** 08-May-2020 World View: Sri Lanka: An 'Ordinary' Genocidal Climax
pbrower2a wrote:
> World War II was as horrible as it was because of the criminality
> of all Axis Powers except Finland and of the criminal and
> incompetent leadership two of the main Allies (China and the
> Soviet Union). As such it makes the opposing sides of the American
> Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the struggle for Italian
> unification, the Mexican Revolution of 1867, and the Meiji
> Restoration look like gentlemen by contrast. (The Taiping Uprising
> in China of 1861 was unbelievably horrible by the standards of the
> time). Whether the Crimean War was one of the Crisis Wars of the
> general era is in doubt. The Crisis wars of the earl latter half
> of the nineteenth century were savage enough, but contemplate
> whether you would rather have been a slave in the Confederacy or
> the Third Reich. Had you been a subject of the Soviet Union, would
> you have rather come under the dominion of Bismarck -- or
> Hitler?
You've given some interesting examples of genocidal crisis war climaxes
that were particularly horrific in the view of history.
The point I'd like to make is that a crisis war can end with a less
dramatic genocide, or even a "small genocide," as long as it horrifies
and traumatizes the people involved.
One interesting example is the Sri Lanka civil war that I'm familiar
with because I was writing about it for years. The government's army
was Sinhalese, while the rebel separatists were Tamils. However, only
a relatively small group of Tamil separatists, known as the Tamil
Tigers, were actually fighting.
By 2006, it had been going on as low-level violence since the 1970s
Awakening era. But in the Crisis era it became more serious, and in
January 2008 the army declared that the Tamil Tigers would be
defeated by the end of the year. So the army stepped up its attacks
against the rebels, and the rebels began using Tamil civilians as
human shields.
This set up a situation that's common in many wars. The army was
attacking the rebels, but were killing civilians, which is a war
crime, while the rebels were using civilians as human shields, which
is also a war crime. So both sides were committing war crimes, and
every now and then in the United Nations some politician angrily
demands that one side or the other (usually the Sri Lankan government)
be punished for war crimes.
So in March 2009, the Tamil Tigers finally surrendered, after a
particularly brutal -- and genocidal -- fight. This wasn't one of the
grand historic examples, like the ones you described, but was just an
"ordinary genocide," or even a "small genocide." But imagine a mother
whose children were killed by army bombings because she and her family
were being used as human shields by the Tamil Tigers. Whom does she
blame for her dead children? Probably everyone. But at that point,
everyone is so sickened and traumatized by their own actions that
they're ready to stop fighting and enter a Recovery Era.
pbrower2a wrote:
> Not quite. Probably because Trump-haters are rightly more scared
> of a little virus than of the anger of a petty man with a potty
> mouth, we don't even have mass protests of Trump policies. If
> anything, Trump has egged on his supporters to challenge State
> governments that have yet to open the doors on venues in which
> COVID-19 could spread like a forest fire up a hill of dry brush
> and trees under the stress of severe drought. If you think that
> Donald Trump can go after his political opponents... about half
> the American adult population consists of dissidents.
Wow! You were responding to a comment about Lincoln and habeas corpus
and the 1919 Sedition act, and you managed to twist yourself into a
pretzel so far that you could turn it into a Democratic campaign
speech. You should be a politician, if you aren't one already.