"But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill"
I'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians. It would seem to me that they are the ones who pay "the biggest part of the bill".
Not that I would deny that the people doing the mass murder can themselves become the victims of war. But I'd personally have more sympathy for civilians who are not trying to murder others but are themselves murdered.
So yes, he didn't witness a truly modern war. 19th century conflicts were brutal, but weren't exactly the city-destroying conflict WWII was, nor the guerrilla wars of modern times.
Though you could argue that the Philippines war had its similarities to modern three-block-war conflicts; see Mark Twain on the Moro Crater Massacre (http://drnissani.net/MNISSANI/cr/moro.htm).
"The [Taiping Rebellion] [...] ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the bloodiest civil war, and the largest conflict of the nineteenth century with estimates of war dead ranging from 20 to 70 million dead, as well as millions more displaced."
WWI still didn't have total war or deliberate destruction of entire cities using aircraft. The bombing of Guernica in 1937 was considered shocking at the time.
WWI eventually defined total war, and no doubt its legacy was the primary reason France just surrendered to the Germans in 1941. The entire population had simply had enough.
> Some 9 to 10 million combatants on both sides are estimated to have died during World War I, along with an estimated 6.6 million civilians.[citation needed] The civilian casualty ratio in World War I is therefore approximately 2:3 or 40%. Most of the civilian fatalities were due to famine or Spanish flu rather than military action. The relatively low ratio of civilian casualties in this war is due to the fact that the front lines on the main battlefront, the Western Front, were static for most of the war, so that civilians were able to avoid the combat zones.
> According to most sources, World War II was the most lethal war in world history, with some 70 million killed in six years. The civilian to combatant fatality ratio in World War II lies somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1, or from 60% to 67%.
I found out recently that "Spanish Flu" is so called because all the countries fighting in the war censored any mention of it happening in their camps, where it almost certainly originated.
From wikipedia:
"To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States;[9][10] but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII),[11] creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit[12]—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu."
and
Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[15] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. A significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated to pigs that were kept near the front.[16]
Er, France surrendered in mid-1940, and they surrendered because they were not able to mount a defence to Blitzkreig, had lost a large proportion of allied forces to the overrun (including the BEF at Dunkirk) and decided to surrender Paris and survive rather than risk it being obliterated in urban warfare. Given what happened to Stalingrad that doesn't look like a bad choice.
In some ways WW2 was the last of the wars of colonisation to be attempted. Assert racial superiority, a need for land, define the "natives" already occupying it as subhuman, invade and kill them, extract resources and colonise. This time in Russia since Africa was already taken and the Americas already liberated.
It is and it isn't. The explosive capacities of WWI were generally directed at the front, at the soldiers. While cities were involved, the civilian v. soldier death toll is not comparable to say, modern day Iraq. And nothing in WWI involved the literal desruction of large cities as was seen in WWII.
Now go back a couple hundred years, back to when cities were occasionally put to the sword, but that is beyond even this guy's memory.
The murder, torture, and rape of civilians all out of proportion of any millitary casualties is hardly a modern phenomenon. The US brutalisation of the Phillipines. The Hundred Years' War. The Thirty Years War. Three off the top of my head, and it's easier to find more examples than to find counter-examples.
The military always thinks they have the worst of war.
Remember all those stories a couple of years back about drone operators being psychologically traumatized by their job? (In between calling children they'd killed "fun-sized terrorists", of course.)
I'm not really sure if, during a national wartime it's always just so easy for millions of potential soldiers to just pack up and move across the border at once.
Otherwise, your option is only for those who are economically, and mentally prepared for such an undertaking. Economically of course including things like important connections.
And your other option which I think is jail for draft dodgers isn't exactly fulsome and charming.
So the soldier either loses his way of life through exodus, forced incaceration, or being sent to fight.
I'm not convinced that being shot, ripped to shreds by shrapnel or tortured after capture is more pleasant if you happen to be wearing a uniform at the time.
The point is that those things happens to you as a solider only because you chose to not take a much simpler way out. The civilians did not have that choice.
Civilians can often emigrate (or relocate within a country to less risky regions) with at least as much ease as soldiers facing conscription. Their choice not to was typically for very similar reasons as people tend not to dodge drafts.
If you want to convince people, you could try naming a horror of war that conscripts aren't subjected to or at risk of instead of making snarky personal remarks...
Of course they face the horrors of war. But they're the ones in a place to do something about it. They have time to plan after getting their notice, they're in a free country where they can buy arms, etc.
Except of course, for the ones not living in free countries. With the countries doing the most conscription tending to be disproportionately not-free, and/or already suffering from attacks on their civilian population. A civilian population which regardless of how bad things have got has a bit more freedom to leave the country than those [about to be] drafted into the army.
And seriously, you're suggesting buying arms is a way for conscripts to avoid the horrors of war?
This subthread is like a magnet for untenable arguments.
> Except of course, for the ones not living in free countries.
Gosh, pardon me for talking about the countries on the continent I was born on.
> A civilian population which regardless of how bad things have got has a bit more freedom to leave the country than those [about to be] drafted into the army.
Historical history fail. American draftees had the ability to cross the borders legally before their reporting date, and the borders were porous and easily crossed anyways. Vietnamese civilians would have had to walk hundreds of miles, crossing mine fields, into even less friendly countries, if they even knew a war was declared before the bomb destroyed their village.
> And seriously, you're suggesting [...]
No matter how hard the conscript has it, their victims will have it worse.
I'm not suggesting, I'm flat-out saying that if you don't take extreme measures to avoid shooting innocents, you're a murderer.
When you're drafted it's too late to avoid some horror but you can keep from making it worse for everyone.
So your refutation of the concept that "both military and civilians have it bad" involves the assumption that the United States is the only country, Vietnam was the only war, and people called up to the military can easily avoid the trauma of being shot at and having to take other human lives by.... buying a gun and starting a firefight.
That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
Although when it comes to Vietnam, I did once chat with an older Vietnamese person in Vietnam who said his worst experience of war was seeing banged up American GIs in the hospital next door. Other Vietnamese civilians' worst experiences were food shortages as the war largely passed their particular inconsequential valley by. Others died agonising deaths under bombardment, which was disproportionately likely and certainly no less painful if they happened to have [been] signed up for one of the armies and sent to guard something. Not all experiences of war are the same, but as a general rule you're going to spend a lot more time being shot at if you're a soldier, and probably don't feel better for shooting back, especially if you're a conscript.
> the assumption that the United States is the only country [...]
Do you see the part of the earlier message where I said "literally every war in every country?" No? Maybe because I didn't write that...
> That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
You need to read the entirety of my messages and not add anything of your own, otherwise you're just arguing with yourself.
> people called up to the military can easily avoid the trauma of being shot at and having to take other human lives by.... buying a gun and starting a firefight.
Sigh, no. Where did I say easily?
It's your responsibility to not be forced into murdering innocents. If you can more-easily leave the country, great. If not, even jail is better than killing people, but if all else fails - it's better to shoot the people conscripting you than be forced to kill innocents.
> probably don't feel better for shooting back
Who said it was enjoyable? But the conscripts still have more agency than the civilians they're firing at.
I'm still struggling to see where your obtuse fixation on the idea that conscripts are obliged to murder the people conscripting them in order to avoid a hypothetical future scenario in which they might be ordered to kill civilians actually counters my original argument that civilians generally don't suffer more in war zones than troops. I mean, if I was going to try to refute that argument I'd probably say something like "except when there's a food shortage and the soldiers have all the requisitioning power" rather than branching into obtuse lines of argument about last resort responsibility to shoot recruiting sergeants.
Sorry, but taking out the word "easily" doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency to avoid the unpleasantness of potentially having to shoot people because they can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians?!) and fire first any less silly.
And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death generally don't have more agency than civilians who generally aren't under such orders. In particular, civilians are far more likely to be allowed to permanently leave the war zone(s) at any given time than soldiers, and far less likely to be intentionally fired at.
You're the one trying to go down a rathole. The point is soldiers have it better than the civilians because they have more choice, more is always better even if it isn't great.
> conscripts are obliged to murder the people conscripting them in order to avoid
You see, this is you moving the goalposts. This is merely one of the choices, the extreme one.
And it's not as much an obligation as a right. Slavers are morally abhorrent and conscripts are slaves. Slaves always have a right to escape and no number of slaver deaths is ever a bad thing.
The obligation comes in when they're actually given the illegal orders as nothing forgives the crimes they commit. Ultimately all responsibility for their actions is theirs.
> hypothetical future scenario in which they might be ordered to kill civilians
In the Vietnam example that wasn't hypothetical - it was evening news. And the war was started on false information from our own government so it wasn't legitimate even if the targets were military.
> Sorry, but taking out the word "easily"
You aren't sorry, the whole "easily" was your invention in the first place.
> doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency
Actually, it does. In the American wars where we've drafted people the draftees have always had considerable rights (travel, etc) before actually being inducted. And certainly more than the Vietnamese - even taking wealth into account.
> can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians [in the victim country]?!)
Had Americans taken up arms to stop the war it would have stopped without going to Vietnam, or would have come home quickly. If Vietnamese had taken up arms ... we'd have burned their entire village to the ground anyways.
Our conscripts have more agency.
> any less silly.
Or any less right.
> And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death
At worst they're holding a gun. They can take their officer out - the one ordering the illegal actions, rather than performing the illegal actions.
And they usually have a lot of advance warning before being inducted, let alone shot at. Time to flee, or shoot themselves in the foot, or just protest and go to jail, or - yes - to fight back at home rather than abroad. But if you force the discussion to the ridiculous point where they're already on the battlefield, being ordered to fire into a village, before they consider any of this, then yes they're morally required to go to ridiculously painful lengths to avoid killing.
If someone kidnaps you and orders you to kill someone else, or he'll kill you, you're still morally and legally culpable if you pull the trigger.
Why do you think soldiers shouldn't be held to the same standard?
That's an awfully longwinded way of continuing to assert the obvious falsehood that civilians generally have less opportunity to flee war zones or imminent death on the front line than conscripted soldiers. If your argument relies on the edge case of a country doing the conscripting being a liberal democracy thousands of miles from the actual fighting and the countries where the civilians are based not to have any natural refugee escape routes to even start to make sense, it probably isn't a good one. And yes, I'm pretty sure that even then the average American soldier's experience of combat was more unpleasant than the average Vietnamese civilian's wartime experience, and I'm pretty sure I've listened to and read more Vietnamese accounts of the war than you.
It's nice of you to reiterate the largely irrelevant point that soldiers shouldn't shoot civilians in the unlikely event of them receiving an order to (unless the civilians are slavers?) so for the avoidance of doubt I agree that shooting civilians is bad.
I'm afraid I can't go down your ratholes any further than that because I'm still none the wiser as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency to avoid bloodbaths because "at worst they're holding a gun" and possess the option to "fight back at home" before they even join up is actually intended to be taken seriously...
> If your argument relies on the edge case of a country doing the conscripting being a liberal democracy thousands of miles from the actual fighting
Yeah, only the wars my liberal democracy has participated in, all of which have been thousands of miles from home. What an edge case!
> countries where the civilians are based not to have any natural refugee escape routes
By your reckoning there were escape routes from Vietnam so nobody was actually killed!
> I'm pretty sure that even then the average American soldier's experience of combat was more unpleasant than the average Vietnamese civilian's wartime experience
Even if you were right the point is the soldier's agency in choosing a better future. Peasants have very little, the soldiers have much more at every stage especially the beginning.
An american soldier could choose to go home at any time "simply" by refusing to fight and being sentenced to, at most, twenty years in prison. Their family wouldn't be face retribution or anything. Ask someone about to be burnt to death with their family which they'd prefer.
> I'm pretty sure I've listened to and read more Vietnamese accounts of the war than you.
You can't read the memoirs of the dead.
> because I'm still none the wiser
That would require not trying to dodge the point.
> as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency
Draftees, particularly before they become soldiers. And it's a fact, not an argument, in all modern cases in my country.
