Hacker News Reader

The US had the military might to extract total submission from the populations of those countries. Anytime someone attacks your troops, kill them and their family and raze their neighborhood/town. But that would obviously be at odds with long term and broader goals.

View on HN

The method of harsh reprisals and collective punishment, besides being morally bankrupt, actually has a pretty bad track record. The Nazi's in occupied Yugoslavia, among other places, had a policy of executing 100 random civilians for every German soldier killed. But this had the exact opposite impact on the resistance movement, actually increasing resistance sentiment.

Would be interesting to compare the nazi methodology with the Russian way of war in chechnya. Russia seemed to get submission through not very nice means.

They both tended to use locals to do their dirty work. For example in Chechnya they didn’t use many “Slavic” Russians but mostly Allies from Chechnya or ex-republics of the CCCP. The nazis also recruited locals.

TIL: you should use CCCP only if abbreviating using Cyrillic. In the Latin alphabet, you should use SSSR or, in English, USSR.

I mean the Allied waged total war on Germany including bombing cities into rubble and it turns out pretty well? Same with Japan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com