undefined | Better HN

0 pointsphilwelch7y ago0 comments

Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved.

We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price. And the adversaries we have faced, from Hitler to Daesh, would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction as we would. The reason asymmetric warfare works is that the terrorist is willing to stoop to levels that we are not. The only counter to that is precision warfare.

0 comments

posix_me_less7y ago

> "Violence is already endless. It’s just a matter of moral vanity whether or not you feel better about not being personally involved."

Nonsense. Violence is still limited, in time and extent, by economic and political forces, and by the fact that soldiers still have some respect for life of other people, because they are in the field, risking their own life and seeing the injustices of war. But put them in control of a violent video game, and that may change.

> We’ve tried non-intervention before, and places like Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and Rwanda have paid the price.

You've tried intervention, and places like Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Syria also have paid and are paying the price.

Perhaps it is not about the intervention/non-intervention, but about how you engage in the world.

> The only counter to that is precision warfare.

Only if you already decided on the warfare part. An alternative is to stop killing unknown people abroad and in so helping create new terrorists, and instead doing something about cooperation between the governments to stop the violence.

philwelchOP7y ago

> Only if you already decided on the warfare part. An alternative is to stop killing unknown people abroad and in so helping create new terrorists, and instead doing something about cooperation between the governments to stop the violence.

So your solution is to negotiate with people like Hitler and Bin Laden and to appease groups like Daesh. Ask the millions murdered in the Holocaust how that worked out for them, how Western non-violence was the solution.

While you're at it, ask the millions of South Koreans living in peace and prosperity how they feel about Western intervention to protect and even rescue them and their ancestors from the Kim regime. Ask the people of Bosnia and Kosovo whether we should have left them to the whims of Milosevic, just as we left the Tutsis to their fate.

We're not the ones who have decided on the warfare part. We're not the one who expand their reach by slaughtering boys and men while kidnapping and raping women and girls wherever they go. We're not the ones who commit ethnic cleansing and hack babies apart with machetes. That's already been decided. The only decision we have is between leaving these victims to their fate and living up to the words, "never again".

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse