Have you ever seen the movie Two Women?

I was spawned in a ditch
By a mother who left me there,
Naked and cold and too hungry to cry;
I never blamed her.
I’m sure she left hoping
That I’d have the good sense to die!
Then, of course, there’s my father…
I’m told that young ladies
Can point to their fathers
With maidenly pride;
Mine was some regiment
Here for an hour,
I can’t even tell you which side!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUAzljzoha0

Civilized societies try to remove the criminal element from society so they do not harm others. While we don’t always get it right in that sometimes we get the wrong guy or the criminal gets away, at least we try.

But, throughout history, these failed states have elevated their psychopathic and sadistic killers to “heroes.”

Sorry, but I can’t entirely agree.

The truth is that while we like to think our societies are functioning as intended and working, the truth is we have to try and find ways to simultaneously negate the criminal element, but also channel it in directions that aren’t terribly destructive for the society at large. Which I think brings us to the question of what is and isn’t functioning or failed.

The Nazis did it in that guards at death camps were volunteers for that assignment and consider good men doing the work that needed to be done to “save Germany from the Jews”, Stalin’s henchmen willing killed political opponents, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rough used their sadistic murders to kill half the population of Cambodia.

The PLO, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other like them use their sadistic murders to carry out their hideous crimes all while elevating them to the status of heroes!

The issue I see is that most of those regimes and especially the Nazis and Soviets had their ways of eliminating the criminal and psychopathic elements that didn’t conform to what they wanted. Paul Ogorzow is probably one of the few people the Nazis executed that isn’t mourned much. Andriy Chitalko’s impeccable party credentials helped protect him to some degree, but once they didn’t he was deleted.

Moreover, we’re kidding ourselves if our own societies in their history haven’t glorified people who at least have acted similarly. I’m not the greatest fan of Voltaire and I find it annoying how blithely his “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets” quote is cited, but it’s important to remember when he lived and what he was used to.

He lived about a century after the “Century of the Soldier” in the long, bloody 17th century, and decades after Louis XIV, which saw some truly horrifying things.

Is the Netherlands a failed state? Maybe. Was it a failed state in the 1600s? Probably not, especially since it was held to be its golden age, as one of the most prosperous, technologically and economically forward, and tolerant of societies.

But it also saw nothing at all wrong with hiring the likes of Peter Ernst Graf von Mansfeld, a particularly sadistic and treasonous mercenary lord whose sole redeeming features was his general affinity for Protestant anti-Imperial/Habsburg Factions, his sizable mercenary army, and his modicum of skill (and even then not that much) while he raped and pillaged even the places he was tasked with defending, before being given a Hero’s Burial when he eventually died. Less uniformly monstrous and certainly less backstabby was Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who helped build the Dutch Empire in the East but who had one of his key mottos be “Despair Not, Spare your Enemies Not, for God is With Us.” The Hakkepelita Light Cavalry of Sweden were and are renowned folk heroes in Finland and to some degree today (largely through the likes of Eric Flint’s 1632) but were known as being prone to atrocity against civilians.

And if anything the people they were prone to fighting were even worse, such as Wallenstein. And the Duc de Luxembourg famously burned an entire town of Dutch civilians alive and was shocked anybody found this objectionable.

For much of human history murder really wasn’t punished or at least punished rigorously or consistently if it was done to the tune of national signaling and for a “good cause” and one of the acid tests of successful societies is how it can redirect many of those people into acceptable targets (in particular the French largely solved or at least curbed the crime epidemic of 19th century and early 20th century Paris by exploiting WWI, conscripting the heavily armed gangs of the city like the “Apaches”, and sending them at the world’s first modern totalitarian dictatorship to see how many would get killed versus how many Germans would). We’d like to think we are above such things as a society, and in the all volunteer army we kind of are, but we’d be fools to think we’re past it completely or that

The big issue I see is that while Les Apaches, Coen, Wallenstein, and especially Mansfeld were plenty nasty and guilty of much, they tended not to be lionized for their atrocities against civilians (though that could depend, especially in times of widespread war and intense hatred). If you sent a murderously intolerant mofo off to the army and they killed civilians in the process, well, that was something. But for Gaza, murdering civilians not only is an intentional purpose and aim, but it is in fact MOST OF WHAT THEY DO. It is the bare basis of their strategy, and arguably their entire reason for existing.

Which also tends to mean they function worse at doing anything else. Louis XIV may have happily encouraged war crimes by his Dogs of War like the Duc de Luxembourg or at least enabled them, but he didn’t spend all of his day fantasizing about killing Jewish or Protestant children in their cribs, nor would he have tolerated his army to be rewarded primarily for it.

for the evil man has no future;

This is why Palestine is a failed state.

Let’s pause a moment for a question or two here, if I may request.

Is there a state called Palestine? Has there ever been a state called Palestine? I think not, on both counts. It’s too loose a way of talking or thinking, I believe, to pass by unremarked. That’s all.

I used to be in favor of the death penalty, until it became ridiculous. Endless appeals dragging the process out so that actually being put to death is an abstraction to the convicted. If it’s about punishment then make it punishing. I’m thinking hard labor, six days a week, e.g. give the inmate a sledgehammer and have him spend 10 hours a day turning big rocks into thousands of tiny ones. It’s not the same as the death penalty, but the work, the boredom, and monotony will make anyone wish they were dead.

This is why Palestine is a failed state.

Civilized societies try to remove the criminal element from society so they do not harm others. While we don’t always get it right in that sometimes we get the wrong guy or the criminal gets away, at least we try.

But, throughout history, these failed states have elevated their psychopathic and sadistic killers to “heroes.”

The Nazis did it in that guards at death camps were volunteers for that assignment and consider good men doing the work that needed to be done to “save Germany from the Jews”, Stalin’s henchmen willing killed political opponents, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rough used their sadistic murders to kill half the population of Cambodia.

The PLO, Black September, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other like them use their sadistic murders to carry out their hideous crimes all while elevating them to the status of heroes!

Failed states are just that failed! And need to be dealt with in such a way that they stop harming their civilized neighbors.

For some odd reason I am reminded of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in which the main character ends up killing another man who is going to blow their cover hiding in the basement from the Martians.

Desperate situations call for desperate actions. Civilized people need to take uncivilized action to save themselves and their families from evil.

Sympathy for the devil. And polishing turds. It has been demonstrated over and over that gentler means of dealing with Hamas don’t work. Fools or knaves?