> actually intended to be taken seriously
Oh gosh, of course not. It troubles you so of course it was meant for you to dismissively chuckle at in passing. No more.
> not really sure if, during a national wartime it's always just so easy
Yeah, borders are hard to find (they're on the outside of a country?! How inconvenient!) and it would suck to lose your important connections and your facebook account.
Not worth it. The murder option is way easier - you should totally just do that.
> And your other option which I think is jail
Hah! "My option". Yeah, I invented sending soldiers to jail right after I invented the draft.
> So the soldier either loses [...]
I'm glad you see the draft as the bad thing here. But they can choose not to kill for the people who drafted them.
I really don't understand where you're going with this argument. My point was that war sucks and we should be laying fault where it's due (not on the civilians or GIs). I'm sure most everyone involved out in the field would rather be somewhere else.
I know plenty of ex-military and nearly uniformly, those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless of whether they were shot at or did the shooting.
> I really don't understand where you're going with this argument.
Then I don't really follow you either.
I had thought my response - that while war sucks for everyone, conscripts generally have more chance to avoid the war than the civilians they end up killing and it's their duty to take those options rather than being a murderer - was pretty clear...?
And yes, I 100% agree that the people who sign the law are doing the worst thing, and the people who vote for them without being at risk of being drafted themselves, etc. The draft is the bad thing, not the conscripts for being drafted.
But, once drafted they still have choice and power, and must use that before victimizing others.
> those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless
Exactly, so if they had run away, or done their fighting in their own country against their own draft, they'd have spared everyone that mistake.
The only way the mistakes happen is if soldiers go.
"The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting" - Washington Post, March 28, 2013
> At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam Hussein, restore order and install a new government.
> Only one economist, William D. Nordhaus of Yale, seems to have come close. In a paper in December 2002, he offered a worst-case estimate of $1.9 trillion, “if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation-building is costly.”
Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief?
The next time a president wants to take the USA to war, or enter any armed conflict, I'd like to see that announcement be accompanied by (or followed shortly thereafter by) a GAO or similar accounting report estimating probable outcomes and costs. The same report should include an appendix that summarizes recent similar reports delivered in past armed conflicts, analyzing their accuracy with known actual costs. (E.g., that appendix should report this fact about the Iraq war and the updated estimate for the new war should take into account the sources of inaccuracy that led to the underestimation).
In software engineering, at least part of the job is doing something new every time. If it wasn't new it wouldn't need a human - it would just be a machine doing something repeatedly. I imagine that war is to some extent the same way, in that no opposition force is exactly the same; yet a lot of war must be loosely similar in cost, barring major technological changes. (E.g., cost per square mile of territory held by infantry or cost per civilian population or cost per enemy combatant; cost per square mile of enforced no-fly-zone, etc.)
Say, where are all of the data scientists? You'd think that you could draw some interesting conclusions analyzing data about the costs of war, assuming it's publicly available. For example, a histogram of dollars spent month by month per province of occupied territory - is such data public? I don't think I've ever seen much in the way of interesting visualizations, outside of the occasional flashy news article.
It's super easy to defeat this kind of constraint. Just claim that if we don't act immediately, the bad guys will kill freedom. There's no time for a GAO! You want to jeopardize the eternal fate of freedom and the triumph of evil because you want a budget proposal!?
Put that on CNN and Fox News. Now the old people want war. Smart people are caught wasting their time in an engineered debate about whether there is or isn't time to first plan a budget. While everyone is riled up, Congress side steps the whole thing and we just begin with whatever military operations they wanted.
It takes a while to go to war or enter armed conflict at scale (on smaller scale, certain force units like Marine Expeditionary Units and certain commando teams can move pretty quickly). The President should have the authority the Constitution gives him to do that.
I'd just like to see the GAO rushing alongside that process to prepare expected financial outcomes, to be shared with American citizens and press who will be evaluating the pending action.
> Do we have better accounting and estimation methods now, to advise current commanders-in-chief?
Colin Powell stood up in front of the UN and lied his arse off about "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION" and the only presidential candidates I've ever seen call this out are the rank, nominally unelectable outsiders like Sanders, Paul, and Trump. What on earth makes you think the voters who don't give a shit about the government lying their way into a war on the topic of chemical weapons would care if there were lies about the money?
It should be simpler than that. The US went to war without declaring war. This meant there would be no capitulation. No formal occupation. No end to the pseudo-occupation. No plan for what to do when the same patrol got blown up on the same road as last week and the week before. If we had stuck to the recipe for how to do war, we'd probably not be in the mess we are in.
These are not actual declarations of war against sovereign nations, and that's the problem. There are numerous other problems that follow from that. But, basically, Congress opened the door to the Executive starting a war on their own. It's not clear that the conditions for going from diplomacy to war laid out in these resolutions were actually met, but once a war was started, Congress lacked the balls to reign in the Executive by refusing to fund an undeclared war. And so on into the abyss.
As noted in other posts, Congress is writing even more squishy and open ended "resolutions" regarding ISIS. I'm not trying to be pedantic or legalistic about declaring war. But, in practice, abandoning that rigor appears to have been disastrous.
If you ever wonder why the economy isn't "taking off" remember the neocons and the ibankers. Led by Dubya, they nearly crashed and burned the nation. They robbed our kids of this wealth. And the next generation, too. If another deep global recession arrives soon, and we find ourselves an ex-great, ex-wealthy nation, these mistakes will be at the root of it. The men who did this are not just wrong, they are evil.
While it is hard to argue with the points in the article, there is this concept of 'global influence' or influence on global politics, which is hard to put a $ value on.
Hasn't this global influence played a huge part in maintaining USA as a global superpower ?
You think blunders in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere contribute to U.S. status as global superpower? I'm pretty sure a stronger case could be made that they've detracted from the status and influence the U.S. could have had.
It's hard to know what exact effect our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has had on the world. I'm sure there are people at military academies and universities getting PhDs on it.
Whatever the answer is, I don't think we should let the analysis fall prey to populism. As much as I'd agree that Iraq seems to have been a disaster, and that we haven't managed to accomplish much in Afghanistan, consider the wider implications. The USA has managed to navigate itself to the point where it put significant pressure on Iran through sanctions, has agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and is beginning to re-enter the global economy amidst a lessening of tensions. Presumably at least partially as a result, the price of oil is down to $40, which is lower than it was in 1985. (Consider where Iran is on the world map relative to Iraq and Afghanistan.) For all we know in the general public, that was the strategic goal the entire time. (Yes, I know, that's probably giving the government too much credit. Then again, consider the skill of sabotage like the Stuxnet virus, and imagine the same skill applied to long-term global strategic thinking.)
Perhaps the empire would be much stronger if not for those blunders, or perhaps Iraq would still be a dictatorship and Iran a nuclear threat. As much as ISIS is annoying, it doesn't seem to be an actual strategic threat in the way that nuclear powers with long-range ballistic missiles are.
Just to be clear, I don't know what to believe. I'm playing devil's advocate and primarily arguing not to prematurely conclude that things are simpler than they seem. Consider, for example, the layers of subtlety involved in executing Nixon's Madman theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory - given the crazy things that actually have happened in our world and politics, I would not be especially surprised if the government knowingly went to war with Iraq on a pretext, specifically to put pressure on Iran and take geo-political control of the region (perhaps even to destabilize the region), with a "fall guy" planned out ahead of time in the way of "no one really believed there were WMDs". The story that, "We thought they had WMDs and were wrong" is a lot easier for the public and world to accept than, "We are strategically invading Iraq and Afghanistan to put pressure on Iran."
Granted, I agree with you that these situations are total clusterfucks. I'm just saying let's look beneath the surface.
You know that it was precisely the sort of meddling you're talking about that got us into this mess with Iran in the first place, right? So at best, we broke even.
A bad idea to gain some negotiating power led to a lie that caused an unjust invasion, the direct murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the deaths of probably a million people in the area since.
Sure, let's look a bit deeper. We ignored the treason the first time around but it's not too late to hang a bunch of people.
They deserve as much of a pass as a kidnapper of children who says he plans to build a hospital with the ransom.
With respect to Iran it's worth reflecting on the fact that the US engineered a coup in Iran to depose Mosaddegh in 1953[1]. At that time the UK and US did not like the winner of a largely democratic process that installed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister and that had forced the Shah to flee Iran. Operation AJAX got rid of Mosaddegh as Prime Minister and brought the Shah back. The US then supported him as he weakened the democratic process and angered the population leading to the Iranian Revlolution. One could argue that the 1953 coup sowed the seeds of the 1979 Iranian revolution[2] that created the Islamic Republic of Iran who then went on to start the nuclear program that you mention. The US also supported Saddam Hussain in Iraq's war against Iran in which 500,000 or more people died. Who knows where the region would be if it were not for the 1953 coup.
The US was at its most powerful at the end of WWII. Its GDP was more than rest of the world combined. Military and industrial capacity - unmatched. And the only power with nuclear weapons. At the end of the war they were barely scratched compared to the total devastation in Europe and Asia.
USA could have literally taken over the world with no one to oppose them.
So ... especially after the first oil shock - you could view US in a state of relative decline. With a short blip during the 90s when they were reaping the spoils of winning the cold war.
$ value for who? I'm not sure if a policy of "globalist capitalism if that works for us, force if it doesn't" is a good policy (from a purely self-interested perspective) even for the entity that implements it. I'm certain it's a shitty one for everyone else, though.
I read this and I think of the courage that it must have taken to write, however, I quickly realize that my thoughts are based on today's mindset where questioning the government gets you labeled a conspiracy nut or traitor.
We have been warned by many about the military industrial complex, yet, it doesn't sink in.
Our current president was elected on promises of ending these wars and somehow he will go down in history as the champion of military occupation and perpetuating conflicts in places we don't belong.
Truth is that peace doesn't make money, it doesn't grease the wheels of industry, the difference is that where is the industry? It used to be that the US would at least benefit from the industry through employment and tax revenue, but what if the production is no longer in the US? Who benefits then? I can tell you with accuracy who doesn't ..
Not so sure about it. Peace and stability is the main driver for civilisation booms. Maybe sometime wars can shake the tree but storms do not help growing big fruits -- long sunny days do. Chinese civilisation is remarkable for its long periods of relative peace and steady wealth increase. That's also when culture develops.
every time china has a prolonged period of peace, the nobility gets corrupt which then opens it up for invasion. culture may be the result of extended peace, but unity is only achieved through conflict. ironically, there is no peace without war. yin and yang.
Yes, that's the second order analysis. But the mantra stating that war brings wealth and competition, that war is "sane and natural" from civilisation point of view, is wrong. Peace is the "sane and natural" state for human civilisation, and while some degradation can occur in an extended period with no major conflict, this is a side effect of peace, not the main effect (which is, again, that people can gather wealth and transmis it to their offsprings)
My favorite retort to those who blame the post-WWII tech boom on war: if that's true why wasn't WWI the cause of a similar boom? And why weren't the Aztec or the Mongols much more advanced?
War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing.
I'd say the Mongols and Aztecs were more advanced after their conquests than before. Expecting the radio or flight to have been invented just because there were many centuries of conflict belies the incremental nature of innovation.
And WWI certainly drove innovation; I think this always manifests most in military facets, obviously and tends to cascade into commercial sectors more slowly. Not much time separated WWI and WWII and a great deal of it was mired in the largest modern economic depression.
I don't support any of this, but it's literally competing with a gun to your head.
> Mongols more advanced after their conquests than before
Maybe, but the point is that Mongols, for some reason (maybe geography and weather?), did never stop being fighters. They never "settled down" to grow wealth, which is a very long process with many parameters (cities, knowledge stores, trustable and transmissible commercial bonds, etc.) So they are very good warriors, and have been very successful in their conquest, but compared to their Chinese neighbours (which are not the prototype of the aggressive people, to understate it a bit), they are just much smaller, and grew much less wealth.
The Mongols were definitely more advanced after their conquests, but so was everybody else, simply because technology progresses. They did acquire technologies from the countries they conquered, but I don't think they were ever significantly ahead of all their neighbours, other than in their excellent organization, strategy and way of life that allowed them to do this in the first place.
