was never any guerrilla movement in the South whose goal was secession or even the restoration of slavery. Keeping the blacks down, yes; but that was never an issue in the civil war. The question was whether they should be slaves, not whether they had equal rights; neither side believed anything of the sort.
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quote:1)I don't find your examples compelling. Do you have examples where a grass roots freedom force or terrorist group was beaten down?
Yes: The Werewolves in Germany never amounted to anything. Do you have any examples where such a group accomplished anything without a large supportive population?
I'm taking this as a 'no'.
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To reply to the tone of the original post, I found bitterly amusing a mention in a bbc report of a Norweigian doctor who claimed he'd seen hundreds of casualties but only two fighters, with all the implicit criticism of the statement.
Now, aside from the fact that Hamas makes a habit of striking from and hiding in civilian neighborhoods, incurring these civilian casualties, my question for this doctor was, "How the hell would you know?"
Do the fighters have HAMAS tattooed on their foreheads? Do they show up in the hospital with their AKs chained to them, or still holding their rocket launchers? Or does this doctor know by sight all of the Hamas 'militants' in his area?
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men:
quote:I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but for the American Civil War, it took something like 40% casualties to get the south to stop fighting, and even then they didn't really give up, they just shifted tactics from outright military action to guerilla attacks that lasted, in one form or another, almost another 100 years.
40% in the actual fighting armies, possibly. Nowhere near that in men of fighting age; something like 8-10% of the total population, which is the number I was giving for the Germans and Russians. Let's try to compare apples to apples, here.
And what guerrilla action are you referring to? There was never any guerrilla movement in the South whose goal was secession or even the restoration of slavery. Keeping the blacks down, yes; but that was never an issue in the civil war. The question was whether they should be slaves, not whether they had equal rights; neither side believed anything of the sort.
Indeed, total Confederate casualties are only roughly 25-29% of their total standing forces. Is my count only 3% casualties of their population in total.
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quote:1)I don't find your examples compelling. Do you have examples where a grass roots freedom force or terrorist group was beaten down?
Yes: The Werewolves in Germany never amounted to anything. Do you have any examples where such a group accomplished anything without a large supportive population?
I'm taking this as a 'no'.
I can see you are a very effective debater; when anyone gives a data point that disagrees with your thesis, you simply ignore it. Clever! I wish I'd thought of it!
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Blayne Bradley
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I should point out that totalitarian states were such as the Soviet Union somewhat effective in squashing any resistance movement. As for a specfiic example I believe Franco's spain squashed the Communist resistance in Spain which had after the civil war continued for a while. I think iraq effectively crushed the Kurds after 91' and Iran after the Soviet Union pulled out crushed all of the Pro Soviet aligned factions and resistence in northern Iran.
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quote:1)I don't find your examples compelling. Do you have examples where a grass roots freedom force or terrorist group was beaten down?
Yes: The Werewolves in Germany never amounted to anything. Do you have any examples where such a group accomplished anything without a large supportive population?
I'm taking this as a 'no'.
I can see you are a very effective debater; when anyone gives a data point that disagrees with your thesis, you simply ignore it. Clever! I wish I'd thought of it!
My bad - I had forgotten this was the name of the post WWII Nazi guerrillas, and thought you were being facetious. I (obviously) don't know much about them, so will read up a bit before commenting on the aptness of this analogy.
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quote: However many it takes to make the Palestinians stop.
I don't know, I'm not sure anyone can ever be entitled to kill that many people, but that's not why I'm here.
I think the real problem with this situation lies not in the Middle East, but with the rest of the world. After WWII, the world felt guilty for allowing 6 million Jews to die horrible deaths in Nazi death camps, so we gave the Jews a home and the ability to defend themselves. It was our penance for allowing such an atrocity, and yet, our solution created more problems. Soon, we began to realize the plight we had visited upon the Palestinians, and thus, our guilt shifted from the Jews to the Palestinians, whom some began to view as the victims of a terrible mistake. Now, of course, we have the US blocking any attempt by the UN to condemn Israel, a world willing to allow the Palestinians to bomb Israel daily, a group of people who voted for a known terrorist organization as their leaders, and a world that enables both sides.
