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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Still cannot get the images of the Ethiopian famine out of my head - truly horrific stuff. I’ll let people smarter and more powerful than me debate what could/should be done - I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects. It seems like there are enough resources in the world to prevent things like this, at least for now - and if not, a conversation needs to be had very soon how this should be handled because I don’t think this will become a situation that becomes less common.

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I guess the problem is nobody wants to "own" countries anymore. Probably for good reason, colonization caused a lot of evil. However if you want to make a country do what you want, you can't just blow it up and then expect them to listen to you. Controlling people requires actually controlling them, and that is icky.

While the old prememant ownership thing has gone out of fashion, maybe we could have something like a 20 year lease where the Brits go in again and bring law and order? This kind of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Egyptian_Sudan

I feel like the mandate system of the interwar period is kind of what you are thinking of.

Yeah maybe something like that. You'd want some international body to give it legitimacy, maybe have it run by the scandinavians as the British track record and some have mentioned has its blemishes, and you'd need some amount of western military so if local warlords started killing people they could retaliate with himars or fighter jets or some such. And an understanding that they'd support local democracy and be prepared to go home when no longer wanted. Perhaps by referendum - if 50% of the locals wanted the foreigners gone it would be done. Rather than say the Afghan situation where they just disappear at some random point leaving a mess.

Are you sure the Scandinavian countries would volunteer? They have an increasing Russian threat close to home. And none of them have expeditionary militaries. Any deployment to Africa would require extensive assistance from USA/UK/France for logistics, intelligence, communications, and fires. And how would you even conduct a referendum in a conflict zone with no effective civil institutions?

A foreign intervention isn't necessarily a bad idea but doing it effectively would be far more complex than you imagine.

Meh. We had the great Bengal famine under British rule. And none of it was due to lack of this and that.

Amrtya Sen "Nobel" in economics was related to this.

Several famines.

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

The first step would have been leaving the African Union.

Debt bondage is much cleaner.

Yeah. The PRC has this process down. None of the long term side effects of colonialism, but the benefits of immediate access to resources.

That's historically been phase I.

Phase II is when debt-burdened countries stop paying their debts, and the creditor sends in their military.

Phase III is when other countries support the debtor, for a variety of reasons, and start a proxy war.

> I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this

Please don't guess, then? The famine started because of a military intervention gone south. The reality is that the Sudanese are a victim of circumstance. A war between some Arab rulers over who controls the Sudan.

You make it sound as if it is not a civil war waged by the Sudanese on the Sudanese.

I don't know anything about it but I would be surprised if each side of the war manufactured their own guns. Foreign powers love to throw a fight.

The vultures are there as they always are in such circumstances, what is your point?

That the people shipping weapons to one side or another are not merely vultures but foreigners who nonetheless have an interest in the civil war's outcome, making it not solely Sudanese vs Sudanese

How much personal responsibility do you assign, then? Perhaps if you're handed a gun by an arms executive and go and shoot your neighbour did you shoot them because A: you are diminished and suggestible and couldn't help but be influenced by the vulture B: you had planned to do that anyway but lacked the tools to.

It's interesting where to draw the line though, because it's relevant in the context of violent/-ist content as well - Relevant to the BS going on in the UK atm; we can claim that a "call to violence" is illegal as it well should be, but there is also the personal responsibility of those involved and that is why they're receiving sentences for participating in violent riots.

I think it might be a bit more transactional than that. Arms sellers sell arms, no matter the side.

At it's heart it's a Christianity vs Islam thing and should be a lesson in the failings of Multiculturalism and a vision of Europe's future.

This ignores historic examples of societies with multiple cultures, religions, etc living peacefully.

It doesn't always end well, but are you proposing the solution is to ensure that societies never try?

> This ignores historic examples of societies with multiple cultures, religions, etc living peacefully.

Can you give me some examples? My own knowledge of history goes like this: proximity (between cultures / ethnicities) = war.

Pretty much every nation on earth contains multiple ethnicities. That's the reality but generally foreigners are ignorant of these sorts of details for faraway places - eg: Sami in Sweden, Druze in Israel, Catalonians in Spain, and on and on.

So, as far as I am aware, any nation that is currently at peace can serve as an example.

Maybe it's the other way around: the more any two groups get along, the less we consider them meaningfully distinct.

War or genocide is just an end, not some perpetual state of affairs. The negative effects of diversity can be seen everywhere, and in places where it’s not seen there is no real diversity— as in the seemingly distinguishing traits of the parties are significantly overridden by commonalities.

Plenty of countries and societies have a mix of different cultures and religions without it triggering a war anything like what Sudan is going through today.

I have lived in the US and the Netherlands. I can say both have a mix of both cultures and religions without widespread famine and bloody civil wars.

I imagine Sudan was the same before the famine and bloody civil wars started.

Vienna, Austria: doing fine.

Luckily my thoughts on this site don’t dictate what international governments do, but thanks for your input?

If you don't want your opinion to be critiqued, you can simply not post.

There’s no critique though - simply tone policing while trying to push another argument entirely. I’m not even making whatever argument is being “critiqued” here. It’s simply bad posting.

but there was a critique, your proposal was "something something let an army fix it" and they provided context "something something various armies caused it."

Then that would be an unrelated critique/strawman that doesn't accurately respond to what they said.

They did not propose to fix it via an army. Instead they said "nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this" That is not a recommendation. Instead it is describing how difficult the problem is to solve.

They then followed it up by saying "but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects". This is significantly hedging the claim, saying that the military could actually make things worse!

Maybe one of the side effects that he is saying could happen is exactly the issue brought up, meaning that the famine would get worse. Therefore bringing this up as a possibility is not a critique, and actually agrees with the original statement.

And they also previously had said "I’ll let people smarter and more powerful than me debate what could/should be done". That statement explicitly saying that they aren't proposing things.

They even finished up the statement by saying "a conversation needs to be had very soon how this should be handled ", which only suggesting that this should be talked about, because he quite clearly thinks that this is a complicated and difficult problem to solve, for which a military intervention could very well not be a good idea!

If you actually read the original statement it is extremely conservative in its statements, and you have to almost intentionally be obtuse to attack such a hedging non recommendation that merely describes how bad and hard it is to solve!

Instead of being an asshole, people could just respond to the idea.

Ethiopian famine was linked with previous massive deforestation projects. No trees = no water and no water = no food. War was a logical consequence of that. After several decades they finally grasp the idea, and are trying to bring the trees again with the "green legacy" project.

That project is really amazing I have seen it in a documentary I just can't remember the name of it.

> I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects

Military interventions most often fail to secure a country than the opposite. Haiti had a long peacekeeping mission from the UN and fell back into anarchy, Sudan has also had a military intervention. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. are other examples of interventions gone south.

Probably one of the few more successful interventions was the Yugoslavian Civil War, nowadays the appetite of the world for NATO bombing a country isn't really there.

No one has figured out how to do nation building from the outside, that often has come from the people in those nations themselves.

> It seems like there are enough resources in the world to prevent things like this

There will always be more greed than resources

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