> War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing.
The problem with war-driven progress is that it's incidental. In War you are focusing on the War Machine, on destroying as much as you can both in human lives and resources.
Obviously you are bound to make discoveries that will be useful in other fields later on as well.
But to me it sounds very wrong on a ethical basis to justify that what we have today in terms of tech is a direct by-product of war. Innovation/Science also occurs outside of the spectrum of war, and it is very reductive to say that War advances Science as a whole.
On top of that, let's not forget that the scientists and technologists involved in the War Machine could have spent their time and lives doing something else and we will never know what other courses innovation could have taken.
I wonder if the real origin of war progress isn't Keynesian, and if a basic income, a lot of R&D spending, and a lot of incentive to invest might not achieve the same thing without all the death. War seems like a way to sell stimulus to conservatives.
"In my opinion, the great leap forward in medical knowledge, the birth of modern medicine, occurs somewhere in the period between the beginning of the Revolution and the end of the Empire."
I don't if or when this became obscure knowledge, but I don't even remember when I first learned it.
To be sure, Koch, the germ theory and understanding of sepcis came later, almost inexplicably.
I think it's also worth looking at how the French aristocracy ruined themselves supporting what became the United States in the American Revolution.
In order to even have a theory about why there was a Great Depression in the first place is extremely difficult. IMO, WWII directly was caused by the Depression among other things. This being said, Pershing held that the end of WWI happened in a way that made another war inevitable in a generation, and this prediction was borne out.
There was a huge industrial boom post-WWI. At least in the US, there was also a big agricultural boom in addition. See Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl" for a very shallow treatment of it.
The Mongols were advanced in ways and not in others. The Aztecs ( really, the Mexica ) were as well. The Aztecs come off as bloody.
At least for the Mongols, once a conquered place knelt, they were left alone ( outside of taxes ) and were now on a trade network unlike what had ever been seen, which generally raised standards of living.
For a blinding array of reasons, things ground to a halt in the Interwar period, leading to the Depression. WWII ended that... Our collective, international inability to manage monetary policy lead to something like 4% of humanity being put to the sword.
>I read this and I think of the courage that it must have taken to write, however, I quickly realize that my thoughts are based on today's mindset where questioning the government gets you labeled a conspiracy nut or traitor.
It's interesting you mention that, as Smedley Butler was the alleger of the Business Plot -- what he claimed to be a planned coup d'etat on FDR by wealthy businessmen. [1]
Sure. What was especially unusual about Obama is that he had taken absolutely no action as a president and got the prize in a pre-emptive way. Which is, honestly, stupid, there is no other way to put it.
He had made a nice speech about improving relations between the West and the Arab world. It's a bit thin for a Nobel, though.
I like to see that Nobel Prize as having been awarded to the American voter. Electing a black president in a country with such a racist past is a fantastic milestone.
Consider that the election of Obama is the first time ever I have seen such outpourings of joy at the election of a US president in Europe. Not because it was Obama, but because it represented a return to normality after GWB.
The second term election of GWB was so surreal by European eyes that it seemed like some collective insanity had gripped large parts of American voters.
In response, when Obama was elected, there were election day parties many places in Europe. Some Americans celebrating always happens, of course, but this time you had Europeans going to parties to celebrate a US president.
The relief was the election of Obama brought was immense, and the Nobel prize is a reflection of just how deep felt it was in certain circles.
It's hard. Refusing it is the right thing to do (since it directly contradicts one of his prime responsiblities), but also sends the message that one doesn't value, nor intend to strive for, peace.
If it were me, I would advise refusal behind closed doors if they had gotten word ahead of time.
To be fair, Obama campaigned on winding down the war in Iraq and scaling up the war in Afghanistan. A lot of people just pretended not to hear that second part. But he by no means campaigned as a pacifist - and if he did, he might have lost.
> questioning the government gets you labeled a conspiracy nut or traitor
Happy to see someone else pointing this out. For someone who grew up in the 90s it's weird how conventional and pro establishment the mainstream and especially more educated mindset is today.
I think it's partly hidden because it's masked by the social liberalism. But ignore gay marriage and legal pot and this is the 1950s. Any serious and deep questioning of society or the power structure of the world is seen as either nutty or futile, whether it comes in the form of more educated criticism or its rougher more "punk" forms like conspiracy theory and counterculture. Today is like some bohemian version of the Eisenhower era.
There is a kind of goofy new age "alt" thing with GMO food scares and such but it really strikes me as not only niche but unserious and toothless. It's almost more a form of entertainment than a serious counterculture. It also strikes me as a distraction with people getting angry at paper tigers like GMO food or nonexistent things like "chemtrails" instead of real issues.
Edit: I also realize that this matches the tech cycle. The return of pro establishment thinking after 9/11 coincided with the end of the first PC era and the rebirth of the mainframe rebranded as "cloud." To what extent is cold sober engineering actually art, an expression of who we are at the time?
>I quickly realize that my thoughts are based on today's mindset where questioning the government gets you labeled a conspiracy nut or traitor.
I think this was true, pre-Snowden. The Snowden revelations confirmed what a lot of conspiracy theorists had been saying for long time.
>Our current president was elected on promises of ending these wars and somehow he will go down in history as the champion of military occupation and perpetuating conflicts in places we don't belong.
Yes and no. 1st term promise: to end the war in Iraq which we have removed ourselves. He said he would escalate the war in Afghanistan. He kept all of this. 2nd term promise: remove ourselves from Afghanistan by EOY 2014 which didn't happen.
>Truth is that peace doesn't make money, it doesn't grease the wheels of industry, the difference is that where is the industry?
A better question is who's profiting and who is losing. As a working class American, I've paid out to subsidize these businesses/war (almost one in the same) while literally nothing has come back to me. No job building bombs, no oil money, zilch. So I don't care about the MIC or this (in every way) destructive industry.
Truth is that peace doesn't make money, it doesn't grease the wheels of industry, the difference is that where is the industry?
I will start by saying that I hate war. And war is VERY anti-capitalist. The only time war makes countries money is when they pick on non-industrialized enemies. People have realized that war is very costly to trade and industrial elites outside the military-industrial complex. [0]
But... Can we really say that we can turn a blind eye to the world's most evil people? Perhaps we can say "Let Europe handle itself" in 1915, but can we really say that in 1941? Even if 1941 was caused by 1915, can't we admit that there are some things worth fighting over?
This isn't to defend the current war-mongers running for President. It's just to say that a 0 wars policy doesn't seem to stand up to reality.
Some wars absolutely do need to be fought. Aggression, genocide, oppression need to be opposed, and sometimes the only way to oppose violence is with violence (though it should be a last resort; always look for an alternative first). But that's different from starting a war. Ultimately the question is: is the real reason for war to help and defend people, or is it for someone to make a profit? The problem is of course that warmongers often try to frame the latter as the former. Like Bush claiming we should invade Iraq to stop Saddam and his WMDs. But Saddam was never a real threat (unlike in the first Gulf War, where he took Kuwait, though maybe the real concern there was still oil dollars, and not the freedom of the people of Kuwait). And even then, even a "good" war can be an excellent opportunity for the arms dealers to make a profit.
The best approach should be what we've always known: be very reluctant, and only go to war when to do nothing means to allow the oppression or death of innocents. But we've known this for centuries, and we still keep messing up. We probably get it wrong more than we get it right. That's depressing. I'm not sure if I had a point anymore.
War is almost never to "make a profit". There have been "filibusters" that were more like that; South Africa and South America were mostly the location for those.
America in WWII might have been better served by simply being the Arsenal of Democracy and selling war materiel. I'd be hard pressed to say that Europe would have been better off. But this is just one of those things about nation-states that we live with. And please realize that Hollywood was overtly pressed into service to sell the War to the American people.
I'm not advocating isolationism. but Americans at the time were highly isolationist.
Is what's behind all this talk the basic Bismarckian welfare-warfare State concept? It's more subtle than that, IMO.
And so following your logic, since war is expensive, it would be rational for any empire to have colonies to increase their profits and thus their ability to secure themselves economically and geographically.
I might add for clarification: war is almost never profitable for the common people but is highly profitable for those in power.
>Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
How could anyone ever think that a war could be a mechanism for making money? No doubt many have, but it's nearly prima facie false.
It's possible for certain kinds of wars of conquest to leave improved trade networks in their wake - the Mongol Conquest worked this way - but the currency of violence is blood, not treasure. History is full of examples of ruinous wars. It has very few that worked out ... financially even for the victors.
WW2 is exactly the example everybody uses as a war that was not waged for profit. At least from a US point of view. Germany definitely did look for profit, specifically more resources and more space for German people to live.
As a US war for profit, the Gulf War and the Iraq War are better examples. They were about oil, access to oil, control over oil, and, in the case of the Iraq War, lucrative deals for Cheney's business friends. (Obviously they didn't make any money for the US tax payer, nor for the people in Iraq.)
I'm not sure that statement on Germany catches all the subtleties of the racial theories of the time. The belief was that those things already belonged to the Master Race, and all that was needed was token show of force for them to be returned. Source: "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer and just about anything else written after it on the subject.
It should be abundantly obvious by now that if the intent of the Iraq War was control over oil fields, then those oil fields are now under the control of ISIS. The rationale for the Iraq War was that the regime in Iraq posed an intolerable threat, based in Neocon readings of history.
"Cheney's business friends" presumably include Halliburton, which had trouble with and has since divested of the Brown-Root portion of Halliburton that was directly involved.
That design came from white papers filed by Neocon wonks, and nearly nowhere else. It's mostly a return to Dulles Bothers style foreign policy. That is strongly correlated with a sort of imperialism but the imperialism isn't inherent to the mentality. The "Frontline" "Rise of the Vulcans" explains this in great detail.
The 1991-ish Gulf War was on invitation from the royal family of Kuwait to reestablish that equilibrium.
There has been a time in which oil was an element in a political strategy that may also include war - the boycott of Japan after the Rape of Nanking is an example - but that really isn't done any more. The spot markets make it a lot less of a thing. There were, of course, sanctions on Iran but they leaked. See also Babak Zanjani.
Is that true? I think in many case war helps a small group of capitalist people to get richer. Especially the ones that know the war is coming.
I'd like to twist your statement: war is VERY anti free-market.
But then I think free-market is something that capitalists are much in favor of when it helps them, and much against when it limits them.
Note: I understand capitalists in the Marxist sense of the work, they do not need to labor (sell work-hours for money) as they can make money with their money.
Does former Yugoslavia count as non industrialized? Because lots of money were made selling heavy machinery to the different parties for the war effort.
> The only time war makes countries money is when they pick on non-industrialized enemies.
Maybe you're making a different point to this but the United States and its corporations came out of WWI and WWII (wars against an industrialized enemy) far richer and more powerful than before WWI and WWII, largely at the expense of Britain/the British Empire.
The USA essentially replacing Britain as the world's economic superpower after WWI and military/imperialist superpower after WWII.
> But... Can we really say that we can turn a blind eye to the world's most evil people? Perhaps we can say "Let Europe handle itself" in 1915, but can we really say that in 1941? Even if 1941 was caused by 1915, can't we admit that there are some things worth fighting over?
WWI started in 1914, not 1915 and WWII started in 1939 (or 1937, if you want to take it from the Japanese invasion of China), not 1941.
1941 (Pearl Harbor) was not caused by 1915 (WWI), it was caused by 1893 and the invasion, overthrow and annexation of Hawaii that led the military of the US empire to be there in the first place.
"Let Europe handle itself" is a simplification of what the United States was thinking and doing before being forced kicking and screaming into finally doing the right thing by Japan and Germany - even after Pearl Harbor, the USA still did not declare war on Hitler.
I doubt it's taught in American schools, but it's no secret that American companies (ie, capitalists) were supporting, supplying and working with the Nazis even after the start of WWII.
People in US do seem to be taught that lots of charity was doled out to Britain. In fact Britain (and its Empire countries), standing alone against the biggest threat to democracy in history, was forced to hand over its gold reserves, its advanced high technology, and even territory to the US, in return for American help.