How do we expect to solve the crisis in the Middle East when we can't even get our own act together? See, Israel and Palestine are caught in the middle of this giant tug-of-war, and neither will be able to solve their problems until we solve our own issues. I like the idea of this being Aragorn attacking the black gates, the problem for me is that world can't decide who is Frodo, Samwise, or Gollum, and until we do, Aragorn will continually attack the black gate.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Yes: The Werewolves in Germany never amounted to anything. Do you have any examples where such a group accomplished anything without a large supportive population?
After a quick scan I have a few questions: 1)Did the werewolves actually formally surrender? 2)Is it more likely that the movement died out because of the harsh measures imposed on communities that contained activists, or because a massive reconstruction effort was underway, or both?
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: I was under impression that the Werwolf soldiers were more propaganda than reality.
Yes. That is precisely my point. The most skilled rhetorician of the twentieth century, directing the most intrusive state apparatus ever, using an ideology which produced a large number of actual, no-insult-intended fanatics, and fighting for a genuine national goal, with plenty of time to see the incoming conventional defeat and prepare for it, was still not able to form a credible guerrilla/terrorist threat when the majority of the population were convinced that the goal (German domination of Europe) was just plain unachievable. This guerrilla movement was so thoroughly defeated by purely conventional means that it never even got started!
That's what happens when you really convince people that their war aims are unattainable. Not "They got the better of us this time". Not "We were stabbed in the back". Not "Their rifles are better, we'll have to accept this temporary setback while we make some of our own." In place of all these, "We gave it our best shot using all the force available, no wavering, no lack of sacrifice, and there just isn't that much strength in us."
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Also, to multiply examples from Germany, how about the Rote Armee Fraktion? No support in the population, a few atrocities, then nothing. The Weathermen: No support in the population, a few atrocities, nothing. The various right-wing terrorists that have set off bombs or shot up schools, in both the US and Europe: No support, one atrocity, then nothing. Any number of guerrilla armies in South America: No support, several years of living in the forest and supporting themselves by banditry, then nothing.
You could probably find more examples, but there's a selection bias at work, because it's rare for unsuccessful groups to become famous. You only hear about the ones that had support, and therefore got to the point of defeating their enemies.
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I dunno, look at Ireland. After 800 years, overwhelming military force still hasn't quashed the Republican movement. The only thing that has shown any progress toward peace is acknowledging the guerrillas and allowing them a political path to achieve their goals. Harsh measures have only served to inflame resistance.
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The trouble with the comparison, to me, is precisely that while the Werewolves were little more than a concept on paper created for propaganda, Hamas is an established network with exterior funding. It's a pretty serious disanalogy in your argument.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: I dunno, look at Ireland. After 800 years, overwhelming military force still hasn't quashed the Republican movement. The only thing that has shown any progress toward peace is acknowledging the guerrillas and allowing them a political path to achieve their goals. Harsh measures have only served to inflame resistance.
There is no continuity between Irish resistance to English rule in 1300, 1600, 1920, and 1970. They are quite separate organisations every time. And I would also argue that harsh measures were not in fact used in 1920 and 1970, at the level I'm talking about here. Recall that Germany was fairly literally flattened, no stone left on stone. Six years of complete mobilisation, millions killed. And all this on top of their very similar experience in the Great War, which failed to convince. To call what was done in Ireland 'harsh measures' is a bit of an exaggeration in this context.
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quote:I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but for the American Civil War, it took something like 40% casualties to get the south to stop fighting, and even then they didn't really give up, they just shifted tactics from outright military action to guerilla attacks that lasted, in one form or another, almost another 100 years.
40% in the actual fighting armies, possibly. Nowhere near that in men of fighting age; something like 8-10% of the total population, which is the number I was giving for the Germans and Russians. Let's try to compare apples to apples, here.
And what guerrilla action are you referring to? There was never any guerrilla movement in the South whose goal was secession or even the restoration of slavery. Keeping the blacks down, yes; but that was never an issue in the civil war. The question was whether they should be slaves, not whether they had equal rights; neither side believed anything of the sort.
I'm not sure how those numbers jive considering something like 90% of the male fighting age population of the south actually served at some point. I'll have to do some checking.
