Does Suffering Bring Positive Change

So does suffering bring a positive change, and is suffering necessary in some cases to bring about a positive change? I say yes. I use Hitler and World War II as an example, because before that, we never believed a race could be systematically exterminated and never fully believed it was happening until we saw it with our own eyes. Now we know the signs and how to stop it and prevent another Holocaust from happening.

'Positive' is a point of view.
'Suffering' is relative.
And suffering might not bring change.

Clearly if you beat the living shit out of someone for several months, harassing them, ruining their life, etc. (causing suffering) they'll become better for it.

Depends. Suffering is a fairly broad term. I've long debate if we are better for having a Jewish state, or better if our population was back to what it was pre-Holocaust. Moralistically, I know it would be better to have those lives back, so their children could grow with us, but I oft wonder if it would have simply left as dejected as before.

Well if hitler hadn't started his damn war everyone would be happy and sharing rainbows while no suffering was inflicted. Also if the English had given the jews land they actually owned we would have that damn problem over there.

Prevention is better than cure, bitches.

Well we didnt really prevent Rwanda or Yugoslavia or Nigeria (multiple times) or Cambodia or Iraq (the Kurds) or Georgia or Australia (attempt to let the aboriginals die out by taking away their children) or Guatemala or Bangladesh or Burundi or East Timor or DRC (pygmies). In the best case there was a relatively late intervention that stopped the killing after most people were either dead or ran away.

You make a good point.

The purpose was never to kill off the aboriginals. Only the half white-half black children were taken. The reason was that the white settlers found the dark skin revolting, and so wanted to "breed out the black".

Well what would you prefer; that we just invade every country that's engulfed in conflict? Your cynicism (or perhaps just criticism of the West) has a basis in reality, but a lot of people dedicate their lives entirely to understanding the morality of conflict, and they haven't come up with any simple answers.

Modern Just War doctrine is an incredibly active framework and minds from every walk of life are still working out even the more basic principles of it, but it's all we've got. Humanitarian intervention in the case of genocide isn't even 100% agreed upon as a proper application of the doctrine, and even those who do support it have wildly differing views as to what factors are necessary to merit such an intervention, and what role the intervention should actually have in the country. There are the basic prerequisites to conflict, the particulars of humanitarian intervention, the conduct during conflict, and the process by which we gauge when to withdraw and how to do so; just to name a few extremely oversimplified concerns for Just War theorists.

Then there's the matter of getting this across as actual policy: whether it be by UN resolution, NATO action, bi- or multilateral alliances, a declaration of war, or an executive action. And after all of that, you've still got to consider whether or not we have any actual responsibility to intervene, or if we have a responsibility not to do so.

War and conflict will almost certainly never be truly just, but that doesn't mean that we can't justify them.

Just because you have troops stationed there does not make it yours. By that logic Australia owns Indonesia and Afghanistan.

We have hundreds of troops stationed there...

In my opinion i believe the palestinians deserve israel since they had been living there way before the jews decided to go there.

You never Conqured it.

If you're gonna underline something at least spell it properly.

Conquered.

Thanks. But England had no right to give israel back to the jews. Not while it was still inhabited by it's own people.

Yeah, I am not really that well informed on it, I was just naming all the post world war II events that could be described as a genocide, but indeed it is a stretch of the definition to define this event as a genocide.

Sure, I was just responding to the op who said that now that we have had the holocaust we can recognize and stop genocides, I responded with a (short) list of all the genocides perpetrated after 1945 that werent really stopped (more or less). I didnt actually mean the west needs to invade every time there is a genocide, I also think that we view genocides (certainly in relation to the response to it) as something that just happens spontaneously when some bad people rouse up some other people so they start frantically killing another group of people, as in the mass hypnosis interpretation of fascism. Which needless to say is very simplistic, and that we need to start looking more at the underlying conditions preceding genocides.

Although I have yet to see the other side to develop an antiquate view of this, as of now I am reading Thomas Hobbs theory on this as well as Freud's civilization thesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
http://web.mac.com/grattonpeter/PHL...Freud on civilzation--Cambridge Companion.pdf

Oh boy, we sure needed that Hitler guy. What could we have done without him?