Conquering For Peace

 Roughly 40 years ago I stopped being fazed when people disagreed with me. One of the things people around me disagreed with was the Sabra and Shatila massacre: I said it was just plain wrong and that Israel should not have allowed it, because it was immoral and unfair.

Some people disagreed with me because the Palestinians were "terrorists" or closely connected with them. Some of those thought Israel and its buddies were doing God's work, some supported Israel and its allies/proxies for secular reasons. It made me sad when people disagreed with me about what I saw as a basic moral issue.

Some people agreed with me that it was wrong for Israel to let the Lebanese fascists slaughter civilians, but said it was wrong because TheJews(R) were evil. And some people agreed with me that it was wrong but attributed the evil to Capitalist Imperialism. I disagreed with both attributions: I thought it was wrong because it's wrong to massacre civilians, regardless of who does it. It made me sad when people agreed with me for what I saw as the wrong reasons.

Since then I've studied the history of the "Middle East" going back 3000 years, and what I see is the old pattern of people slaughtering each other, both in battle and in massacres, over ethnic and/or religious differences. It doesn't matter who's doing what to who at any given time, there's always some tribal conflict going on. In 1982 in Lebanon the Falange Party was a right-wing Christian tribe of Arabs; in 2023 in Gaza Israel has become in effect another tribe of Arabs. In both cases their enemies were supposedly left-wing tribes of Arabs, some fighting for Islam and some fighting against Capitalism. Who they were and why they said they were doing it didn't matter, which side they were on was irrelevant, what matters was they were all bloodthirsty.

In just about every instance of intertribal violence the "Mideast" over the past 3000 years people have been killing civilians, such as shooting up refugee camps and blowing up school buses full of little kids. The reasons change, the names of the peoples change, but the basic geography and how people behave there remains the same. Maybe there's something about that area, something in the soil or air or water, some germ or radiation, that makes people bloodthirsty.

The only practical solution I see, the one that's least immoral in the long run, is for Israel to pacify the area. History has shown the only way people in that area will stop killing each other like that is if they're all under the heel of some really nasty bunch who can beat everybody else, separately or together.

The analogy is the Mongol conquest of central Asia, which is also in the same general sphere: the Mongols beat everybody else so bad for a couple generations the tribal warfare died down. The Mongols had the same methods and the same ends, but they forced everybody they beat to join in their attack on the people next door.

Israel doesn't need to build that kind of enforced coalition because behind Israel is the USA, this era's greatest empire. As long as the USA keeps the IDF in business Israel can keep all its neighbors down if it feels it has to. Israel can force its neighbors to be peaceful, or at least to stop ganging up to kill TheJews(R).

We've also seen that Israel didn't have to do much in Syria because the Syrian Arabs were too busy killing each other to harm Israel, and unlike in Lebanon Israel didn't pick a side because it hated them both. That Syrian civil war was good for Israel but not good for the people who live there: it would be better if somebody could stop the Arab tribes from killing each other. In the long run it doesn't matter who does it or why, what matters is that some overwhelming force compels peace.

It seems to work better if the overwhelming force is not from that area, if they're Assyrians or Persians or Mongols or Turks; Israel can fulfill that function with US help, if Israel remembers to act like imperialists instead of just another bloodthirsty tribe. Forty years ago in Lebanon Israel got bogged down in the tribal conflict and picked a side, which in the long run was a mistake. The Mongols would have conquered the whole place and made the Arab tribes get along or else.

Note that the idea is to stop the tribes of that area from slaughtering each other, and the way to do that is overwhelming force. "To make a desert and call it peace," and then to make the conquered people get along well enough to do business peacefully with each other. The Silk Road was safer and more profitable under the Mongols than it had ever been. And once the Mongols had killed enough people fewer people died by violence, and more people got enough to eat. and so on.

The history of the most ancient civilizations, those between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, has always been one of bloody murder. And certain areas, like the Middle East, are concentrated hot spots where murderous tribes have been banging against each other since time immemorial. Unless some bigger beast makes them stop.

