Historians are very critical of many countries response to Nazi Germany in the years just before WWII. So much hate and violence was ignored. Foreign Leaders wrung their hands not knowing what to do as events unfolded. Kristallnachtaka The Night of Broken Glass in 1938. The building of the concentration camps for the homosexuals, disabled, and mentally ill. The forced deportation of Jews who had no where to go. Countries like the US’ immigration laws blocked them. Ships that could not dock and returned these people back to Europe to eventually die in the concentration camps.
The parallels with ISIS is striking. They tooroutinely execute homosexuals. Ancient sects of Christians and Yazdi are being systematically eradicated. Thankfully the number of victims is much smaller than what happened in Nazi Germany. But that is only because the targeted groups of people are smaller.
I feel great sadness and yes, a great deal of shame for the modern Western Nations response. That we as a civilized and educated people are little different from the earlier generation in the 1930’s. Like them we wring our hands, express concern, and do almost nothing. Until events escalated to a point that the Western Nations either fought Germany or capitulated to their rule. Only then did the West unite to crush Germany and its Fascist Ally Italy.
I don’t pretend to have an answer. I know this situation is different. WWII troops were welcomed with flowers and kisses as liberators. Troops today would quickly face an insurgency and terrorism just like we did ten years ago. It’s hard helping the innocent people when a significant radical segment of the population wants to kill you.
I guess there’s not much the Western World can do except turn our heads and look away. Close our ears and hearts to the cries of the suffering and dying. We’ve done it many times in other situations and are quite proficient at carrying on with our own self-absorbed lives. I wish there was another way.
At least steps are *finally *being taken to recognize ISIS’ actions for what they are. Genocide.
Over the years I have changed my stance on being interventionist as it’s like a cop getting into the middle of domestic squabble where both parties wind up attacking the cop. It often leads to nothing but making ourselves the object of hatred and violence.
Yes terrible things happen but sometimes this stuff just needs to burn itself out. The west keep sthinking people need “rescuing” when a lot of the time they are heavily invested in the culture that s oppressing them and the solution has to come from within the culture not from the outside. You can change political cultures through pure force (witness WWII) but the investment is ferocious in terms of treasure and blood.
For example, while the West is often criticized for too little too late in regards to Nazi atrocities, I don’t see anyone saying that we’re bad people for not intervening in Soviet and Chinese atrocities. Stalin and Mao killed comparable numbers of people to Hitler (more by some counting measures), over a longer period of time, and no one did anything about it… ever.
Personally, I do think we should pay more attention to the Nazi/ISIS parallels on immigration issues. We turned away a lot of Jewish immigrants in exactly the same way we’re turning away a lot of Syrians. It’s one thing to resist going to war over genocide… it seems downright unjust to refuse them immigration.
It’s not like the US has been sitting idly by, you know. We’ve been kind of an unfortunately critical character in this whole drama from the beginning. I’d imagine history will probably consider us one of the instigating factors.
This war is a complex system. It’s a system where you can’t necessarily predict the outcome of any particular intervention. Any given action could lead to peace and reconcilliation, or it could lead to nuclear bombs. A clear chain of cause and effect isn’t operating right now. Nobody, no matter what information they have, can predict what will happen six months from now, a year from now, or longer.
We’ve developed methods for working in complex environments-- basically taking small, incremental steps and adjusting strategy based on immediate feedback, while looking for moments of opportunity that could tip the scales in a favorable direction. It’s not as satisfying as having a grand strategy with a strong narrative, but the grand strategy hasn’t worked for quite a while. It’s important to realize that we’ve historically been very bad at intervening in distant civil wars. This is outside of the zone of things we are good at, and we can’t magically change that. It’d be nice for us if we could walk in to any given civil war and determine the outcome. But we just can’t.
More cynically, I’d be surprised if we aren’t a lot more comfortable with them fighting it out over there than trying to fight with us over here.
I also want to point out that it’s not like this is the only bad stuff going on right now for history to remember. Central Africa Republic is only avoiding genocide through heavy intervention. Burundi is giving everyone Rwanda Genocide flashbacks. South Sudan is just a complete disaster, with the worst war crimes imaginable happening pretty much constantly, everywhere. Mali is threatening to fall apart. Boko Haram is terrorizing the entire region and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. The Rohingya are still trying to find a place to exist. The Uighers aren’t going to get through this era lightly. Afghanistan is still a non-state. Somalia’s still a wreck. Eritrea is earning it’s moniker of “the North Korea of Africa.” And then there is, of course, the North Korea of North Korea.
