[fake-name]

> Is it because the US isn't willing to go total war and massacre civilians until they give up and stop aiding rebels or what?

Or maybe because we did stuff like that, and it lead to more resistance.

You can't murder your way to peace. Killing for peace just leads to everyone being dead.

[blackstrips]

> You can't murder your way to peace. Killing for peace just leads to everyone being dead.

(Assuming “everyone” includes the attacker here.)

The Mongolians did. You just had to be willing to thoroughly finish the job. Fear of guaranteed annihilation kept the rest in check.

[craftyguy]

And we all know the Mongolian Empire lasted for centuries using this method (Hint: they collapsed relatively quickly)

[etrevino]

The Mongolian Empire lasted for centuries as a series of successor states. It wasn't a collapse. It was just divided among the family. Those states stayed stable for quite awhile, with one of them taking over China.

[craftyguy]

I'm not sure I would classify "disintegration into competing entities" as a "stable" empire.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire#Disintegration_i...

[blackstrips]

Not from revolt though but from succession issues.

[philwelch]

The idea that brutal, evil tactics don't actually work is something we may certainly like to believe or want to be true, but that doesn't make it true.

Part of human nature is the near-universal paradoxical behavior of digging one's own grave at gunpoint. It is breathtakingly easy to subjugate people through brute force. In 1860, there were large stretches of the American South where the majority of the population were enslaved. How do you think that order was maintained? How do you think the SS--an organization that at no point had as many as a million men--was able to murder tens of millions of people in the Holocaust (of which the well-known six million Jews were, at most, slightly more than half)?

Neither of these subjugations were stopped by the valiant resistance of oppressed people inspired by the unquenchable thirst for human freedom--they were stopped by some other group applying even more brute force to the oppressors for largely unrelated reasons.

[hutzlibu]

Sure you can murder your way to (temporary) peace. Empires did it all history long. But they could do it (mostly) openly and did not had to pretend to be nice, so they could do it consequently. Killing until the rebell spirit was crushed and enslaved.

The problem empires face today is that this behavior is not acceptable anymore and the empires have to act like they are there for the local people. So conquering, but not calling it like that and pretending to be nice while doing it. Hypocrite. And does not work so effective in terms of control. Because if you kill only those who indeed fight against you, than yes, their relatives are your next enemies etc.

Related: What Ghandi achieved in India he probably could not have done if the Nazis would have been the enemy empire as the british empire allready was bound by human rights. The Nazi Empire was not.

[jandrese]

Yeah, Empires have used intimidation to subjugate people for millennia, but they've also been prone to rebellion and collapse because nobody wants to live in fear. All it takes is a show of weakness and the fringes of the empire are up in revolt again. If you want an empire that can last you need to assimilate the people, which is difficult to do if you're trying to keep them afraid.

[blackstrips]

There are many forms of “assimilation” ...

One form invoked killing all military age males then selling of the woman and children as slaves scattering them.

Pretty common back in the day from what I read. Very low chance of revolt.

[hutzlibu]

"Pretty common back in the day from what I read. Very low chance of revolt."

Yes, but then you have to build up everything yourself. So to have a working province that can be milked soon, quite often local structures were also left intact. Important is to crush their culture/religion if you want to crush their spirit to revolt. Thats why the romans killed the druids of the gaulls and took away children of the nobles to make little romans out of them.

[philwelch]

You can also kidnap the children and raise them as your own.

[hutzlibu]

Fear is also a factor to force people to assimilate.