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A lot of studies show that people very rarely change their beliefs - like very few people even in the U.S. changed from Republican to Democratic or back - state

A lot of studies show that people very rarely change their beliefs - like very few people even in the U.S. changed from Republican to Democratic or back - states changed their colours mostly due to demographic changes - red and blue population had different age breakdown, birth and death rates, and different migration/naturalisation patterns which mostly determine changes in voting outcomes. This is even more true in case of such much much deeper rooted thing like this one. It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people. Mafia isn't about people being literally forced to do something with the fear or death - such an approach totally doesn't scale, even Sicily is not a Nazi death camp. It's about deeply rooted tradition to say, "respect your village elders" and "don't put your family to shame by exposing issues". And people don't even realise they have those beliefs, everyone taken separately just acts "normally", letting the whole society be exploited. Just reducing proportion of people having these beliefs in the first place - to some percentage giving "herd immunity" from them because these informal links need to be able to sufficiently propagate - solve the problem.

DC1350 6y ago
> It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people... so have to replace people. This makes no sense at all. The government exists to serve those people who are getting replaced, so if you fix their problems by replacing them then nothing has actually been solved. You’re putting the importance of the government and the region over the people which is backwards.
coldtea 6y ago
>It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people. That is social engineering (not the security term, the historical), and is associated with the worst totalitarianism (closely related to genocide and ethnocide). At the very least it's Machiavellian. And it's even more illegal than brainwashing! This "solution" sees the population from outside, as assets to be replaced, manipulated, etc to solve an abstract problem. But the problem is not "how to have Calabria without mafia" (that has several trivial solutions, from the suggested population replacement to nuking the area to a totalitarian government that maintains absolute control against the mafia). The problem is rather, "how the population of Calabria can get rid of mafia". In other words, e.g. Calabria is not just a named piece of land (for someone to rule as they see fit and do whatever to it, including removing the population) - it's first and foremost population and a culture. If the culture can't change easily (or at all), tough luck. But replacement of the population is not a solution (at least not this side of Stalin).
- anovikov 6y ago
  Well the problem is cultural. As i said, mafia doesn't exist because of some "boss" scares everyone into obedience, but because whole local culture is permeating it. If the culture is no longer shared by majority of people, mafia turns into just a sort of crime, and then it can be tackled by policing alone, as it was successfully done with Italian mafia in the U.S. (although not without some trial and error). What's bad about getting to that point by mixing/diluting the population? Back to ethnic cleansing, i think categorically criticising it is an utter hypocrisy. All stable European states are products of ethnic cleansing done at some point. And while it is ancient history for Western Europe, in case of Central and Eastern Europe e.g. Poland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, it was done after 1945, mostly by decisions pushed by U.S. itself. Ethnic cleansing is good for everyone as long as it's done without too much violence. Middle East is just an example of region where formation of ethnic nationalities - process that predates ethnic cleansing - is not yet complete. There is little else fundamentally broken about Middle East - apart from territories being fragmented sometimes down to village level onto fractions of population divided by ethnic, religious and political lines with and hating each other - a process which must eventually result in some of them being butchered and others amalgamating into nations, divided by political borders and united by... something better than just force. In a piece of land where people who have nothing in common have to coexist, there is either a brutal dictatorship coercing them into bearing with each other, or unlimited all-on-all bloodshed (see pre-2011 and post-2011 Syria). Nothing can fix it apart from thorough ethnic cleansing. Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).
  - gnatman 6y ago
    "Some nations have benefited from ethnic cleansing, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not" You comment and line of reasoning is nothing short of pathetic.
    - anovikov 6y ago
      I'd say, it's understandable why rich/developed countries oppose ethnic cleansing in other countries: they want to deny them the benefit of stability which the rich countries have, brought long ago by ethnic cleansing, to make their position more exclusive - which results among other things, in lower borrowing costs/higher P/E ratios and attraction of investments. Same cynicism as "nuclear non-proliferation": "we have the nukes so we are safe from you, and we want to make things stay that way by denying nukes to you losers". Both things are understandable, and both are morally untenable. Also, give me a counterexample - a country that lost something because of ethnic cleansing? Not counting those that lost because of being punished for that cleansing from the outside. Nazi Germany comes to mind - they cleansed Jews and lost a lot of science and engineering skill, keeping which could probably give them a chance to achieve somewhat better war outcome (while hardly any chances to win the war in any case). But, they made a big mistake in choice of target group, it's always a bad idea to mess with the Jews. Ofc there are also cases when ethnic cleansing did not work out because they didn't have resources to pull it off, and it turned into a civil war...