Not loans at this point in time, of course, because the US believed Britain would fall to Hitler (just as the US had sat back and watched other democracies fall) and therefore would not be in any position to pay the US back.
You're right that some things are worth fighting over, and you're right that WWII is an example of a justified war. It's just a pity that the United States, for all the effort it put in when it finally joined (when Germany's defeat was already a foregone conclusion due to Barbarossa), acted before, during and after WWII with complete self-interest.
> * when [the U.S.] finally joined (when Germany's defeat was already a foregone conclusion due to Barbarossa)*
Germany's defeat was hardly a foregone conclusion in December 1941. Sure, in hindsight it now appears that way. But all the history books indicate that things looked mighty different at the time.
> 1941 (Pearl Harbor) was not caused by 1915 (WWI), it was caused by 1893 and the invasion, overthrow and annexation of Hawaii that led the military of the US empire to be there in the first place.
Caused? No.
It wouldn't have happened if the US didn't own Hawaii in 1941, but the US takeover of Hawaii was not the causus belli for Pearl Harbor.
> It wouldn't have happened if the US didn't own Hawaii in 1941
Which is what I said, except I put it more honestly: it would not have happened had the US not invaded, overthrown and annexed Hawaii. The US 'owned' Hawaii the same way Hitler 'owned' the Sudetenland.
The point being the roots (ie, cause) of Pearl Harbor stretch back to 19th century US imperialism, throwing its weight around, and generally being in places it shouldn't have been.
> but the US takeover of Hawaii was not the causus belli for Pearl Harbor.
You said "caused". Not "it would not have happened" (that is, it was one essential factor), but "caused" (that is, this is what made that happen).
To see the difference, do a thought experiment. The US takes Hawaii in 1893, but does not end the sale of oil, rubber, metal, and everything else militarily useful to Japan in 1937. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Probably not, because the US is not signaling opposition to Japan's invasion of China.
On the other hand, say the US doesn't "invade, overthrow, and annex" Hawaii. It merely negotiates for a naval base. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Yes.
> You said "caused". Not "it would not have happened" (that is, it was one essential factor), but "caused" (that is, this is what made that happen).
I said "caused" because I was copying the statement and style of the previous poster. His point (I believe) alluded to the commonly held belief that the roots of WWII lay in WWI; my point, since he used 1941, was that the roots of Pearl Harbor lay closer to home.
> To see the difference, do a thought experiment. The US takes Hawaii in 1893, but does not end the sale of oil, rubber, metal, and everything else militarily useful to Japan in 1937. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Probably not, because the US is not signaling opposition to Japan's invasion of China.
Okay, I say in this fictional version of history that it still does happen, because the US is still in places it should not be, due to its late 19th century imperialism, and still poses a military threat to Japanese ambitions in the region.
> On the other hand, say the US doesn't "invade, overthrow, and annex" Hawaii. It merely negotiates for a naval base. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Yes.
Why does it still happen? If the US is acting peacefully in this imaginary situation, why can't Japan?
Based on US Navy interviews with Japanese officials after the end of WWII, it seems immensely improbable that Japan cared about the US takeover of Hawaii per se. They cared about the US fleet that was based there, and about US actions to oppose Japan's attempts to conquer China and the Dutch East Indies. So if Hawaii were independent but the US had a fleet base there, no, Japan wasn't going to act peacefully in that imaginary situation - not unless you're postulating an actually peaceful Japan, one that isn't attacking China and the Dutch East Indies.
> it seems immensely improbable that Japan cared about the US takeover of Hawaii per se. They cared about the US fleet that was based there
Nobody is saying otherwise. Perhaps you have forgotten again how and why the US fleet got there in the first place: violent American imperialism and expansionism in the late 19th century. It's fairly pointless to imagine situations where that didn't happen, when it did.
> So if Hawaii were independent but the US had a fleet base there, no, Japan wasn't going to act peacefully in that imaginary situation - not unless you're postulating an actually peaceful Japan, one that isn't attacking China and the Dutch East Indies.
Why not? You're postulating a mythological United States capable of negotiating peacefully with Hawaii (and presumably the Philippines, and Guam, and Cuba, and Puerto Rico?). If such a US ever existed, why would it be impossible for it to also come to a peaceful understanding with Japan?
I mean, what are we supposed to be doing here, simply coming up with just the right amount of convenient historical changes to prove your point?
It depends on which story you buy. An American in 1925 considered America a "shining city on a hill" relative to corrupt old Europe. That American was doubtless isolationist.
After the heavy propaganda campaigns to get Americans to accept WWII, that's no longer been the case but there is cognitive dissonance. The leadership does not always have conveniently available justification.
There were Congressional hearing on Vietnam through the years, and various CSPAN channels run them. It's worth learning the language from there.
This is a bit reductionist. War is fought for many reasons, many of them bad, not just economic reasons.
Before WWI many believed the so called general war would never occur because it would be so terrible for business, no gain could offset the loss. War still happened.
The author of this book was approached by George W Bush's grandfather and some other very rich men, to be the leader of the U.S. after their fascist coup overthrew the current president. He said no, and blew the whistle, a government committe investigated and found the claims plausible and then nothing happened:
(edit: I see I'm a bit late with this info as it's been linked twice already, still fascinating stuff, and very plausible given the country was certainly exploiting other countries militarily, and still exploiting its own minorities at home with little moral compunction, so it's not exactly a big step).
Not just the government. It is a power complex which has clearly subverted the "government". Huxley/Herbert did warn us, and imo this conflict was/is inevitable.
My understanding of many of the most recent military engagements by the US is that they are basically sandbox experiments for prototyping new warfare tech and tactics, especially to study things like asymmetric urban warfare in which the distinction between combatant and civilian is difficult.
We enter the conflicts under whatever pretext is popularized in the media, but the real reason is to fuel warfare R&D efforts, grow surveillance infrastructure, and collect data that reflects situations our military leaders forecast to be important.
Large contracting firms profit. Soldiers lose time, often also money, often their mental health and family relationships, and sometimes their lives. Taxpayers lose money. Foreign civilians lose their lives. Few benefits are ever given to soldiers or foreigners, if they are even paid lip service with promises of benefits at all.
It's basically a string of smaller scale proxy wars to fuel tech, surveillance, and population control between larger, "actual" wars.
I fear we are already past a point where democratic process could stop it. I think by now it would require almost an actual revolt from U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and that it would be bloody, and that part of the military engineering being studied is exactly how much civilians will tolerate before being pushed to the point of revolt.
As long as you can watch Netflix on your iPad and put it out of your mind, then while it might ruffle your feathers, you won't actually take action that could jeopardize your creature comforts. Even things like Occupy Wall Street seem like they are more data collection opportunities than anything else. "OK, so they will protest via X, Y, and Z, but too few of them can be pushed to do A, B, or C for us to care."
It's a very depressing feeling. In the meantime, just like everyone else, I have to worry about money, family, life goals, comforts, health, and all my biases push me to ignore the military industrial conflict, because already giving it maybe 1/100th of my overall bandwidth is exceedingly depressing. Something close to 40% of the country believes in young earth creationism. Open up to a highly-visited YouTube video and scroll down to the comments and behold the inanity of how we use our time and what our priorities are.
How could enough people possibly coordinate beliefs and actions around humanity-affirming rebukes of the military industrial complex? Of course they won't, so then I guess I'd better put my brain towards how to live in a world where they won't, which is too depressing to think about... and the cycle continues.
I'm sure it has been articulated even earlier than the early 1900s. It's just goes on and on.
"My understanding of many of the most recent military engagements by the US is that they are basically sandbox experiments for prototyping new warfare tech and tactics, especially to study things like asymmetric urban warfare in which the distinction between combatant and civilian is difficult."
And my "understanding" of how gravity works is that the Earth is carried around the Sun by a giant invisible rottweiler dog. If I can't back it up, though, I'm not going to get my Rottweiler Theory through peer review. What do you back up your "understanding" with?
It's based, I think, on interpreting the evidence of the way we prosecuted recent wars, the money flows spent in waging war, and the overlap of military, industrial and political interests.
My understanding differs though. My understanding is that the commenters understanding comes from finding it difficult to believe human beings, especially people seemingly smart enough to reach the top, could be that stupid. If they couldn't be that stupid or misguided, then they must have had some ulterior motive.
I go with the 'yeah, the neocons really were that dumb.'
Actually, I worked in the defense industry for a while, so a lot of it is based on my understanding of that work.
It's not fruitful to dump some 5000 word diatribe about it though. I'm not interested in convincing anyone about it ... and anyone who doubts it or feels I couldn't produce a compelling argument if I was pressed to should absolutely feel free to disagree and I am not at all endorsing my fleeting comments as justification.
But are you SURE you don't want to spend hours justifying your opinion to some random passive aggressive stranger?
Clearly you're not allowed to share your views without being ridiculed unless you cite extensive sources and make some flow charts or something.
[/sarcasm]
I enjoyed reading your insight so thanks for sharing that.
13thLetter: Do you think it's possible to tell someone to elaborate on why they believe something without being an asshole. I mean, if you ask nicely then he could've written something interesting about his experiences. If you act like a passive aggressive douche then you'll just get people defensive and they won't write anything. The whole community loses.
Besides, I think it's pretty pretentious to hold someone's views shared at a messaging forum to uphold to the same standard that they would need to get into a peer-reviewed journal disputing gravity. Do you even THINK before you write?
On the one hand, yeah, you're right, I tend to be too aggressive and rude and I really shouldn't do that, especially on a forum like HN. I genuinely appreciate you telling me that.
On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.
Hey, I appreciate your erm, apology, I guess. You're right, you shouldn't be rude to people, or they will stop talking to you.
I don't know what you expect me to say to your second paragraph though. The guy making those "accusations" has already left the conversation, and I don't really feel like having this discussion with you either.
Gravity is much more of a hard science than the psychological and economic motivations behind war. We're not peering into a sandbox of ants from some omniscient above-view. We're obvserving the actions and reactions of people, which is much more messy.
This is partly why I wish for Trump to get the top job. The amount of window dressing in society will come down drastically as the clown makes misjudgements at every turn and contradicts himself by the hour.
Just like what happened when Bush got the job? Obama won the Nobel peace prize before he was president because people believed so strongly that the problem was Bush. "If we just get a sensible president in, he will fix everything!"
American politics goes from yin to yang every 8 years because that's was people expect. The media polarizes every thing. Your average person laps it up. "Those damn conservatives/liberals are ruining everything. How can they be so stupid/naive?". We must make America great. We must make America whole. :-P
People believe that it is their duty to vote: we must keep the democrats/republicans out of office! Or you could waste your vote on someone who can't win. As a measure of protest, perhaps. Or maybe if they did win once... then you would have 3 parties. Then 2 would gang up on 1. Or the third will split the vote.
If you wish to stop war, don't get sidetracked on people. That's how you will be defeated, because it's easy to swap people around like a game of 3 card monty. Concentrate on the issue, not on people, parties or politics. Don't simply cast a vote and say, "Well, I tried". That's how you lose.
Well said! This is a discussion that needs to be had (regularly) on places like Hacker News. I know of only a few small communities online (for example, /r/EndlessWar/) that openly discuss what is absolutely the most significant topic of our time.
I left the US some years ago and I am strongly considering renouncing my US citizenship. That I would have to pay to do so, is one of the few things stopping me. It won't happen, but if Obama and Bush are imprisoned for murder, among other crimes, I would think about going back.
The US should stop defending Europe but alas we are sending more troops there. If Europeans can't be arsed to maintain a proper defense they should reap the whirlwind.
One of the movie that inspired a lot US army is 'la bataille d'Algiers'. For a reason very few understand, what was an historic defeat of France in a colonial war was considered a military success for fighting against terrorism by USA. Of course, you fight your own citizens.
Don't ask.
It basically said that torture was ok, and that your own citizens / any civilians can be considered your ennemies and treated as such. Abou grahib, Condor operation (chili, argentina...) for getting rid of "commies" in south america used nice french para technics.
