An interesting thing happened last week. While talking about how to defeat ISIS and global terrorism, the pundit Bill O’Reilly opined that the nations of the world should act together to build an anti-terrorist force. This mercenary army would have license to go after terrorists in nations that we as a country could not invade. He probably missed the point that to stop some terrorist groups we will have to kill them all…and likely slaughter the civilian populations where they arise.
Bill O’Reilly has proposed the creation of The Genocide Project, 44 years before Lola Lamb established it in my timeline. I’m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed about this. Oh, well, I guess that’s the world we’re living in.
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Exit: Overkill policy is in effect. Island will be annihilated. Repeat --
Msaka: We scared her away.
Girii: No...something else did...
Msaka: We scared her away.
Girii: No...something else did...
Yeah, bombing the island. Knew it.
Also great exit from Shou!
Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that much. Bill O’Rielly I mean. Nobody with more than two functioning brain cells listens to him.
Yeah, when the obsessed killing machine bails out, that’s a clue that something’s wrong.
Sounds more like the Peacekeepers of Farscape, or the CORE from SSDD.
Which probably means they’ll become a multinational protection racket.
1) O’Reily is just dusting off one of the original concepts for the military police force for the U.N. The idea was to create French Foreign Legion type organization that could deploy under the authority of the U.N. Stalin shot the idea down, probably because he already planning the invasion of South Korean at the time.
2) As a conservative, Bill O’Reily is governed by the concepts of tradeoffs. He knows full well that wars mean did civilians. Conservatives always start an idea with the assumption that all positive actions come with a linked negative side effect.
That wars kills civilians is one of those side effects e.g UN forces killed more Dutch, Belgium and French civilians in WWII than the Nazi’s did. It is only Leftists in the post-60’s era that developed the idea that somehow it was possible to combat violent sociopaths with no negative side effects. To date, any such methods remain hypothetical.
2) There are no “populations that give rise” to terrorist. All known historical and extant “terrorist groups” are created and actively supported by one or more nation states. E.g. the 60’s IRA, the Red Brigade and the PLO were all Soviet proxies. Hezbollah and ISSI are Iranian proxies, Al Quadea and the Taliban are both creations of internal factions of Pakistani intelligence. The idea of terrorist operating as rouge groups is a diplomatic fiction invented during the Cold War so that everyone could ignore the fact the Soviets were actively attacking and killing people in the Free World. Without that fiction, each terrorist attack would have led to a superpower confrontation.
Unfortunately, the fiction has become part of the standard dialog about terrorism so instead of attacking the actual font of terrorism, we pick off the foot soldiers. If we could kill every proxy terrorist in the world with a click of button, it wouldn’t matter because the nations that created the terrorist in the first place, would just create a new one.
A few smart bombs targeted at the facilities of intelligence services of a few select countries as well as targeted assassinations of specific intelligence agencies executives, would do more to stop terrorism than than killing millions of foot soldiers.
3) Excessive condemnation of liberal democracies, and usually only liberal democracies, over civilian casualties has led to an actual increase in proportional civilian causalities because it has created an incentive for terrorist and other actors to use civilians as human shields. Prior to the 60s, all combatants tried to limit civilian causalities for the moral effect. The Geneva convention explicitly required them to do so. But now, only liberal democracies are blamed for all civilian deaths and only liberal democracies are held to the Geneva convention. Now, non-democratic actors have a positive incentive to see that as many civilians as possible get caught in the cross fire.
4) We need to do something fast. Historically, the collapse of liberal orders to authoritarian ones has never occurred from the increase in effective military power. Instead, liberal orders collapse when they can no longer effectively defend the citizenry from attacks or economic disruption. Eventually, people are either being killed or are starving and turn to an authoritarian order to survive.
The rise of Fascism in Italy in the early 20s as a response to the inability of Italy’s weak democracy to stop the violence and economic warfare of the Communist and other hard socialist, is a canonical example.
5) You can’t criticize someone for their proposed solution unless you have a proven alternative to offer. I would note that the only alternatives advanced by people who don’t like military solutions is some sort of “terrorism will go away when fix/address all the current and historical injustices of humanity everywhere.” Even if true, is it possible to do so? Even if it is possible, how long will it take? Decades, centuries? What happens to civilization in the meantime?
The Genocide project in the comic seems to have been started as a response to a very real threat to the human population and the general biosphere from from biological weapons and genetically engineered lifeforms. Early in the story it is implied that the whole of China was destroyed by a biological weapon. The powers granted to the project might have been utterly necessary at the time.
But that doesn’t mean the Genocide project would not evolve into a threat. In fact, history shows that the more real the problem that prompts increasing the power of the State, the quicker that power itself becomes a threat. Power based on a make believe threat will eventually be withdrawn, power that address a real threat, even if abused, is much harder to stop or get rid off.
An international foreign legion would be active danger to freedom of everyone (who watches the watchmen) but it’s not the only danger and could head off worse ones. It could easily go bad eventually but before then it could head off a slide to chaos and authoritarianism in the shorter term.
There’s an old Yiddish saying: “You have to eat today to starve tomorrow.” It means you have to survive an immediate threat to be around to fall prey to a long term threat.
O’Reily’s a professional polemicist ass but that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong about everything.
The genocide project was started by a pimp living off an old woman in years 600…He called himself a prophet whose gang was acting on the principle of the razziah, which is robbery, rape and genocidal murder.
He allied himself with the Jewish tribe called Banu Qurayza in Medina to beat his Arab rivals…once that done, he beheaded himself 1,000 Banu Qurayza, tortured their chief to get his gold, cut his head off then raped the chief young wife on top of his still pulsating cadaver.