No, there wasn't post-war guerilla action devoted to secession or the reintroduction of slavery, but that's just my point. After they accepted that slavery wouldn't be a reality, they just modified their goals slightly. The South spent the 30's through the 50's using a constant stream of violent action and political action to achieve their aims, and that resulted in a war that they lost. After the war, Johnson allowed them to pretty much return to the status quo. They voted back in the same people to power in their government, they created draconian Black Codes that restricted the movement of blacks and their rights, and created ridiculously strict contracts that technically allowed blacks to choose where they worked, they were slaves in some sense in every way except name. When Congressional military reconstruction took over, things were radically altered. Contract laws were changed, amendments were passed, black senators were elected in Mississippi, and Republicans took over every elected office in the South. The result was a massive terror campaign that drove blacks away from the polls, killed elected officials, and saw the downfall of reconstruction.
My point thus, is that after the war ended, they were fine with it, until actual change came, at which point they started doing the exact same things they did before the war started, just in a different way, and for slightly different aims. And for the next 100 years, they systematically repressed the same group of people, and engaged in terror campaigns in some small way, until they were finally stopped in the 1960's.
And there were plenty of people in the north who were willing to fight for equality of rights for blacks, not the least of which was Lincoln. The population as a whole wasn't on board, and that's why it fell apart in the 70's, but Republicans in Congress made sure it got done as a condition of readmission into the Union. They just didn't stay vigilant.
The connection to Palestine/Israel, is that even if you kill enough people to get them to surrender, you're not necessarily home. It just means the dynamic of the war changes.
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Blayne Bradley
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Ever read "The Man with the Iron Heart"(title?) by Harry Turtledove? It supposes that if Heydrich had lived an actual resistence would have taken place and successfully with cleverly drawn parallels force the US to pull out.
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Blayne Bradley
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The population of the CSA was 9.1 million people, having roughly only 1.2 million in uniform at the height of the war, of which only roughly including wounded, 310,000 were casualties.
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Those numbers, which are off slightly I think, fail to represent a lot of things. I'll post something more substantive when I have numbers in front of me.
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Speaking of numbers, I thought these were fascinating. And a little appalling. Those who think Israel should be helping out the people with whom they are at war should like this. Personally, I don't.
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In the Ft. Worth Star telegram, someone wrote that because the children grow up to be Hamas, there is no such thing as Palestine Civilians. Everyone in Palestine is a terrorist.
Great world we live in.
Maybe Madoff was a Hamas spy. Sounds good, eh?
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This is some excellent commentary on what's happening right now, as is this. I know Jeff Goldberg, and I rarely agree with him about the middle east, but he's spot on this time.
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quote:The connection to Palestine/Israel, is that even if you kill enough people to get them to surrender, you're not necessarily home. It just means the dynamic of the war changes.
In the first place, I disagree with your reading of the postwar history. Second-class citizenship is nowhere near equivalent to slavery. But more to the point, this does not contradict what I said. I stated that there exists a point at which people give up. I did not state that this is the same as the point at which they surrender militarily, as exemplified by the Germans in 1918. And what's more, you'll note that when change did come, in the sixties, only an extremely tiny minority tried to resist it by real force, and they were rapidly rooted out; that's because the experiment of armed insurrection had been tried, and failed in a massive, convincing sort of way.
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Those analogies don't quite work. In the Warsaw analogy, it isn't the Jews that are in the ghetto. The situations aren't the same. The only with the little guy throwing rocks, the article seems to portray the big guy with the gun as just minding his own business and the little guy attacking for no reason. Whether the Palestinians reason is a good one is another question, but they didn't just pick some random big guy to annoy.
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quote:Second-class citizenship is nowhere near equivalent to slavery.
Well I won't make that judgment for all second class citizenship statuses in history, or all forms of slavery, but in post civil war America, directly after the war, it was pretty damned close. Then things got better for a decade, and when reconstruction failed, it went sharply back the other way. If you want to take this to a different thread, I could probably ratttle off a four or five page essay off the top of my head on the subject, but this isn't really the place for it.
quote:And what's more, you'll note that when change did come, in the sixties, only an extremely tiny minority tried to resist it by real force, and they were rapidly rooted out; that's because the experiment of armed insurrection had been tried, and failed in a massive, convincing sort of way.
