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Comment by tptacek

4 days ago

The reason foreign military organizations don't routinely target active duty US military generals isn't that they're worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds. It's that the United States armed forces will very quickly reduce their entire organization, and much of the surrounding area, to its combustion products.

There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them. And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.

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tptacek

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ignoramous  4 days ago

> US military ... worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds...

Acutely aware of this fact, yeah.

> There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them.

Not wrong. None of the former great empires that fell were as military capable as the super powers of the modern era.

> And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.

True. Some on the Left have extreme take on "Nation States" for this reason:

  One was to challenge the thesis that nationalism and colonialism are two separate things — that nationalism is the good side, colonialism the bad side; that nationalism came first, colonialism later, or vice versa. I wanted to show that they were twins joined at the hip. And I also wanted to show that from the outset, the nation-state project could not be achieved without ethnic cleansing and extreme violence. This could be seen in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims [from the Iberian Peninsula], and that soon led to a conflict between states, because each state had an official majority — the nation it claimed to represent — and its minority, or minorities.

  The human rights paradigm focuses on the perpetrators of violence. It wants to identify them individually so that we can hold them individually accountable. It does not look for the beneficiaries of that violence. Beneficiaries are not necessarily perpetrators. To address beneficiaries, you need to identify the issues around which violence is mobilized ...

The Idea of the Nation-State Is Synonymous With Genocide: A conversation with political theorist Mahmood Mamdani (2024), https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mahmood-mamdani-na...

  • eli_gottlieb  4 days ago

    Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

    • ignoramous  3 days ago

      > Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

      This is the 2nd time "[bomb] Dresden" at me in this thread. Interesting.

      > by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified ...

      Well, if you're curious about where his "logic" (his political hypothesis) leads, Mamdani wrote an entire book on it (which is in fact the subject of the interview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Settler_nor_Native

      (from the book's Introduction):

        ... Nuremberg effectively depoliticized Nazism, saddling responsibility for Nazi violence with particular men and ignoring the fact that these men were engaged in the project of political modernity on behalf of a constituency: the nation, the volk. The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism's political roots ... After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.

  ... If Nazism had been understood not as a crime but as a political project of the nation-state, there may yet have been a place for Jews in Europe, in denationalized states committed to the equal protection of every citizen. However, because the response to Nazism took the nation-state for granted, the solution for the Jews turned out to be the nation-state, again.

 ... South Africans didn't give up their cultural identities and reject diversity. They rejected the politicization of diversity. Decolonizing the political through the recognition of a shared survivor identity does not require that we all pretend we are the same; far from it. It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.

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  • tptacek  4 days ago

    And all I have to do to operationalize this logic is to accept the premise that the idea of a nation-state is synonymous with genocide.