That’s just off the top of my head. If we are supposed to be the ones to fix everyone’s problems, we’ve got quite a task ahead of us.
Really ugly shit. But it has always been an issue of how much we get involved in what foreign situations. To take one from my youth, I never understood how we could normalize relations w/ China and N. Vietnam, yet still pretend Cuba didn’t exist.
I was hugely critical of the west for not doing SOMETHING more and earlier in Rwanda, but I strongly opposed our post 9/11 attack on Iraq. Even acknowledging that Saddam was a bad guy, I didn’t see that he was the WORST guy out there at the time.
My favorite may have been our invasion of Panama. Operation “Just cause” indeed! Full name, Operation “Just 'cause we can!”
No answers from me. Just more of the same questions. I was an international relations major in undergrad, and in law school studied a lot of international law. But I came to the realization that it really is all bullshit, with actions motivated by whomever has the ability to spur action at any particular time. Forget looking for noble purpose or consistency.
I think we ought to define our “national interests” far more narrowly than we do, but I don’t think isolationism is workable either. Just ugly shit, reflecting that (a lot of) people the world-wide are self-interested and intolerant assholes.
The problem is that the news media focuses on ISIS atrocities because they make really well filmed snuff videos where they murder people in creative ways. The news media profits off these videos, describing their content in sensational stories.
Apparently, the people who support ISIS, the…Sunnis I think, (or is it the Shiites? think it’s the Sunnis this round) are getting oppressed by the government the USA put in place. So it’s either “support this murder cult that fights our oppressors” or “get oppressed”. Not a simple choice, and as a result, there are millions of people tentatively supporting ISIS. (or at least living there and not saying or doing anything)
Worse, apparently, the Shiites were the main people the USA was killing on a vast scale when it was fighting in Iraq. The USA spent more than a trillion bucks to send troops into harms way then bomb from the air the people who were shooting at them, and those people were usually Shiites. So if the USA joins in the “fight against ISIS” in earnest, it will be supporting the same people it was murdering the last time around.
Anyways, both sides murder prisoners, oppress large numbers of people, and are generally bad people. Both of them are realistically enemies of the USA. So getting involved is self defeating. I know the ISIS videos are horrible, but what can you do? The last invasion was estimated to kill on the order of a million people. I doubt Saddam had to kill even a fraction of that many people per decade to stay in power - invading Iraq didn’t save any Iraqi lives, and it arguably made living conditions for the average citizen there much worse.
This is why we can’t have nice things, like moon bases and trips to Mars; because we still have genocide. ISTM we cannot get away from our inbred savagery toward one another. I agree there are feelings of just letting things run their course and not get involved, but the more we do that, the more places in the world that can turn into shit-holes. I think we have consistently selected conflicts to get involved-with based on economic motives, not moral ones. People may be savage to one another, but are smart enough to know where the US stands when it comes to oppression - we’ll get involved only when our economic interests are at stake. Poor you if you live in a hut in east Africa and those Boko Haram bozos are coming to wipe-out your community. THAT is how the west will be judged, IMHO
I disagree. The reason we don’t have Moon bases and trips to mars is because we do not have the technology to do so without it requiring a lifetime of labor for hundreds of thousands of people to give about 6 people a brief stay on Mars or a longer stay on the Moon. That is, there would need to be millions of total employees working for a decade or so, and it would total out to be equivalent to a whole lifetime of labor for 100k+ people to make this happen. While about 6 people get to be the astronauts.
This ratio doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Sure, these things sound cool, but the knowledge gained from studying some dead rocks - which are not expected to have anything different in terms of element composition than earth rocks, and probably every instance of those rocks we find, there are rocks like this made using a similar geologic process somewhere on earth - is not worth the expenditure.
Colonization is impossible with the technology we currently have.
The problem is similar with fighting against ISIS. You’re asking thousands of Americans - often people who were too poor to have any other prospects and so they signed up for the military - to end their whole existence, just to “help” some people who hate us. We did that for over 10 years and sacrificed 10k men. It seems to have made things worse.
What’s the solution? More technology. If we had self replicating machines, we could build millions of drone peacekeepers and send them to stop the savagery without sacrificing American lives. (the drones would resemble walking robots like Atlas, just mass produced cheaply). If we had self replicating machines, we could build factories that spew out rocket stages with minimal human labor, recycling spent rockets back into new ones. Going into space would become possible for huge numbers of people because the rockets would now be cheap.
Self replicating machines is doable a whole bunch of different ways, and we know it’s possible because human beings self replicate and we have semi-automated factories today.