DC1350 6y ago

> It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people... so have to replace people. This makes no sense at all. The government exists to serve those people who are getting replaced, so if you fix their problems by replacing them then nothing has actually been solved. You’re putting the importance of the government and the region over the people which is backwards.

coldtea 6y ago

>It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people. That is social engineering (not the security term, the historical), and is associated with the worst totalitarianism (closely related to genocide and ethnocide). At the very least it's Machiavellian. And it's even more illegal than brainwashing! This "solution" sees the population from outside, as assets to be replaced, manipulated, etc to solve an abstract problem. But the problem is not "how to have Calabria without mafia" (that has several trivial solutions, from the suggested population replacement to nuking the area to a totalitarian government that maintains absolute control against the mafia). The problem is rather, "how the population of Calabria can get rid of mafia". In other words, e.g. Calabria is not just a named piece of land (for someone to rule as they see fit and do whatever to it, including removing the population) - it's first and foremost population and a culture. If the culture can't change easily (or at all), tough luck. But replacement of the population is not a solution (at least not this side of Stalin).

anovikov 6y ago
Well the problem is cultural. As i said, mafia doesn't exist because of some "boss" scares everyone into obedience, but because whole local culture is permeating it. If the culture is no longer shared by majority of people, mafia turns into just a sort of crime, and then it can be tackled by policing alone, as it was successfully done with Italian mafia in the U.S. (although not without some trial and error). What's bad about getting to that point by mixing/diluting the population? Back to ethnic cleansing, i think categorically criticising it is an utter hypocrisy. All stable European states are products of ethnic cleansing done at some point. And while it is ancient history for Western Europe, in case of Central and Eastern Europe e.g. Poland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, it was done after 1945, mostly by decisions pushed by U.S. itself. Ethnic cleansing is good for everyone as long as it's done without too much violence. Middle East is just an example of region where formation of ethnic nationalities - process that predates ethnic cleansing - is not yet complete. There is little else fundamentally broken about Middle East - apart from territories being fragmented sometimes down to village level onto fractions of population divided by ethnic, religious and political lines with and hating each other - a process which must eventually result in some of them being butchered and others amalgamating into nations, divided by political borders and united by... something better than just force. In a piece of land where people who have nothing in common have to coexist, there is either a brutal dictatorship coercing them into bearing with each other, or unlimited all-on-all bloodshed (see pre-2011 and post-2011 Syria). Nothing can fix it apart from thorough ethnic cleansing. Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).
- gnatman 6y ago
  "Some nations have benefited from ethnic cleansing, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not" You comment and line of reasoning is nothing short of pathetic.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    I'd say, it's understandable why rich/developed countries oppose ethnic cleansing in other countries: they want to deny them the benefit of stability which the rich countries have, brought long ago by ethnic cleansing, to make their position more exclusive - which results among other things, in lower borrowing costs/higher P/E ratios and attraction of investments. Same cynicism as "nuclear non-proliferation": "we have the nukes so we are safe from you, and we want to make things stay that way by denying nukes to you losers". Both things are understandable, and both are morally untenable. Also, give me a counterexample - a country that lost something because of ethnic cleansing? Not counting those that lost because of being punished for that cleansing from the outside. Nazi Germany comes to mind - they cleansed Jews and lost a lot of science and engineering skill, keeping which could probably give them a chance to achieve somewhat better war outcome (while hardly any chances to win the war in any case). But, they made a big mistake in choice of target group, it's always a bad idea to mess with the Jews. Ofc there are also cases when ethnic cleansing did not work out because they didn't have resources to pull it off, and it turned into a civil war...