I'm not convinced that that is the main reason why. It was a numbers game. The people who were angry enough to actually take up arms were drastically few in number, and resorted to petty local terrorism of varying kinds, and were hunted down by law enforcement. The national wasn't as sectional for a lot of reasons, and a black diaspora of sorts had taken place over the preceding 60-80 years. They didn't resort to arms because America was a fundamentally different place a hundred years after the civil war, not because they all picked up a history book and said "huh, well THAT won't work."
The solution in our case was generational. The south I don't think EVER surrendered as a people, not their ideas. Militarily they gave in, but they never really gave up on their cause, and they took it to the grave. Things only changed when that generation died off and the next one came into being in the post war world. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville, 'America reinvents itself every generation.'
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I really didn't enjoy the parallel to Warsaw.
I don't appreciate everyone who tries to champion the holocaust for their cause. This is nothing like the holocaust, not to the Israelis and not to the Palestinians. It cheapens things to use the holocaust as a political tool.
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quote:The people who were angry enough to actually take up arms were drastically few in number, and resorted to petty local terrorism of varying kinds, and were hunted down by law enforcement.
There are two ways of interpreting this fact. Let me restate it first: The number of people who were angry enough to resort to violence, and optimistic about violence working, was very small. This is a Venn diagram. You believe that the first set was small; I believe that the second set was small.
But you are also, I think, exaggerating what it means to give up a goal. The population of the South, around 1870, might have collectively thought that it would be nice to have slavery back, or be independent of Washington, or whatever. But they were not willing to fight for that - not even a small minority, enough to form a guerrilla group. They were really convinced that such action would be futile. The desire for it eventually went away by generational osmosis, as you outline, but the conviction that "this can't be done" is the important thing.
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quote:And what's more, you'll note that when change did come, in the sixties, only an extremely tiny minority tried to resist it by real force, and they were rapidly rooted out; that's because the experiment of armed insurrection had been tried, and failed in a massive, convincing sort of way.
I'm not convinced that that is the main reason why. It was a numbers game. The people who were angry enough to actually take up arms were drastically few in number, and resorted to petty local terrorism of varying kinds, and were hunted down by law enforcement.
I think this is exactly KoM's point. There weren't enough people angry about it because, as a whole, they'd realized that getting angry and starting a fight with the federal government didn't turn out well.
If you've spoken with many Germans, or lived in Germany, you (general) would realize that the German people, as a whole, are still haunted by WW2 and the Holocaust. The current generation doesn't feel guilt, exactly, for the war, but they are quite aware of it.
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quote:The people who were angry enough to actually take up arms were drastically few in number, and resorted to petty local terrorism of varying kinds, and were hunted down by law enforcement.
There are two ways of interpreting this fact. Let me restate it first: The number of people who were angry enough to resort to violence, and optimistic about violence working, was very small. This is a Venn diagram. You believe that the first set was small; I believe that the second set was small.
But you are also, I think, exaggerating what it means to give up a goal. The population of the South, around 1870, might have collectively thought that it would be nice to have slavery back, or be independent of Washington, or whatever. But they were not willing to fight for that - not even a small minority, enough to form a guerrilla group. They were really convinced that such action would be futile. The desire for it eventually went away by generational osmosis, as you outline, but the conviction that "this can't be done" is the important thing.
I don't think that being optimistic about achieving goals by violence or thinking it can be done is as important a factor as you seem to think. Quite often, the struggle is its own goal - the hopelessness of a cause is not a deterrent. (Again, from a study of Irish history.)
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Who do you have in mind as taking up arms without some sort of belief in eventual victory?
Edit: And also, doesn't that tend to reinforce my point, that people actually gave up their goal of slavery? If belief in victory is not important, then we must conclude that a different factor changed, presumably belief in the importance of race.
[ January 07, 2009, 07:23 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Check out The People's Cube. This one was particularly on point today.
This is some excellent commentary on what's happening right now, as is this. I know Jeff Goldberg, and I rarely agree with him about the middle east, but he's spot on this time.
Haven't been through all the stats yet but, "0 wounded Palestinians allowed by Hamas to cross from Gaza into Egypt for treatment." Is a bit inaccurate. Egypt isn't allowing any Palestinians to cross through the border, in fact they kill them if they try.
edit: changed the word "into" into "through" as it's pretty hard to get into a border.
quote:The people who were angry enough to actually take up arms were drastically few in number, and resorted to petty local terrorism of varying kinds, and were hunted down by law enforcement.