Habeed You might want to talk with people who actually know what is possible now in terms of space exploration/exploitation. Moreover, technology advances progressively and non-linearly through application. You don’t go direct from cavemen to smartphones in a single step…
If we felt exploration and future colonization was important, we could be taking several significant steps in that direction. What is lacking is funding. And the required funding/staffing/timelines are FAR less than you suggest before we would see significant results. (sorry - just gearing up for my son - the rocket scientist’s visit over Thanksgiving! ;))
Completely different situation to international relations, especially the Mideast. Please don’t conflate scientific research with international relations. Sure, individuals and groups can be dishonest, self-interested,and pursue agendas in research, but there is always the ability to apply the scientific method and hold results up to peer review. How do you assess “results” - not to mention attributing any result to any specific action - in international conflicts? Hell, how do you even reach agreement on identifying our national interest?
What has one of our most consistent reactions been to foreign strife? Who can we arm? Second question, name one instance in which our injection of additional arms has been effective. I can think of one example, and I’m not sure the result was desirable in the long term. Seem to remember us successfully arming one group to repel Russian invasion. Group that rhymes with Fluhajideen?
As I said, the lifetime’s work of 100k people. Let me check the math. 500 billion for a Mars landing, maybe. (would probably cost more). An average person works for 39 years and makes 50k a year. Let’s say it’s 75k for the employer’s loaded cost. So every 2.925 million bucks is a human lifetime of labor. So it’s the life’s work of 170k people.
I didn’t “talk” to anyone. I’m just not stupid. Anyone can tell that if 170k people have to give their whole lives (well, it would be probably 700k people giving 10 years) to get about 6 astronauts to Mars, this is not a sustainable endeavor. Colonization ain’t happening.
Even if you can grow food, you need a massive pile of complex machinery to stay alive at all, and that machinery needs a constant supply of replacement components to remain functional. Those components are far too complex to manufacture without a factory that occupies square miles of space, like the way we do it now - 3d printers don’t do squat if you’re talking about making high end valves, compressors, bearings, that kind of thing, which is needed for life support.
So you have to keep paying costs on the order of billions - lifetimes of labor - to keep a big mountain of spare parts on hand for a proposed Mars “colony” (you have to keep a lot of spares because you don’t know what will break next and there’s years of latency between making an order and it arriving on Mars because of orbital mechanics)
It’s a paradox of history. The justification in a foreign country’s affairs is to prevent mass murder. But if you intervene, you prevent the mass murder that was the justification for intervening. In the real world, this means political leaders have to look at a situation in a foreign country and guess where it’s heading - and then, in a democracy, convince other people their guess is correct and should be acted on. And in a democracy, any political leader is going to have political opponents who will be denouncing his guess as wrong before, during, and long after the intervention - and they may be right.
The main ISIS fighting is going on in Syria where ISIS is fighting the Assad regime. There is no possible way to come up with a rational claim that the United States put the Assad government in power.
ISIS is also opposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and the government of Iran. I’d have a hard time describing the Taliban and Iran as American puppets.
There’s a lot more to this conflict than just anti-Americanism.
You’ve piqued my interest. I’ll do a little looking into what projections are for various space projects. But it doesn’t sound as tho you are particularly interested in anything other than your preconception. Various projects on the moon and elsewhere are very achievable at a fraction of what you suggest. And the economies of space exploration/investment are somewhat more complicated than you suggest. But I apologize for prolonging this hijack.
I think in a few hundred years the world will have decided that this was just another paint drip on the canvas of post-WWII shakeout when so much power was transferred to different parties so quickly.
There is something to be said for letting countries sort out their own messes. ISIS is not comparable to Germany. they don’t have an overwhelming military advantage. My limited understanding is that the countries where ISIS is operating are capable of defeating them if they put together a reasonable strategy.
Significant western intervention will just foment future resentment in the area and not lead to productive future relationships. A good strategy is to help with the refugee crisis and offer peacekeeping services until the region works out this conflict.
Habeed, you took my point too literally. I was trying to make a point that we can easily turn a blind eye to a real world problem like genocide, in favor of dreamy other-worldly problems that are not as pressing. I think if we, as a civilization, cared enough about it, we could address issues leading up to genocide, and the emergence of groups like the Nazis, and ISIS. Solving issues like perpetual hunger, overpopulation, wars, etc. are hard and dirty and nasty and involve compromises. Figuring out how to keep someone alive in space, while difficult, is just more sexy. The point is that we could end-up obliterating ourselves thru war or some other man-made catastrophe before we get to moon bases and trips to Mars.
