>No, I don't think mere candy-ass "brutality" solves a thing, Max; it
>just feeds resentments and causes countermeasures. The only
>violence that *really* solves problems is wholesale slaughter,
>ideally genocide.
U.S. Civil War - ended slavery, laid basis for modern U.S. industrial state.
WW II - ended fascism, laid basis for world order under U.S. dominance.
Neither was genocidal, but both were very effective, and changed the course of history.
You could add the Contra War, which ended Sandinista rule, and helped put an end to Third World nationalist and/or socialist revolutions everywhere.
It's not for nothing that Bourne said that war is the health of the state.
Doug