Well today i was talking to my friend and his girlfriend about genocide and such... and i said just take out the leaders and the problem is destroyed. my friend said nothing understanding what i meant, his girlfriend said we must understand them to stop them... I said that you dont need to understand someone to kill them. she counters with the only way to stop someone is to understand them and than figure out how to stop them from the inside... and i think thats ludicrous because people didnt stop tyrants by figuring out what the tyrant thinks. This goes on for a good hour and then they leave... and im just trying to figure out why we must understand someone to stop them. I think we should understand them after we stop them but I do not think we should stop and analyze the whole situation before ending the situation... just a lil rant and maybe a lil question as to why some people dont understand that actions sometimes are the only way to stop something.
I'm assuming that when you say "tyrants" you're mostly referring to groups like the National Socialist party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The problem is that what happened during WWII, and during other major conflicts, is that the process of fighting the war resulted in large-scale destruction over most of the nation being invaded. The term "carpet bombing" was created during WWII to describe the process of dropping enough bombs to destroy every single block of a city. In Japan cities were firebombed, and of course ultimately hit with atomic weapons. In the aftermath of these conflicts no one wanted to take up the fight again because they had more pressing concerns - usually finding food and water. When the leadership is killed or incapacitated WITHOUT this sort of complete-destruction-of-infrastructure, you end up in a situation where the populace will often want to find new leadership to keep up the fight. If you look at the Arab-Israeli wars, you can find great examples of this. Israel has repeatedly defeated its enemies on the battlefield, often put Palestinian leaders under house arrest, and even carried out straight-up assassinations. Yet the people of Palestine and neighboring Arab nations often persist to keep up the fight? Why? Because unlike the aftermath of WWII, most people in those countries are still having their needs met. Say what you want about the plight of the Palestinians, at no point have they undergone such widespread despair as was experienced in Japan during the late 1940s and early 1950s, where people would routinely commit suicide, sometimes in groups, or just lose the will to live and waste away all together (look up "kyodatsu condition" for more info). At times, Israel has been tempted to cause this level of destruction, but the global community has always pulled them back (and rightly so, in my opinion). But without complete destruction, killing your "enemies" will often just entrench the populace against you and prolong the conflict, just as the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to this day.
When you kill a leader you don't know what's going to happen next. Bush was bad, but if someone had just killed him Cheney would have taken over and that's a hell of a lot worse.
lol yeah man you shouldnt just go out and kill leaders just look at what happened after arch duke ferdinand got popped. there is exceptions though
i just know that if you take out the leadership you have to fight the infrastructure cause its like the chop the head off the body dies thing, but i do not think you would let your head be chopped off without fighting. so you would have to deal with the infrastructure, its just annoying how people try to say that its better to understand than to act upon something and try to stop it.
You don't have to understand them personally, but I mean if you're going to fight someone you know their "cause" and all that shit in the first place anyway. Ever hear the phrase "know your enemy"?
Yeah. Well the head can't always be assasinated without causing even more trouble, as someone stated that was the catalyst to the Great War WW1. However, it can be said that killing the head can help in some cases. When the Nazi's knew the war was being lost, alot of the top echelon disagreed with Hitler, resulting in numerous assasination attempts. The most famous was portrayed in the movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise. But I don't think you two were debating this. You don't physically have to understand someone to kill them, but it might help the situation more to know whats going on before taking such drastic action.
maybe she was thinking terrorists? i've heard it argued that we need to understand their point of view before we can make progress.