There are two ways of interpreting this fact. Let me restate it first: The number of people who were angry enough to resort to violence, and optimistic about violence working, was very small. This is a Venn diagram. You believe that the first set was small; I believe that the second set was small.
But you are also, I think, exaggerating what it means to give up a goal. The population of the South, around 1870, might have collectively thought that it would be nice to have slavery back, or be independent of Washington, or whatever. But they were not willing to fight for that - not even a small minority, enough to form a guerrilla group. They were really convinced that such action would be futile. The desire for it eventually went away by generational osmosis, as you outline, but the conviction that "this can't be done" is the important thing.
My point as it relates to Palestine and Israel, is that while the South DID give up on the idea of retaining slavery, they really only slightly shifted their goals. They didn't give up entirely. Giving up entirely would have meant allowing the North's attempted rewiring of the southern economy and southern cultural fabric to take hold and then continue. Instead they licked their wounds for a decade, and then systematically undid everything the Republicans tried to push on them during the period from 1865 to 1875 (roughly). Acknowledging that slavery wasn't possible anymore, they set about remaking their society into something as close to antebellum society as they possibly could, and they were pretty damned good at it.
In other words, at the end of the war they maybe agreed to give up 2% of what they believed in, in order for peace, but held on to the other 98%. Slavery was hardly the only point of contention in the war. Move that over to Palestine and Israel. Palestine might renounce some of what they've been doing, like Qassams and suicide bombings (though there hasn't been one in awhile from what I understand), and they might agree to live side by side with Israel...but while that might seem big, there are still a LOT of other things that need to be agreed upon, and a lot of old emnities that have to die with the people who hold them, before the aims of the current conflict are truly renounced.
Politically the parallels go even further I think. Both the South and the Palestinian people are kept in a virtual strangehold by their governments. Both Hamas and the Democrats in the south amped up the people on false threats and fears in order to get themselves voted into power, and kept alive the specter of Israeli/Yankee oppression as a means to keep the people in a constant state of heightened agitation, which makes them far more pliable.
Jhai -
I think the difference is, I don't think the number of people who were willing to take up arms was low because of futility. I think that even if in the 60's they felt they actually could have won what they wanted through force of arms, they wouldn't have. National unity in the 1960's wasn't even close to the lows of the 1860's.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Check out The People's Cube. This one was particularly on point today.
This is some excellent commentary on what's happening right now, as is this. I know Jeff Goldberg, and I rarely agree with him about the middle east, but he's spot on this time.
Haven't been through all the stats yet but, "0 wounded Palestinians allowed by Hamas to cross from Gaza into Egypt for treatment." Is a bit inaccurate. Egypt isn't allowing any Palestinians to cross through the border, in fact they kill them if they try.
Many of the stats on that website just scream "cherry-picked."
I especially liked the category "Iran-backed Hamas Rocket, Mortar Attacks and Nuclear Developments". That certainly isn't ambiguous at all.
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Maybe not too cherry-picked, the 28 total deaths from rockets fired from Gaza since 2001 might be an attempt to put the small scale of the conflict into perspective. (As a comparison, annually thats about the same rate of deaths as by lightning in Texas between 1990 to 2003)
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Lightning isn't purposeful. Comparing the two is bizarre.
And Juxtapose, why would you expect ambiguity? There's nothing ambiguous about the malice of the Arabs in Gaza.
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It wasn't a criticism, I'm just saying that if I were trying to one-sidedly talk up the case for a war I'd probably have left that part out (or better yet, inflated it somehow) especially after noting that there were more than 10,000+ rocket attacks in the same period which IS a more impressive and dangerous looking number.
I only picked lighting because its a cause of death with a similar rate of death, most causes of death (accidents at work, falls, car accidents, suicides, etc.) that quickly came to my mind would have rates of death far higher and thus would be unsuitable as a point of comparison.
In fact looking back, lightning in Texas is an unsuitable candidate for comparison simply because the population of Texas is roughly four times that of Israel. Although *mathematically*, the rate of death should then be similar to that of lightning deaths of evangelical protestants in Texas since they comprise about a quarter of the population (Hmmm, I mean if the lightning only hit them).
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