Like pushing opponents in the ocean from an helicopter far from the coast so that body might not be discovered recognizable. Sleep depravation, gégéne, waterboarding, having muslim naked and possibly being ordered by woman ... A lot of actual technics used in Guantanamo.
Hey, don't look at me this way. I do not support this. At the opposite of USA, war stopped because soldiers revolted against these "successful" technic. And their was a strong opposition between the "conscripted" and the engaged soldiers.
Call french cowards. At least they did oppose their own government and army and accepted (ok, De gaulle took the liberty to choose) to lose war rather than to win with torture. Which triggered another civil war in the metropole between the tenants of keeping colonies and the others not really for tortures. And of course, CIA did its best to put even more mess in the process. (Gladio operation).
Maybe looking like cowards is not the worse that can happen to a nation and as you see french people are still alive.
Maybe they don't look like a great nation, but loosing on the moral battle has proven to be a great way to destroy your own civilization.
At least that is the topic of the peloponesian wars that is a mandatory lecture for westpoint cadets.
>Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
-Friederich Nietzsche
Don't let yourself get depressed, that's one of the worst things you could do in such a situation which calls for change. I've been there and it helps no one to feel sorry for yourself all the time.
Realize that although we are poised technologically to destroy everything, the world is in fact the most peaceful it has been in a long time.
Also, stop reading so much into YouTube comments, they are not representative of the world at large. I suspect many of the inflammatory provocative comments on there are astroturf anyway.
>Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
> Butler is famous, but not for his US military service.
I can hear the collective shouts of every Marine begging to differ. Two of the most recognized names in Marine Corps history are MajGen Smedley Butler and SgtMaj "Dan" Daly. Among other things, they are 2 of 19 men in US military history and the only two Marines to receive two Medals of Honor.
He was a great Marine. His complaint was that the the USMC wasn't fighting for the United States, but was being misused on behalf of the United Fruit Company. That's where "banana republics" (not the Gap subsidiary, the Central American countries) came from.
This fact isn't so much drilled into heads during bootcamp, but anyone who reads from the Commandant's reading list (or any light research into MajGen Butler for that matter) will have known this. I was specifically addressing your first statement though.
I read an NYT article a while ago that made the argument that the effect of people who did not support the Vietnam War evading the draft was a military that was, twenty or so years later, when the people who did join became senior, very conservative or willing to wage war. Along the lines of the critical theory idea that some of the Left have become ineffective by not involving themselves in actual politics, I think it's important to not be deterred by this idea of war, as the only way the military-industrial complex will change is if people with better values come to make up more of the military. Maybe this will come to be the case as younger people see decreasing future job prospects and turn to the military as a career.
Interesting that you imply that Left would like less war.
It seems to me that the progressives main thing is to tell and enforce how others should live and behave, that is the core of the left, the other ideas are just branches. Evidence is the congress votes in USA by Left to start wars and votes by Taxed Enough Already (TEA) to defund the wars.
If you are anti war, I invite you to check out the Right, Libertarian POV.
The left main thing is mostly about making sure there is a "floor", meaning that even if you are poor and on min wage you don't die on the street or bankrupt at the first opportunity.
Usually, countries where the right is in power (take the US for example) have a terrible living for their poorest population.
And this is not something you want because the guy having the shitty min wage job might tomorrow be you, one of your kids, your best friend, or someone in your family.
> "[It's] peace, not war, that makes wealth for a country. War just transfers possession of the residue from the weaker to the stronger. Worse, what is bought with blood is sold for coin, and then stolen back again. [...] It's a wondrous transmutation, where the blood of one man is turned into the money of another. Lead into gold is nothing to it."
-- "The Curse of Chalion", by Lois McMaster Bujold
While Butler was quite spot on with his early 1930s post-mortem assessment of WWI, a less isolationist approach might have possibly lessened the scale of WWII.
Some aspects of it's stance, like home territory limited military presence and exclusive zones of interest are simply obsolete in an era of ICBMs and satellites.
For some context and general description of sentiment in the 30s:
It was written by a leftist and libertarian/paleoconservative working together, so you will likely find something you love and something you hate in it, as with all good books.
I very much regret my early support for the Iraq war.
> Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they?
A couple notes on the war drum:
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force [0] targeting the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks has been invoked to deploy US armed forces to Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. [1][2]
A new proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force [3] targeting ISIS, "its associated forces," and "any successor organizations" is arguably more open-ended.
The author of the proposal, Lindsey Graham (Senior Senator from South Carolina), seeks to grant the next president "the ability to go after ISIS without limitation to geography, time and means." [4]
I love Smedley Butler! Good link. Always wiki - the business plot to see how corporate america tried to get Smedley Butler to lead a military coup of mercenaries against the US government during FDR's presidency.
i am surprised butler got this far on hn. read this before the next elections. before the next assad. before your friends and relatives go on tours with the troops.
>it is important to remember that prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve, there was no such thing as a world war.
> Although pre-war Germany had a private central bank, it was heavily restricted and inflation kept to reasonable levels... So, in the media of the day, Germany was portrayed as the prime opponent of World War One
The invasion of Russia, Belgium and France might have had something to do with it as well.
> as early as 1933 they started to organize a global boycott against Germany to strangle this upstart ruler who thought he could break free of private central bankers [poster of "Judea Declares war on Germany" headline]
Come on HN, we're better than this sort of nutjobbery.
If you liked Butler's perspective, then you will probably also like Garet Garrett's [0] oeuvre. He was an outspoken critic of WWI, and of America's entry into WWII until after Pearl Harbor. His position against an imperial America delivers a wider context to Butler's field experience as handmaiden to American power elites' ambitions accomplishing just that outcome.
I have read through the comments, and it strikes me that I dont see more combat vets on here. I knew some really smark hackers while I was in the Marine Corps, even though I was just a bullet sponge grunt in OIF/OEF.
It also gladens my heart just to see my favorite Marine, Smedley Butler, get some "air time". It does dissapoint me that so many in the comments are making escuses for war as a profit or r&d center, or for war crimes prosecutions of what are essentially pawns on a grander chessboard.
In the Marine Corps, a lot of people have a hardon for Chesty Puller, but the phrase I used to use is "If you like Chest more than Smedley you do the country and the Corps a disservice." Why? Because not only did Smedley Butler wake up and realize the true nature of the part he played, but he spoke out against it, and beyond that, something I havent seen mentioned yet but something I think is of the utmost importance is his thwarting of the business plot. His convressional hearing testimony is vital to understanding the modern racket of war, and now we have the unredacted version, (though still not his full testimony, because it was heavily edited before even entering the record). If you havent read the unredacted testimony, I highly suggest it.
All that being said, war indeed is a racket, and it continues to be. The WFA (waste fraud and abuse) I saw in Iraq by contractors is barely the icing on the racket cake. There is a reason that something like the richest three counties in the US are in Virginia. The true racket though, is much larger than the contractor world, and primarily involves banking and resource oriented interests.
I spent a long time voraciously reading anything I thought could help me understand the bigger geostrategic/political chessboard, and my primary conclusion about the wars were that resource wars are on the horizon, and the wars were destabilizing measures designed to contain China and Russia by prevention of resource pipelines being built to them. Take a look at the maps of resources and their pipelines...
The other factor is that the traditional nation state actor threat model is being upended by texhnology, to the point that the military industrial congressional complex isadjusting very quickly.
My primary problem with this is how much the people of the US have been lied to and misled. If the United States has some interest in destabilizing an area, I would prefer that this just be said and the case be made outright, instead of sending young dumb warriors like myself to die for causes they dont understand and are lied to about. You want to know where I feel like the primary failure lies at? Every O-5 and above officer who just went along with it and didnt pushback against the Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield bunch of Chicago school Straussian neocons backed by Kissinger and Brezenski. When you cant tell me what my fucking objective is, how can I be expected to accomplish it?
In truth, where we are headed currently is a return to the tripolar world, but in this move, I think we will never fully understand the almost complete subversion of our government that has happened at the behest of the globalists. Smedley Butler caught a glimpse of the beast and had the courage to fight against it openly. He will continue to be my favorite Marine until I die.
Oh, and for any of you touting the economic benefits of war, I hope you never are on the ground on either side when that benefit is being extracted by blood and corruption...
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadI'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians. It would seem to me that they are the ones who pay "the biggest part of the bill".
Not that I would deny that the people doing the mass murder can themselves become the victims of war. But I'd personally have more sympathy for civilians who are not trying to murder others but are themselves murdered.
So yes, he didn't witness a truly modern war. 19th century conflicts were brutal, but weren't exactly the city-destroying conflict WWII was, nor the guerrilla wars of modern times.
"The [Taiping Rebellion] [...] ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the bloodiest civil war, and the largest conflict of the nineteenth century with estimates of war dead ranging from 20 to 70 million dead, as well as millions more displaced."
WWI eventually defined total war, and no doubt its legacy was the primary reason France just surrendered to the Germans in 1941. The entire population had simply had enough.
Hell, Sherman was fighting total war in 1864.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_...
> According to most sources, World War II was the most lethal war in world history, with some 70 million killed in six years. The civilian to combatant fatality ratio in World War II lies somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1, or from 60% to 67%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_...
From wikipedia:
"To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States;[9][10] but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII),[11] creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit[12]—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu."
and
Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[15] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. A significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated to pigs that were kept near the front.[16]
In some ways WW2 was the last of the wars of colonisation to be attempted. Assert racial superiority, a need for land, define the "natives" already occupying it as subhuman, invade and kill them, extract resources and colonise. This time in Russia since Africa was already taken and the Americas already liberated.
Now go back a couple hundred years, back to when cities were occasionally put to the sword, but that is beyond even this guy's memory.
Remember all those stories a couple of years back about drone operators being psychologically traumatized by their job? (In between calling children they'd killed "fun-sized terrorists", of course.)
Anyone unwilling to go to some effort to avoid prosecuting an unjust war can't really be said to be a victim like the people they shoot...
If we give them a pass we remove all moral requirement to make sure you're fighting for a just cause.
Otherwise, your option is only for those who are economically, and mentally prepared for such an undertaking. Economically of course including things like important connections.
And your other option which I think is jail for draft dodgers isn't exactly fulsome and charming.
So the soldier either loses his way of life through exodus, forced incaceration, or being sent to fight.
And seriously, you're suggesting buying arms is a way for conscripts to avoid the horrors of war?
This subthread is like a magnet for untenable arguments.
Gosh, pardon me for talking about the countries on the continent I was born on.
> A civilian population which regardless of how bad things have got has a bit more freedom to leave the country than those [about to be] drafted into the army.
Historical history fail. American draftees had the ability to cross the borders legally before their reporting date, and the borders were porous and easily crossed anyways. Vietnamese civilians would have had to walk hundreds of miles, crossing mine fields, into even less friendly countries, if they even knew a war was declared before the bomb destroyed their village.
> And seriously, you're suggesting [...]
No matter how hard the conscript has it, their victims will have it worse.
I'm not suggesting, I'm flat-out saying that if you don't take extreme measures to avoid shooting innocents, you're a murderer.
When you're drafted it's too late to avoid some horror but you can keep from making it worse for everyone.
That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
Although when it comes to Vietnam, I did once chat with an older Vietnamese person in Vietnam who said his worst experience of war was seeing banged up American GIs in the hospital next door. Other Vietnamese civilians' worst experiences were food shortages as the war largely passed their particular inconsequential valley by. Others died agonising deaths under bombardment, which was disproportionately likely and certainly no less painful if they happened to have [been] signed up for one of the armies and sent to guard something. Not all experiences of war are the same, but as a general rule you're going to spend a lot more time being shot at if you're a soldier, and probably don't feel better for shooting back, especially if you're a conscript.
Do you see the part of the earlier message where I said "literally every war in every country?" No? Maybe because I didn't write that...
> That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
You need to read the entirety of my messages and not add anything of your own, otherwise you're just arguing with yourself.
> people called up to the military can easily avoid the trauma of being shot at and having to take other human lives by.... buying a gun and starting a firefight.
Sigh, no. Where did I say easily?
