When I was younger, I used to build and maintain old minis. One of the jobs I dreaded was changing the rear sub frame. It was generally thoroughly rusted by the time it need changing at at least one of the bolts holding it to the chassis would be so stuck that radical measures would be called for.
After exhausting the usual, less than usual and downright stupid tricks to get the thing off eventually only oxy-acetylene would do it with all the pain involved in welding the damn thing back together.
So it is with Gaza.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Israel - Gaza
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4 comments:
I don't get what this whole disproportionately thing is all about. You don't win wars by acting proportionally.
You win wars by crushing your enemy. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They put one of your men in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue.
You must fight on their level. With trickery, brutality, finality. You must match their evil.
Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words ‘Civis Romanis’ I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens?
Tit for tat does lead to more violence. And isn't that what proportionality really means?
If you aren't fighting with disproportionately then you aren't fighting to win, And if you aren't fighting to win then you are just continuing the cycle of violence. Don't get me wrong. I am not one of those who say that violence never solved anything. Ask what the city fathers of Hiroshima what they say about it and you know what they would say? NOTHING, Hiroshima was destroyed. Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn't solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst.
No, I am not a pacifist. But the truth is that when you fight you fight in order to totally destroy your enemy's will and capacity to fight. You totally overwhelm them.
Anything less than that is just unnecessary cruelty.
I am reminded of the Cabinet discussion during World War II regarding Lidice after the Germans wiped the place out in retaliation for Heydrich's assassination.
The conclusion was:
"We must not compete with the Germans in atrocities."
"We must not compete with the Germans in atrocities."
... and yet the allies targeted military installations and factories surrounded by civilians, and levelled Dresden.
... which was a waste of lives, effort, equipment and did not advance the Allied victory at all.
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