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Comment by hedgew | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The last time we tried that went horribly wrong; we watched and negotiated and "waged the war of ideology" too patiently while Hitler grew in power, until ultimately the Nazis had to be fought and slaughtered and condemned without mercy.

If history repeated itself, we would be wise to intervene faster instead of twiddling our thumbs on the sidelines. And we'd know that waging any kind of ideological war would be futile. It's almost certainly too late to solve the problem with anything other than military action.

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The last time the west waged a war of ideology was the cold war, that one went pretty well all things considered.

> The last time we tried that ...

Let's keep things in perspective here. Yes, the rest of the world was too complacent about the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, but that's not the last time we've had to deal with this sort of thing.

Red Army Faction (and Baader-Meinhof), Action Directe, the PIRA, the Corleonesi faction of the Sicilian Mafia, the FSLN, and the Basque ETA are all terrorist groups that essentially no longer exist or have mutated into legitimate political parties.

Still more recently than Hitler was neo-Nazism, which, while it still exists in pockets, has lost almost all of the coordinated criminal/terrorist organizations which existed in post-war Europe.

Suggesting that the narrative of ideological warfare went from the Crusades to WWII to ISIS with no breaks in between and meriting only a single response (military action) is historically naive.

But how long did it take for the whole of Europe to mend the damage of WWII, both physical and political? Germany has been left effectively occupied and divided for 45 years after the end of the war. We're talking about an industrialized country, which shared a very similar culture for the most part with the occupying powers. How do you think the post-WWIII would go in the Middle East? Do you think Syria will meekly accept foreign occupation, write a new constitution and rebuild itself in just 45 years?

West Germany had a similar culture to their occupant, the east not so much. Germany also became the centrepiece for a US vs. Russia proxy war, Syria would likely become the same and is arguably already in that state.

In any case it would depend on whether a post WWIII and independent(ish) Syria, much like the post WWII Germany, makes the prudent decision to outlaw and taboo the fanaticism that got it into that situation in the first place.

> West Germany had a similar culture to their occupant, the east not so much. Germany also became the centrepiece for a US vs. Russia proxy war, Syria would likely become the same and is arguably already in that state.

That why I said mostly. However I still think Russia/East Germany is way closer than France or US/Syria or Iraq.

Other than that Germany was not the only European power that kept suffering the consequences of WWII well into the '80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Putting NSDAP and ISIS in the same boat is nothing but a historical equivocation. One isn't even a state at all.

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