It's your responsibility to not be forced into murdering innocents. If you can more-easily leave the country, great. If not, even jail is better than killing people, but if all else fails - it's better to shoot the people conscripting you than be forced to kill innocents.
> probably don't feel better for shooting back
Who said it was enjoyable? But the conscripts still have more agency than the civilians they're firing at.
Sorry, but taking out the word "easily" doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency to avoid the unpleasantness of potentially having to shoot people because they can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians?!) and fire first any less silly.
And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death generally don't have more agency than civilians who generally aren't under such orders. In particular, civilians are far more likely to be allowed to permanently leave the war zone(s) at any given time than soldiers, and far less likely to be intentionally fired at.
Uh huh.
You're the one trying to go down a rathole. The point is soldiers have it better than the civilians because they have more choice, more is always better even if it isn't great.
> conscripts are obliged to murder the people conscripting them in order to avoid
You see, this is you moving the goalposts. This is merely one of the choices, the extreme one.
And it's not as much an obligation as a right. Slavers are morally abhorrent and conscripts are slaves. Slaves always have a right to escape and no number of slaver deaths is ever a bad thing.
The obligation comes in when they're actually given the illegal orders as nothing forgives the crimes they commit. Ultimately all responsibility for their actions is theirs.
> hypothetical future scenario in which they might be ordered to kill civilians
In the Vietnam example that wasn't hypothetical - it was evening news. And the war was started on false information from our own government so it wasn't legitimate even if the targets were military.
> Sorry, but taking out the word "easily"
You aren't sorry, the whole "easily" was your invention in the first place.
> doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency
Actually, it does. In the American wars where we've drafted people the draftees have always had considerable rights (travel, etc) before actually being inducted. And certainly more than the Vietnamese - even taking wealth into account.
> can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians [in the victim country]?!)
Had Americans taken up arms to stop the war it would have stopped without going to Vietnam, or would have come home quickly. If Vietnamese had taken up arms ... we'd have burned their entire village to the ground anyways.
Our conscripts have more agency.
> any less silly.
Or any less right.
> And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death
At worst they're holding a gun. They can take their officer out - the one ordering the illegal actions, rather than performing the illegal actions.
And they usually have a lot of advance warning before being inducted, let alone shot at. Time to flee, or shoot themselves in the foot, or just protest and go to jail, or - yes - to fight back at home rather than abroad. But if you force the discussion to the ridiculous point where they're already on the battlefield, being ordered to fire into a village, before they consider any of this, then yes they're morally required to go to ridiculously painful lengths to avoid killing.
If someone kidnaps you and orders you to kill someone else, or he'll kill you, you're still morally and legally culpable if you pull the trigger.
Why do you think soldiers shouldn't be held to the same standard?
It's nice of you to reiterate the largely irrelevant point that soldiers shouldn't shoot civilians in the unlikely event of them receiving an order to (unless the civilians are slavers?) so for the avoidance of doubt I agree that shooting civilians is bad.
I'm afraid I can't go down your ratholes any further than that because I'm still none the wiser as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency to avoid bloodbaths because "at worst they're holding a gun" and possess the option to "fight back at home" before they even join up is actually intended to be taken seriously...
Of you dodging such a obvious truth, I agree.
> If your argument relies on the edge case of a country doing the conscripting being a liberal democracy thousands of miles from the actual fighting
Yeah, only the wars my liberal democracy has participated in, all of which have been thousands of miles from home. What an edge case!
> countries where the civilians are based not to have any natural refugee escape routes
By your reckoning there were escape routes from Vietnam so nobody was actually killed!
> I'm pretty sure that even then the average American soldier's experience of combat was more unpleasant than the average Vietnamese civilian's wartime experience
Even if you were right the point is the soldier's agency in choosing a better future. Peasants have very little, the soldiers have much more at every stage especially the beginning.
An american soldier could choose to go home at any time "simply" by refusing to fight and being sentenced to, at most, twenty years in prison. Their family wouldn't be face retribution or anything. Ask someone about to be burnt to death with their family which they'd prefer.
> I'm pretty sure I've listened to and read more Vietnamese accounts of the war than you.
You can't read the memoirs of the dead.
> because I'm still none the wiser
That would require not trying to dodge the point.
> as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency
Draftees, particularly before they become soldiers. And it's a fact, not an argument, in all modern cases in my country.
> actually intended to be taken seriously
Oh gosh, of course not. It troubles you so of course it was meant for you to dismissively chuckle at in passing. No more.
Yeah, borders are hard to find (they're on the outside of a country?! How inconvenient!) and it would suck to lose your important connections and your facebook account.
Not worth it. The murder option is way easier - you should totally just do that.
> And your other option which I think is jail
Hah! "My option". Yeah, I invented sending soldiers to jail right after I invented the draft.
> So the soldier either loses [...]
I'm glad you see the draft as the bad thing here. But they can choose not to kill for the people who drafted them.
I know plenty of ex-military and nearly uniformly, those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless of whether they were shot at or did the shooting.
Then I don't really follow you either.
I had thought my response - that while war sucks for everyone, conscripts generally have more chance to avoid the war than the civilians they end up killing and it's their duty to take those options rather than being a murderer - was pretty clear...?
And yes, I 100% agree that the people who sign the law are doing the worst thing, and the people who vote for them without being at risk of being drafted themselves, etc. The draft is the bad thing, not the conscripts for being drafted.
But, once drafted they still have choice and power, and must use that before victimizing others.
> those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless
Exactly, so if they had run away, or done their fighting in their own country against their own draft, they'd have spared everyone that mistake.
The only way the mistakes happen is if soldiers go.
> Only one economist, William D. Nordhaus of Yale, seems to have come close. In a paper in December 2002, he offered a worst-case estimate of $1.9 trillion, “if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation-building is costly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/washington/19cost.html?_r=...
The next time a president wants to take the USA to war, or enter any armed conflict, I'd like to see that announcement be accompanied by (or followed shortly thereafter by) a GAO or similar accounting report estimating probable outcomes and costs. The same report should include an appendix that summarizes recent similar reports delivered in past armed conflicts, analyzing their accuracy with known actual costs. (E.g., that appendix should report this fact about the Iraq war and the updated estimate for the new war should take into account the sources of inaccuracy that led to the underestimation).
In software engineering, at least part of the job is doing something new every time. If it wasn't new it wouldn't need a human - it would just be a machine doing something repeatedly. I imagine that war is to some extent the same way, in that no opposition force is exactly the same; yet a lot of war must be loosely similar in cost, barring major technological changes. (E.g., cost per square mile of territory held by infantry or cost per civilian population or cost per enemy combatant; cost per square mile of enforced no-fly-zone, etc.)
Say, where are all of the data scientists? You'd think that you could draw some interesting conclusions analyzing data about the costs of war, assuming it's publicly available. For example, a histogram of dollars spent month by month per province of occupied territory - is such data public? I don't think I've ever seen much in the way of interesting visualizations, outside of the occasional flashy news article.
Put that on CNN and Fox News. Now the old people want war. Smart people are caught wasting their time in an engineered debate about whether there is or isn't time to first plan a budget. While everyone is riled up, Congress side steps the whole thing and we just begin with whatever military operations they wanted.
I'd just like to see the GAO rushing alongside that process to prepare expected financial outcomes, to be shared with American citizens and press who will be evaluating the pending action.
Colin Powell stood up in front of the UN and lied his arse off about "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION" and the only presidential candidates I've ever seen call this out are the rank, nominally unelectable outsiders like Sanders, Paul, and Trump. What on earth makes you think the voters who don't give a shit about the government lying their way into a war on the topic of chemical weapons would care if there were lies about the money?
You presume that spending money isn't one of the primary goals of some military campaigns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution
As noted in other posts, Congress is writing even more squishy and open ended "resolutions" regarding ISIS. I'm not trying to be pedantic or legalistic about declaring war. But, in practice, abandoning that rigor appears to have been disastrous.
Hasn't this global influence played a huge part in maintaining USA as a global superpower ?
Whatever the answer is, I don't think we should let the analysis fall prey to populism. As much as I'd agree that Iraq seems to have been a disaster, and that we haven't managed to accomplish much in Afghanistan, consider the wider implications. The USA has managed to navigate itself to the point where it put significant pressure on Iran through sanctions, has agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and is beginning to re-enter the global economy amidst a lessening of tensions. Presumably at least partially as a result, the price of oil is down to $40, which is lower than it was in 1985. (Consider where Iran is on the world map relative to Iraq and Afghanistan.) For all we know in the general public, that was the strategic goal the entire time. (Yes, I know, that's probably giving the government too much credit. Then again, consider the skill of sabotage like the Stuxnet virus, and imagine the same skill applied to long-term global strategic thinking.)
Perhaps the empire would be much stronger if not for those blunders, or perhaps Iraq would still be a dictatorship and Iran a nuclear threat. As much as ISIS is annoying, it doesn't seem to be an actual strategic threat in the way that nuclear powers with long-range ballistic missiles are.
Just to be clear, I don't know what to believe. I'm playing devil's advocate and primarily arguing not to prematurely conclude that things are simpler than they seem. Consider, for example, the layers of subtlety involved in executing Nixon's Madman theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory - given the crazy things that actually have happened in our world and politics, I would not be especially surprised if the government knowingly went to war with Iraq on a pretext, specifically to put pressure on Iran and take geo-political control of the region (perhaps even to destabilize the region), with a "fall guy" planned out ahead of time in the way of "no one really believed there were WMDs". The story that, "We thought they had WMDs and were wrong" is a lot easier for the public and world to accept than, "We are strategically invading Iraq and Afghanistan to put pressure on Iran."
Granted, I agree with you that these situations are total clusterfucks. I'm just saying let's look beneath the surface.
Sure, let's look a bit deeper. We ignored the treason the first time around but it's not too late to hang a bunch of people.
They deserve as much of a pass as a kidnapper of children who says he plans to build a hospital with the ransom.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
USA could have literally taken over the world with no one to oppose them.
So ... especially after the first oil shock - you could view US in a state of relative decline. With a short blip during the 90s when they were reaping the spoils of winning the cold war.
This is so far from true. One nation occupying the world in any meaningful way is completely unrealistic.
Are you implying 'well then worth it!'?
We have been warned by many about the military industrial complex, yet, it doesn't sink in.
Our current president was elected on promises of ending these wars and somehow he will go down in history as the champion of military occupation and perpetuating conflicts in places we don't belong.
Truth is that peace doesn't make money, it doesn't grease the wheels of industry, the difference is that where is the industry? It used to be that the US would at least benefit from the industry through employment and tax revenue, but what if the production is no longer in the US? Who benefits then? I can tell you with accuracy who doesn't ..
Not so sure about it. Peace and stability is the main driver for civilisation booms. Maybe sometime wars can shake the tree but storms do not help growing big fruits -- long sunny days do. Chinese civilisation is remarkable for its long periods of relative peace and steady wealth increase. That's also when culture develops.
War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing.
You mean "wasn't" ?
And WWI certainly drove innovation; I think this always manifests most in military facets, obviously and tends to cascade into commercial sectors more slowly. Not much time separated WWI and WWII and a great deal of it was mired in the largest modern economic depression.
I don't support any of this, but it's literally competing with a gun to your head.
Maybe, but the point is that Mongols, for some reason (maybe geography and weather?), did never stop being fighters. They never "settled down" to grow wealth, which is a very long process with many parameters (cities, knowledge stores, trustable and transmissible commercial bonds, etc.) So they are very good warriors, and have been very successful in their conquest, but compared to their Chinese neighbours (which are not the prototype of the aggressive people, to understate it a bit), they are just much smaller, and grew much less wealth.
The problem with war-driven progress is that it's incidental. In War you are focusing on the War Machine, on destroying as much as you can both in human lives and resources.
Obviously you are bound to make discoveries that will be useful in other fields later on as well.
But to me it sounds very wrong on a ethical basis to justify that what we have today in terms of tech is a direct by-product of war. Innovation/Science also occurs outside of the spectrum of war, and it is very reductive to say that War advances Science as a whole.