The muslim conquest killed over a billion people…all Assyrians of today’s Iraq, all Copts(real Egyptians), all Greeks of Anatolia, all Zoroastrians of Persia, half the Hindus of India…etc…They have invaded all of Europe coastline and enslaved millions of Europeans with the Barbary Pirates and hundreds of millions of Africans were sold to American planters and warlords of Arabia…
They are now all over Europe and America and getting ready to kill us all and sell our children as sex slaves as they have been doing for a thousand years. Prepare for an “interesting” time, as the Chinese say.
In the “Rape” of Nanking, Japanese soldiers had beheading contests, but none reached the total of the so-called “Prophet” Muhammad in Medina…Will ISIS manage to beat their prophet’s beheading score?
shannonlove: Your hypothesis has at least one major flaw. You allege that ISIS is a proxy of the Iranian government. Islam is divided into two major schisms, Sunni and Shia, who have been killing each other for 1400 years, ever since Mohammad died.
Iran’s state religion is Shia.
ISIS is Sunni, and Shia muslims are the biggest targets of their ethnic cleansing campaign.
Good analysis, shannonlove, but I have a couple quibbles.
I was playing off the concept of the UN military police force also, but I was hoping the idea would stay dead.
You *do* have to kill entire populations to stop terrorists. ISIS is sustained by Sunni muslims across the region. They are not particularly concentrated in any one state — and the states that they do control are ‘friends’ of the West, such as Saudi Arabia. The only way to truly stop ISIS is to make their particular sub-sect of Islam illegal across the world, just as we did with the Taliban, and then slaughter any people who insist on clinging to that illegal religion.
(Note that ISIS’s brand of Islam is a small fraction of Sunni Islam, which itself is only a portion of Islam in general. I’m not talking about murdering an entire race, just a few million misinformed representatives of it.)
Lastly, it’s not my responsibility to offer useful solutions. I’m a fiction writer. It’s enough for me to take what is happening in today’s world and figure out the consequences…and hopefully entertain people in the process. 🙂
“There are no “populations that give rise” to terrorist. All known historical and extant “terrorist groups” are created and actively supported by one or more nation states.”
And I suppose nation states of course spring forth from the depths of the earth fully formed? You can’t get or stay big enough to be a nation state without a significant portion of the population (not necessarily the majority) willing to support you. Whether out of the belief they are in the right or the (often true) belief that the fall of the regime will bring them ruin, these supporters will go to great lengths to support their government and repair damage dealt to it.
“Soviet proxies”, “Iranian proxies”, “Pakistani intelligence”, “the Soviets”
There is a certain notable omission in your list of terrible cold-war-era proxy users who ought to have their government bombed. Do you think that the US didn’t also have its share of nasty proxy groups, or that they just don’t count because FREEDOM?
(Also, as Zarapalus pointed out ISIS makes no more sense as an Iranian puppet then it does as a Canadian one. One of ISIS’s main goals is exterminating the Shia, which includes the government of Iran. Just because two groups of people hate you doesn’t mean they are automatically on the same team.)
“Excessive condemnation of liberal democracies, and usually only liberal democracies, over civilian casualties has led to an actual increase in proportional civilian causalities”
So you see more civilian casualties when you actively look for them. How unexpected, this MUST mean the rate is increasing rather than something like increased visibility.
“Prior to the 60s, all combatants tried to limit civilian causalities for the moral effect.”
Hahahahaha, tell us another one how people in the past were honorable and never routinely killed civilians out of hatred or a desire to instill terror.
“You can’t criticize someone for their proposed solution unless you have a proven alternative to offer.”
Having no plan at all IS a better alternative to a sufficiently counterproductive one. For example, if I were to propose ridding the world of the common cold via nuclear war, you could criticize that plan without needing a cold-ending plan of your own.
“An international foreign legion would be active danger to freedom of everyone (who watches the watchmen) but it’s not the only danger and could head off worse ones.”
What worse dangers? Terrorism? Terrorism is bad, but without extreme weapons such nuclear or biological (which are jobs for more specialized groups than ‘anti-terrorism’ in general) it isn’t any more of an existential threat (or of a killer at all for that matter) then automobile accidents or heart disease.
ISIS is the scrupulously correct brand of Islam taught by Muhammad, Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim…It cannot be changed…if you try, it’s the muslimeen jihadi duty to kill you.
It’s main tenet is “Taqyia”, dissimulation, or hiding your real intention, which are to kill the infidels and sell their children as sex slaves.
You may delude yourself but the history of Islam is one of genocides and subjugation, of relentless conquest…First off by invasion by playing the victims then of ruthless extermination of the conquered infidels.
Wait, he thought that civvie casualties were new too?
Tell that to the “Nineteen to Thirty MILLION” civilians killed by soldiers in WWII, and almost as many died from famine or disease caused by the war too. Every war we’ve fought in since the 50s has been a downtown gang fight compared to the wars we used to have.
And, the further back you go…Think of the Warring States period in China, after a battle, one million captured soldiers getting buried alive…and the contemporary commentators opined it was an excellent idea.
Ming, please tone it down just a little bit. I don’t want anybody to be offended by my comment section, and I don’t want to have to delete comments.
Religions evolve. Christianity used to be brutal and warlike, but it evolved many variants that are peaceful and benevolent. Islam has done the same thing. You can’t blame ISIS on Islam any more than you can blame the Crusades on Evangelicalism; they are no more than distant cousins.
Even without religion, there will always be a fraction of humanity who are violent savages — it’s in our nature.