In southeast Asia for a couple hundred years the various European empires conquered the area and imposed the kind of peace where all the different tribes had to get along so the empires could profit: e.g., Chinese and Malays and Burmese and and Khmers and Annamese and Thais and so on, of various languages and religions, helped the Brits and the French and the Dutch build a huge commercial network that could basically run itself, as long as the Europeans stayed on top and as long as they weren't too busy fighting each other. The long-term winner in the region was Thailand, that became a rich country because of all the immigrants and refugees who moved there to work and raise kids and eventually intermarry. And for as long as the European empires had control the various tribes of southeast Asia were peaceful with each other.

People are stupid and develop bad habits. One bad habit we have is tribal conflict, which over the course of centuries comes to be normal. Only an empire, be it Persians or Romans or Brits or whoever, can keep them from fighting among themselves. And for a while everybody benefits, some more than others, from the ceasefires among the subjected tribes. Whatever else they're doing they're not at war with each other.

In the long run, if you value peace and prosperity and life itself, you have to allow some overwhelming force to eventually make the tribes stop fighting. The only country that can do that in the Levant is Israel, with US backing. Only "the Zionist conspiracy" can keep the Arab tribes from killing not only TheJews(R) but also each other.

West Virginia and Pennsylvania don't go to war because the USA rules them both. It works if you let it: tribes stop fighting when you make them. And that is peace, which is a good thing, which benefits all the tribes.

People are that stupid. That hasn't changed in over 3000 years. That will only change for our species when one power rules the planet, such as a global communist dictatorship. Speaking of (a kind of) communism, consider the example of the Russian empire: under the Tsars the Russians had been conquering northern Asia from west to east a couple centuries, when in the 1800s they conquered the smaller nations that bordered them, the Armenians and the Georgians and the Turkmen and the Uzbeks and so on, that had been fighting each other for 2000 years, and were starting to make them peaceful. Then came the "Marxist-Leninists" of the USSR who enforced peace among those peoples for 70 years. Then once the USSR fell apart these tribal societies got back to killing each other, until once again the Kremlin overwhelmed them all.

One good thing about Leninism is it valued unity, making the Georgians and the Uzbeks cooperate for the benefit of the USSR. There was more to that than armed force, but only armed force brought enough peace so maybe people could be taught to not fight each other. The USSR gave lots of good and bad examples of how to be a communist empire, so we can build on that without having to reinvent the wheel. All we need is a global hegemon we can subvert, like the Leninists subverted the Tsarists, to get back to the problem of civilizing humanity.

We might have to have more than one hegemon, say Russia and China and the USA, but once they've divided the world between them they'll have to more or less get along. In that case it doesn't matter if Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia and at war with Eurasia, as long as the empires are doing business peacefully and keeping their own societies under control. Each empire will have to evolve systems that work in similar ways, whatever vocabulary they use, and as time goes by they might learn how to come together in one world. If not at least the Shiites and the Sunnis, and the MAGAS and the Woke, all the conquered tribes that make up each empire, will learn to cooperate, because they have to. And the big empires won't fight each other because that would destroy them.

And time will pass and power will mellow and people will learn to get along because it's the right thing to do, because peace is better than murder. It'll be easier if the official ideology of each empire is peace & prosperity for all our members, but even if it's not eventually people will learn peace the hard way.

Democratic socialism and/or anarchy will come later, when the various tribes that make up the planet have been kept down together for so long that they forget about that shit and learn to do something else. Learn to share, to cooperate, to negotiate, for mutual benefit. First they have to be united the way Pennsylvania and Virginia are united. Beat their swords into plowshares. Wise them the fuck up.

The official ideology is almost irrelevant. What people think they're doing matters less than what they're actually achieving. How many people have to die before they're forced to be peaceful will depend on how stupid they are, how long it takes them to catch on. If they're so stupid that they'd rather all die than be peaceful that's their problem. 

We have to start with the species we have, taking the facts as they are. Basically speaking Hobbes had a point: Leviathan brings peace. Once we have peace we can go on to the next step: learning to share.