On top of that, let's not forget that the scientists and technologists involved in the War Machine could have spent their time and lives doing something else and we will never know what other courses innovation could have taken.
http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/interviews/lemaire.asp
"In my opinion, the great leap forward in medical knowledge, the birth of modern medicine, occurs somewhere in the period between the beginning of the Revolution and the end of the Empire."
I don't if or when this became obscure knowledge, but I don't even remember when I first learned it.
To be sure, Koch, the germ theory and understanding of sepcis came later, almost inexplicably.
In order to even have a theory about why there was a Great Depression in the first place is extremely difficult. IMO, WWII directly was caused by the Depression among other things. This being said, Pershing held that the end of WWI happened in a way that made another war inevitable in a generation, and this prediction was borne out.
The Mongols were advanced in ways and not in others. The Aztecs ( really, the Mexica ) were as well. The Aztecs come off as bloody.
At least for the Mongols, once a conquered place knelt, they were left alone ( outside of taxes ) and were now on a trade network unlike what had ever been seen, which generally raised standards of living.
For a blinding array of reasons, things ground to a halt in the Interwar period, leading to the Depression. WWII ended that... Our collective, international inability to manage monetary policy lead to something like 4% of humanity being put to the sword.
So who's bloody now?
Booms are strongly correlated with increases in trade.
It's interesting you mention that, as Smedley Butler was the alleger of the Business Plot -- what he claimed to be a planned coup d'etat on FDR by wealthy businessmen. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
It's very unlikely he would have gotten this prize as a U.S. senator not involved in presidential campaign.
I like to see that Nobel Prize as having been awarded to the American voter. Electing a black president in a country with such a racist past is a fantastic milestone.
The second term election of GWB was so surreal by European eyes that it seemed like some collective insanity had gripped large parts of American voters.
In response, when Obama was elected, there were election day parties many places in Europe. Some Americans celebrating always happens, of course, but this time you had Europeans going to parties to celebrate a US president.
The relief was the election of Obama brought was immense, and the Nobel prize is a reflection of just how deep felt it was in certain circles.
If it were me, I would advise refusal behind closed doors if they had gotten word ahead of time.
Happy to see someone else pointing this out. For someone who grew up in the 90s it's weird how conventional and pro establishment the mainstream and especially more educated mindset is today.
I think it's partly hidden because it's masked by the social liberalism. But ignore gay marriage and legal pot and this is the 1950s. Any serious and deep questioning of society or the power structure of the world is seen as either nutty or futile, whether it comes in the form of more educated criticism or its rougher more "punk" forms like conspiracy theory and counterculture. Today is like some bohemian version of the Eisenhower era.
There is a kind of goofy new age "alt" thing with GMO food scares and such but it really strikes me as not only niche but unserious and toothless. It's almost more a form of entertainment than a serious counterculture. It also strikes me as a distraction with people getting angry at paper tigers like GMO food or nonexistent things like "chemtrails" instead of real issues.
Edit: I also realize that this matches the tech cycle. The return of pro establishment thinking after 9/11 coincided with the end of the first PC era and the rebirth of the mainframe rebranded as "cloud." To what extent is cold sober engineering actually art, an expression of who we are at the time?
Beautifully put.
I think this was true, pre-Snowden. The Snowden revelations confirmed what a lot of conspiracy theorists had been saying for long time.
>Our current president was elected on promises of ending these wars and somehow he will go down in history as the champion of military occupation and perpetuating conflicts in places we don't belong.
Yes and no. 1st term promise: to end the war in Iraq which we have removed ourselves. He said he would escalate the war in Afghanistan. He kept all of this. 2nd term promise: remove ourselves from Afghanistan by EOY 2014 which didn't happen.
>Truth is that peace doesn't make money, it doesn't grease the wheels of industry, the difference is that where is the industry?
A better question is who's profiting and who is losing. As a working class American, I've paid out to subsidize these businesses/war (almost one in the same) while literally nothing has come back to me. No job building bombs, no oil money, zilch. So I don't care about the MIC or this (in every way) destructive industry.
I will start by saying that I hate war. And war is VERY anti-capitalist. The only time war makes countries money is when they pick on non-industrialized enemies. People have realized that war is very costly to trade and industrial elites outside the military-industrial complex. [0]
But... Can we really say that we can turn a blind eye to the world's most evil people? Perhaps we can say "Let Europe handle itself" in 1915, but can we really say that in 1941? Even if 1941 was caused by 1915, can't we admit that there are some things worth fighting over?
This isn't to defend the current war-mongers running for President. It's just to say that a 0 wars policy doesn't seem to stand up to reality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree
The best approach should be what we've always known: be very reluctant, and only go to war when to do nothing means to allow the oppression or death of innocents. But we've known this for centuries, and we still keep messing up. We probably get it wrong more than we get it right. That's depressing. I'm not sure if I had a point anymore.
America in WWII might have been better served by simply being the Arsenal of Democracy and selling war materiel. I'd be hard pressed to say that Europe would have been better off. But this is just one of those things about nation-states that we live with. And please realize that Hollywood was overtly pressed into service to sell the War to the American people.
I'm not advocating isolationism. but Americans at the time were highly isolationist.
Is what's behind all this talk the basic Bismarckian welfare-warfare State concept? It's more subtle than that, IMO.
Where did you get that idea?
>war is a matter not so much of arms as of money
-Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
I might add for clarification: war is almost never profitable for the common people but is highly profitable for those in power.
>Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
-James Madison
The Athenians won.
It's possible for certain kinds of wars of conquest to leave improved trade networks in their wake - the Mongol Conquest worked this way - but the currency of violence is blood, not treasure. History is full of examples of ruinous wars. It has very few that worked out ... financially even for the victors.
As a US war for profit, the Gulf War and the Iraq War are better examples. They were about oil, access to oil, control over oil, and, in the case of the Iraq War, lucrative deals for Cheney's business friends. (Obviously they didn't make any money for the US tax payer, nor for the people in Iraq.)
It should be abundantly obvious by now that if the intent of the Iraq War was control over oil fields, then those oil fields are now under the control of ISIS. The rationale for the Iraq War was that the regime in Iraq posed an intolerable threat, based in Neocon readings of history.
"Cheney's business friends" presumably include Halliburton, which had trouble with and has since divested of the Brown-Root portion of Halliburton that was directly involved.
That design came from white papers filed by Neocon wonks, and nearly nowhere else. It's mostly a return to Dulles Bothers style foreign policy. That is strongly correlated with a sort of imperialism but the imperialism isn't inherent to the mentality. The "Frontline" "Rise of the Vulcans" explains this in great detail.
The 1991-ish Gulf War was on invitation from the royal family of Kuwait to reestablish that equilibrium.
There has been a time in which oil was an element in a political strategy that may also include war - the boycott of Japan after the Rape of Nanking is an example - but that really isn't done any more. The spot markets make it a lot less of a thing. There were, of course, sanctions on Iran but they leaked. See also Babak Zanjani.
Is that true? I think in many case war helps a small group of capitalist people to get richer. Especially the ones that know the war is coming.
I'd like to twist your statement: war is VERY anti free-market.
But then I think free-market is something that capitalists are much in favor of when it helps them, and much against when it limits them.
Note: I understand capitalists in the Marxist sense of the work, they do not need to labor (sell work-hours for money) as they can make money with their money.
Does former Yugoslavia count as non industrialized? Because lots of money were made selling heavy machinery to the different parties for the war effort.
Maybe you're making a different point to this but the United States and its corporations came out of WWI and WWII (wars against an industrialized enemy) far richer and more powerful than before WWI and WWII, largely at the expense of Britain/the British Empire.
The USA essentially replacing Britain as the world's economic superpower after WWI and military/imperialist superpower after WWII.
> But... Can we really say that we can turn a blind eye to the world's most evil people? Perhaps we can say "Let Europe handle itself" in 1915, but can we really say that in 1941? Even if 1941 was caused by 1915, can't we admit that there are some things worth fighting over?
WWI started in 1914, not 1915 and WWII started in 1939 (or 1937, if you want to take it from the Japanese invasion of China), not 1941.
1941 (Pearl Harbor) was not caused by 1915 (WWI), it was caused by 1893 and the invasion, overthrow and annexation of Hawaii that led the military of the US empire to be there in the first place.
"Let Europe handle itself" is a simplification of what the United States was thinking and doing before being forced kicking and screaming into finally doing the right thing by Japan and Germany - even after Pearl Harbor, the USA still did not declare war on Hitler.
I doubt it's taught in American schools, but it's no secret that American companies (ie, capitalists) were supporting, supplying and working with the Nazis even after the start of WWII.
People in US do seem to be taught that lots of charity was doled out to Britain. In fact Britain (and its Empire countries), standing alone against the biggest threat to democracy in history, was forced to hand over its gold reserves, its advanced high technology, and even territory to the US, in return for American help.
Not loans at this point in time, of course, because the US believed Britain would fall to Hitler (just as the US had sat back and watched other democracies fall) and therefore would not be in any position to pay the US back.
You're right that some things are worth fighting over, and you're right that WWII is an example of a justified war. It's just a pity that the United States, for all the effort it put in when it finally joined (when Germany's defeat was already a foregone conclusion due to Barbarossa), acted before, during and after WWII with complete self-interest.
Germany's defeat was hardly a foregone conclusion in December 1941. Sure, in hindsight it now appears that way. But all the history books indicate that things looked mighty different at the time.
Caused? No.
It wouldn't have happened if the US didn't own Hawaii in 1941, but the US takeover of Hawaii was not the causus belli for Pearl Harbor.
Which is what I said, except I put it more honestly: it would not have happened had the US not invaded, overthrown and annexed Hawaii. The US 'owned' Hawaii the same way Hitler 'owned' the Sudetenland.
The point being the roots (ie, cause) of Pearl Harbor stretch back to 19th century US imperialism, throwing its weight around, and generally being in places it shouldn't have been.
> but the US takeover of Hawaii was not the causus belli for Pearl Harbor.
I didn't say it was a casus belli (no U), did I?
To see the difference, do a thought experiment. The US takes Hawaii in 1893, but does not end the sale of oil, rubber, metal, and everything else militarily useful to Japan in 1937. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Probably not, because the US is not signaling opposition to Japan's invasion of China.
On the other hand, say the US doesn't "invade, overthrow, and annex" Hawaii. It merely negotiates for a naval base. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Yes.
I said "caused" because I was copying the statement and style of the previous poster. His point (I believe) alluded to the commonly held belief that the roots of WWII lay in WWI; my point, since he used 1941, was that the roots of Pearl Harbor lay closer to home.
> To see the difference, do a thought experiment. The US takes Hawaii in 1893, but does not end the sale of oil, rubber, metal, and everything else militarily useful to Japan in 1937. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Probably not, because the US is not signaling opposition to Japan's invasion of China.
Okay, I say in this fictional version of history that it still does happen, because the US is still in places it should not be, due to its late 19th century imperialism, and still poses a military threat to Japanese ambitions in the region.
> On the other hand, say the US doesn't "invade, overthrow, and annex" Hawaii. It merely negotiates for a naval base. Does Pearl Harbor still happen? Yes.
Why does it still happen? If the US is acting peacefully in this imaginary situation, why can't Japan?
Nobody is saying otherwise. Perhaps you have forgotten again how and why the US fleet got there in the first place: violent American imperialism and expansionism in the late 19th century. It's fairly pointless to imagine situations where that didn't happen, when it did.
> So if Hawaii were independent but the US had a fleet base there, no, Japan wasn't going to act peacefully in that imaginary situation - not unless you're postulating an actually peaceful Japan, one that isn't attacking China and the Dutch East Indies.
Why not? You're postulating a mythological United States capable of negotiating peacefully with Hawaii (and presumably the Philippines, and Guam, and Cuba, and Puerto Rico?). If such a US ever existed, why would it be impossible for it to also come to a peaceful understanding with Japan?
I mean, what are we supposed to be doing here, simply coming up with just the right amount of convenient historical changes to prove your point?
After the heavy propaganda campaigns to get Americans to accept WWII, that's no longer been the case but there is cognitive dissonance. The leadership does not always have conveniently available justification.
