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Either Humanity Wins or Israel Loses
A ceasefire only guarantees more slaughter
As General George S Patton famously said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” This is the brutal truth of war – but it’s one the West seems to have forgotten. Or is afraid to admit to.
The primary purpose of a military: to defend the nation and its citizens from external enemies. The first means of doing so is by deterrence: carrying a big stick, as Theodore Roosevelt said. Having a military so lethal that no one dare attack you. The second, should the first fail (almost always due to the clumsiness and stupidity of the ruling elite), is being prepared to exercise that lethality. Swiftly and mercilessly.
As Orson Scott Card argues, in his Ender books, a strong nation should always avoid war where possible (no one, Scott says, loves peace like a soldier – because it’s the soldiers who fight and die when peace fails), but when war cannot be avoided, there is only one proper function of a military: victory. That is, to destroy the enemy as swiftly and with as little loss to one’s own forces as possible. Any other policy, as George Orwell wrote to the hand-wringers of World War II, “is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords”.
What, after all, should we make of a commander or politician who willingly allows his own troops, or her fellow citizens, to die unnecessarily, in order to spare more enemy lives? They would rightly be called deadly incompetent at best, callous monsters otherwise. Which is, indeed, the label still bestowed (however undeservedly) on the Allied commanders of World War I. Certainly, no one would want their son or daughter to serve under such reckless incompetents.
Once upon a time, not just generals but politicians understood this basic truth. Winston Churchill, for instance, stated baldly that Britain’s aim was, “victory – victory, victory at all costs, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival”. Churchill’s ally, another Roosevelt, was similarly clear-eyed: “The object of war,” US soldiers in WWII were told, “is to bring about the complete submission of the enemy.” Those men thrown into battle, and their commanders, had but one task: “breaking the enemy’s will and forcing him to sue for peace”.
Even by the 1980s, after the bitter humiliation of Vietnam, America’s leaders understood the necessity of victory. If the nation’s troops are required, then the only proper course is to commit whatever force is necessary to win. Anything else was, necessarily a loss. “We win”, Ronald Reagan said. “They lose.”
Over two thousand years ago, Cicero put it even more bluntly: Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed.
Compare the words of Cicero, Reagan, Churchill, or Patton, with those of Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama addressed cadets at West Point. Never, in his entire speech, did he use the word “victory”. Despite platitudinously intoning that “as your Commander-in-Chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined,” Obama proceeded to avoid stating exactly what that was. Instead of promising the complete submission of the enemy, Obama merely waffled about “keeping the pressure on al Qaeda” and “break[ing] the Taliban’s momentum”. Not destroying them, not forcing them to submit, but instead, “coming together” and “forg[ing] a new beginning between America and the Muslim World”.
Most especially not making the other poor dumb bastards die for their cause. No, Obama piously urged “exercis[ing] restraint in the use of military force”, and “respect for the dignity of all peoples”.
What would the likes of Curtis LeMay or Bomber Harris, the American and British commanders of the air war in WWII, have made of such lily-livered guff? These were men tasked with a brutally clear task: breaking the enemy’s will and forcing him to sue for peace. The enemy each faced was a total war state, with their entire economies turned over to a single purpose: making war. The line between civilian and soldier was hopelessly blurred. Especially in Japan, where every man, woman and child was drilled as militia, expected to fight with suicidal fanaticism, even with sticks or home-smelted weapons.
They knew perfectly well the dreadful toll their bombing campaigns inflicted, but they also knew that victory must be won at all costs. Because without victory, there would be no survival. As writer Lionel Chetwynd quotes a World War II veteran, the choice was between a world with Nazism, or a world without it. Without complete victory, there would be a world with Nazism. Dislike bombing, or any other operation of war, as we may, as Orwell said, “no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion” of hand-wringers who would be lucky enough to live in a Nazism-free world made possible by them.
The Allied leaders and commanders of World War II knew, because they faced its truth in the most brutal possible terms, that in war, victory is not just important, it’s the only thing. It is not, as the Obamas of this world would have it, a secondary aim to such “progressive” nostrums as “coming together” and “forging new beginnings”. It is, without question, the only thing that a commander should aim for.
For certain, such total victory as over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, isn’t always possible. That doesn’t mean that leaders shouldn’t strive for it. An incomplete victory, as Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, is no recipe for peace. Indeed, it’s almost always a guarantee of more war, more suffering and dying by one’s own. Without total victory, the enemy is apt to think of peace “as just a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found at some later date”. This was the lesson that the Allied leaders of World War II had learned from bitter experience. The failure to pursue World War I all the way to Berlin made another war inevitable.
