--- Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at dodo.com.au> wrote:
> Don't flatter yourself. You are a nihilist, not a
> communist.
I think you've been watching The Big Lebowski too many times.
> for the civilian
> population to evacuate their homes and farms, then
> bombing the
> civilian infrastructure to rubble, spreading
> thousands of mines
> across cities and farms and for good measure
> imposing a blockade on
> the region.
Until you demonstrate how this differs from other capitalist nation-states engaged in war, I can only assume that you have a rather idealized view of warfare.
> Lebanon. They call
> that genocide where I come from.
First the "Nazi" label, now we have "genocide." This sort of projective madness knows no boundaries where Israel is the topic of discussion.
> attempts to pretend
> that all nations states do this all the time
Again, I think you have a rather idealized view of nation-states. Actually, if we are going to throw the label "fascist" around, I should note that one characteristic of fascism is exactly this tendency to have a foreshortened understanding of capitalist normality. Rather than call into question the whole system of the value form and state form into question, one pines for a "good," functional, idealized capitalist normality. The Nazis were prone to attacking finance capital while never calling the capital relation as such into question. The contemporary version of this is to view Israel's crimes as particularly vile amongst capitalist nation-states.
>That makes
> you a fool as well, you can't tell the difference
> between war crimes
> and the normal way a state behaves because of
> ideological blinkers?
I tend to think "war crimes" is a redundancy.
>I wasn't "demonizing" Milosevic, just
> observing that the war
> strategy he was accused of was obviously considered
> criminal by a
> majority of the governments of the world.
And we know what paragons of virtue the governments of the world are.
> Of course, of course, "international law" would be
> anathema to you
> wouldn't it.
There are treaties between nations and international agreements, but "international law" would require the existence of a global sovereign in a position to enforce such a law.
> Well I guess by that logic, domestic national laws
> can't exist
> either. After all, there's lots of bad guys that
> aren't in prison.
Read your original post to me. You said that Milosevic's imprisonment was proof that international standards of warfare were higher than I thought. I said that if that were the case, many more heads of state would be in jail.
> Yeah, its normal in all nation states for the native
> population to be
> made non-citizens
Native populations? Do you think the population of every modern nation state in the world is comprised of the original inhabitants of a particular geographical strip? I was right, you are naive.
>Happens everywhere, what's the
> big deal?
It is not a question of saying such things are good or desirable, I am just taking issue with your naive assumption that this is common state practice. If you don't think so, than your issues with Israel are probably of a more pathological nature.
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