There were Congressional hearing on Vietnam through the years, and various CSPAN channels run them. It's worth learning the language from there.
Before WWI many believed the so called general war would never occur because it would be so terrible for business, no gain could offset the loss. War still happened.
The author of this book was approached by George W Bush's grandfather and some other very rich men, to be the leader of the U.S. after their fascist coup overthrew the current president. He said no, and blew the whistle, a government committe investigated and found the claims plausible and then nothing happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
(edit: I see I'm a bit late with this info as it's been linked twice already, still fascinating stuff, and very plausible given the country was certainly exploiting other countries militarily, and still exploiting its own minorities at home with little moral compunction, so it's not exactly a big step).
Not just the government. It is a power complex which has clearly subverted the "government". Huxley/Herbert did warn us, and imo this conflict was/is inevitable.
I guess conspiracy theorist are today hippies.
We enter the conflicts under whatever pretext is popularized in the media, but the real reason is to fuel warfare R&D efforts, grow surveillance infrastructure, and collect data that reflects situations our military leaders forecast to be important.
Large contracting firms profit. Soldiers lose time, often also money, often their mental health and family relationships, and sometimes their lives. Taxpayers lose money. Foreign civilians lose their lives. Few benefits are ever given to soldiers or foreigners, if they are even paid lip service with promises of benefits at all.
It's basically a string of smaller scale proxy wars to fuel tech, surveillance, and population control between larger, "actual" wars.
I fear we are already past a point where democratic process could stop it. I think by now it would require almost an actual revolt from U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and that it would be bloody, and that part of the military engineering being studied is exactly how much civilians will tolerate before being pushed to the point of revolt.
As long as you can watch Netflix on your iPad and put it out of your mind, then while it might ruffle your feathers, you won't actually take action that could jeopardize your creature comforts. Even things like Occupy Wall Street seem like they are more data collection opportunities than anything else. "OK, so they will protest via X, Y, and Z, but too few of them can be pushed to do A, B, or C for us to care."
It's a very depressing feeling. In the meantime, just like everyone else, I have to worry about money, family, life goals, comforts, health, and all my biases push me to ignore the military industrial conflict, because already giving it maybe 1/100th of my overall bandwidth is exceedingly depressing. Something close to 40% of the country believes in young earth creationism. Open up to a highly-visited YouTube video and scroll down to the comments and behold the inanity of how we use our time and what our priorities are.
How could enough people possibly coordinate beliefs and actions around humanity-affirming rebukes of the military industrial complex? Of course they won't, so then I guess I'd better put my brain towards how to live in a world where they won't, which is too depressing to think about... and the cycle continues.
I'm sure it has been articulated even earlier than the early 1900s. It's just goes on and on.
And my "understanding" of how gravity works is that the Earth is carried around the Sun by a giant invisible rottweiler dog. If I can't back it up, though, I'm not going to get my Rottweiler Theory through peer review. What do you back up your "understanding" with?
My understanding differs though. My understanding is that the commenters understanding comes from finding it difficult to believe human beings, especially people seemingly smart enough to reach the top, could be that stupid. If they couldn't be that stupid or misguided, then they must have had some ulterior motive.
I go with the 'yeah, the neocons really were that dumb.'
It's not fruitful to dump some 5000 word diatribe about it though. I'm not interested in convincing anyone about it ... and anyone who doubts it or feels I couldn't produce a compelling argument if I was pressed to should absolutely feel free to disagree and I am not at all endorsing my fleeting comments as justification.
Clearly you're not allowed to share your views without being ridiculed unless you cite extensive sources and make some flow charts or something.
[/sarcasm]
I enjoyed reading your insight so thanks for sharing that.
13thLetter: Do you think it's possible to tell someone to elaborate on why they believe something without being an asshole. I mean, if you ask nicely then he could've written something interesting about his experiences. If you act like a passive aggressive douche then you'll just get people defensive and they won't write anything. The whole community loses.
Besides, I think it's pretty pretentious to hold someone's views shared at a messaging forum to uphold to the same standard that they would need to get into a peer-reviewed journal disputing gravity. Do you even THINK before you write?
On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.
I don't know what you expect me to say to your second paragraph though. The guy making those "accusations" has already left the conversation, and I don't really feel like having this discussion with you either.
Anyway, good luck getting to the bottom of this!
Gravity is much more of a hard science than the psychological and economic motivations behind war. We're not peering into a sandbox of ants from some omniscient above-view. We're obvserving the actions and reactions of people, which is much more messy.
This is partly why I wish for Trump to get the top job. The amount of window dressing in society will come down drastically as the clown makes misjudgements at every turn and contradicts himself by the hour.
American politics goes from yin to yang every 8 years because that's was people expect. The media polarizes every thing. Your average person laps it up. "Those damn conservatives/liberals are ruining everything. How can they be so stupid/naive?". We must make America great. We must make America whole. :-P
People believe that it is their duty to vote: we must keep the democrats/republicans out of office! Or you could waste your vote on someone who can't win. As a measure of protest, perhaps. Or maybe if they did win once... then you would have 3 parties. Then 2 would gang up on 1. Or the third will split the vote.
If you wish to stop war, don't get sidetracked on people. That's how you will be defeated, because it's easy to swap people around like a game of 3 card monty. Concentrate on the issue, not on people, parties or politics. Don't simply cast a vote and say, "Well, I tried". That's how you lose.
I left the US some years ago and I am strongly considering renouncing my US citizenship. That I would have to pay to do so, is one of the few things stopping me. It won't happen, but if Obama and Bush are imprisoned for murder, among other crimes, I would think about going back.
Don't ask.
It basically said that torture was ok, and that your own citizens / any civilians can be considered your ennemies and treated as such. Abou grahib, Condor operation (chili, argentina...) for getting rid of "commies" in south america used nice french para technics.
Like pushing opponents in the ocean from an helicopter far from the coast so that body might not be discovered recognizable. Sleep depravation, gégéne, waterboarding, having muslim naked and possibly being ordered by woman ... A lot of actual technics used in Guantanamo.
Hey, don't look at me this way. I do not support this. At the opposite of USA, war stopped because soldiers revolted against these "successful" technic. And their was a strong opposition between the "conscripted" and the engaged soldiers.
Call french cowards. At least they did oppose their own government and army and accepted (ok, De gaulle took the liberty to choose) to lose war rather than to win with torture. Which triggered another civil war in the metropole between the tenants of keeping colonies and the others not really for tortures. And of course, CIA did its best to put even more mess in the process. (Gladio operation).
Maybe looking like cowards is not the worse that can happen to a nation and as you see french people are still alive.
Maybe they don't look like a great nation, but loosing on the moral battle has proven to be a great way to destroy your own civilization.
At least that is the topic of the peloponesian wars that is a mandatory lecture for westpoint cadets.
Guess, we did not read the same book.
-Friederich Nietzsche
Don't let yourself get depressed, that's one of the worst things you could do in such a situation which calls for change. I've been there and it helps no one to feel sorry for yourself all the time.
Realize that although we are poised technologically to destroy everything, the world is in fact the most peaceful it has been in a long time.
Also, stop reading so much into YouTube comments, they are not representative of the world at large. I suspect many of the inflammatory provocative comments on there are astroturf anyway.
>Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
-Lao Tzu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
I can hear the collective shouts of every Marine begging to differ. Two of the most recognized names in Marine Corps history are MajGen Smedley Butler and SgtMaj "Dan" Daly. Among other things, they are 2 of 19 men in US military history and the only two Marines to receive two Medals of Honor.
It seems to me that the progressives main thing is to tell and enforce how others should live and behave, that is the core of the left, the other ideas are just branches. Evidence is the congress votes in USA by Left to start wars and votes by Taxed Enough Already (TEA) to defund the wars.
If you are anti war, I invite you to check out the Right, Libertarian POV.
Usually, countries where the right is in power (take the US for example) have a terrible living for their poorest population.
And this is not something you want because the guy having the shitty min wage job might tomorrow be you, one of your kids, your best friend, or someone in your family.
-- "The Curse of Chalion", by Lois McMaster Bujold
Some aspects of it's stance, like home territory limited military presence and exclusive zones of interest are simply obsolete in an era of ICBMs and satellites.
For some context and general description of sentiment in the 30s:
https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/power-of-isolationists-be...
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/american-isol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nye_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Acts_of_1930s
http://www.amazon.com/We-Who-Dared-Say-War/dp/1568583850
It was written by a leftist and libertarian/paleoconservative working together, so you will likely find something you love and something you hate in it, as with all good books.
I very much regret my early support for the Iraq war.
A couple notes on the war drum:
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force [0] targeting the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks has been invoked to deploy US armed forces to Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. [1][2]
A new proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force [3] targeting ISIS, "its associated forces," and "any successor organizations" is arguably more open-ended.
The author of the proposal, Lindsey Graham (Senior Senator from South Carolina), seeks to grant the next president "the ability to go after ISIS without limitation to geography, time and means." [4]
[0]: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-107sjres23enr/html/BILLS...
[1]: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/aumf-071013.pdf
[2]: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43760.pdf
[3]: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/sjres26/text
[4]: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/congr...
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/allwarsarebankerwa...
> Although pre-war Germany had a private central bank, it was heavily restricted and inflation kept to reasonable levels... So, in the media of the day, Germany was portrayed as the prime opponent of World War One
The invasion of Russia, Belgium and France might have had something to do with it as well.
> as early as 1933 they started to organize a global boycott against Germany to strangle this upstart ruler who thought he could break free of private central bankers [poster of "Judea Declares war on Germany" headline]
Come on HN, we're better than this sort of nutjobbery.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garet_Garrett
It also gladens my heart just to see my favorite Marine, Smedley Butler, get some "air time". It does dissapoint me that so many in the comments are making escuses for war as a profit or r&d center, or for war crimes prosecutions of what are essentially pawns on a grander chessboard.
In the Marine Corps, a lot of people have a hardon for Chesty Puller, but the phrase I used to use is "If you like Chest more than Smedley you do the country and the Corps a disservice." Why? Because not only did Smedley Butler wake up and realize the true nature of the part he played, but he spoke out against it, and beyond that, something I havent seen mentioned yet but something I think is of the utmost importance is his thwarting of the business plot. His convressional hearing testimony is vital to understanding the modern racket of war, and now we have the unredacted version, (though still not his full testimony, because it was heavily edited before even entering the record). If you havent read the unredacted testimony, I highly suggest it.
All that being said, war indeed is a racket, and it continues to be. The WFA (waste fraud and abuse) I saw in Iraq by contractors is barely the icing on the racket cake. There is a reason that something like the richest three counties in the US are in Virginia. The true racket though, is much larger than the contractor world, and primarily involves banking and resource oriented interests.
I spent a long time voraciously reading anything I thought could help me understand the bigger geostrategic/political chessboard, and my primary conclusion about the wars were that resource wars are on the horizon, and the wars were destabilizing measures designed to contain China and Russia by prevention of resource pipelines being built to them. Take a look at the maps of resources and their pipelines...
The other factor is that the traditional nation state actor threat model is being upended by texhnology, to the point that the military industrial congressional complex isadjusting very quickly.
My primary problem with this is how much the people of the US have been lied to and misled. If the United States has some interest in destabilizing an area, I would prefer that this just be said and the case be made outright, instead of sending young dumb warriors like myself to die for causes they dont understand and are lied to about. You want to know where I feel like the primary failure lies at? Every O-5 and above officer who just went along with it and didnt pushback against the Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield bunch of Chicago school Straussian neocons backed by Kissinger and Brezenski. When you cant tell me what my fucking objective is, how can I be expected to accomplish it?
In truth, where we are headed currently is a return to the tripolar world, but in this move, I think we will never fully understand the almost complete subversion of our government that has happened at the behest of the globalists. Smedley Butler caught a glimpse of the beast and had the courage to fight against it openly. He will continue to be my favorite Marine until I die.
Oh, and for any of you touting the economic benefits of war, I hope you never are on the ground on either side when that benefit is being extracted by blood and corruption...