It was only in the rubble and ashes of total defeat that Germany and Japan learned finally to give up their aggression. Because victory means that the victor can impose their values. Victory reshapes not just the strategic, but the moral and political landscapes. Imagine the outcome of a Nazi victory in Europe, or an Imperial Japanese victory in Asia, with the values of a Hitler, or a Tojo imposed on vast swathes of the world’s population.
It’s a lesson the West’s leaders forgot – or ignored – in the “War on Terror”. Even worse, it’s a lesson the keffiyeh-wearing idiots prating about a “ceasefire” in Gaza are neither capable of nor willing to learn.
Israel today faces the same harsh truth which faced Churchill, Roosevelt, and even Cicero: Hamas delenda est.
Anything less than total victory over Hamas simply cannot be countenanced by anyone who truly believes, as the left and wet right pretend to, in peace, or human rights. If the left really wants to end the cycle of conflict, then there is no other course than the complete submission of the enemy. Hamas’s will, which is as much the Palestinians’ will as the Nazis’ was of Germans, must be broken. Only then can the victor’s values of democracy and human rights be imposed on a population currently ruled by astonishingly bloodthirsty and viciously intolerant mediaeval theocracy and insane, pervasive Jew-hatred.
Anything less than a crushing of Hamas as complete as that of the Third Reich will only guarantee that the conflict will continue, without end. Only if Hamas’s war-making capacity is eliminated as thoroughly as Imperial Japan’s can a durable peace ensue. Even leaving Hamas partially intact will only encourage them to strike again.
A ceasefire, the ardently expressed wish of the left, will be a disaster.
What do these marching morons think Hamas will do in a ceasefire? Lay down their arms and hand out emergency relief to the very people they’ve only ever regarded as “martyrs” and human shields? Is anyone so absolutely cretinous as to believe that Hamas won’t use a ceasefire to regroup and rearm?
Referring once again to Clausewitz, the Prussian once again has stern words of advice for the pro-Palestinian mob: hunting down and systematically destroying a retreating enemy is even more important than forcing them into retreat in the first place. A “ceasefire now” will only allow Hamas to regroup in more favourable terrain (or, more likely, sub-terrain) and give it the very means of starting a recovery in the morale of its troops. The only sane strategy for Israel at this point is the same as for any other: “demand that the victory should really be complete”.
It’s bad enough that the tens of thousands of idiotic leftists and anti-Semitic Muslims marching, week after week, in the West’s cities either cannot or will not understand this. It’s perilous that the West’s leadership cannot, either.
The Biden administration is relentlessly undermining Israel and throwing Hamas a lifeline. The rest of Western leadership, from Paris to Canberra and Wellington, are even worse. Paralysed by fear of alienating the twin totalitarianisms of woke leftism and decidedly anti-woke Islam, Western leaders are cravenly undermining Israel in a way that would have been unthinkable even just a few decades ago. “If the bell is allowed to toll for Israel,” Bob Hawke warned a left which was even then too determined to back Palestinian terrorism, “It will have tolled for us all.”
The empty vessels of the West are clanging the bells for all they’re worth.
What’s worse is that they’re doing so under the unconvincing lie that their real concern is “peace” and “human rights”.
If today’s useless idiots can prattle on about human rights and peace, it is only because a clearer-eyed generation of leaders and soldiers ruthlessly crushed the totalitarian powers of the 1930s. If the gibbering twits of today’s left wring their hands over the destruction of Gaza, they ought to consider that the battle to end fascism reduced entire cities to rubble and forced entire populations into homelessness and starvation on a scale that makes Gaza look paltry. Vastly more people were killed in a single night of bombing in Berlin or Tokyo than even the lying propagandists of Hamas would have us believe have been killed in Gaza.
After the enormities of October 7, Israel faced a simple choice: war, or no war.
The second option was obviously unthinkable. To allow Hamas to wreak the absolute, animalistic savagery it did, without punishment, was to invite savagery without end.
So war it was and must be. In which case, as I have outlined, war must be prosecuted with all the force that can be brought to bear, to bring about total victory as swiftly and completely as possible. Anyone who truly values human life cannot argue otherwise. To do otherwise is to return to the dreary treadmill of forever war.
So, “there is something very distasteful”, as Orwell reminds the 1940s equivalents of the “ceasefire now” brigade, “in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features”. Even Clausewitz was adamant that war was “a horrifying experience”. But that could not excuse the humbug of “blunting our swords in the name of humanity”. For once those swords are blunted, he warned, “someone will, soon enough, come along with a sword that is razor-sharp and hack us to shreds”.
And we’ve all seen how all-too-ready Hamas is to use swords, guns, and even garden implements, to hack, behead, slaughter and mutilate the innocent.
Hamas delenda est.
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