To the beating of the drums....
Spinbrett
Posts: 251
As long as man has emotions such as love, anger etc. There will always be war.
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
Well I have quite strong emotions such as love and anger etc, but I have absolutely no desire to go to war and can think of very few instances where I would.
So I don't think it's the emotions that are the problem. Plenty of people live, love, rage and hate but never become physically violent.
It's the power hungry, money grubbing jerks that feed on people's emotions that you have to worry about.
*~You're IT Bert!~*
Hold on to the thread
The currents will shift
I don't know if you can equate Love with War. War is usually a product of Greed, Hatred, Intolerance, Indifference... but, Love? And War is always a decision of the leaders, not the populous. It has alway been a matter of old men sending young men out to kill the young men of other old men.
Hail, Hail!!!
hmmm...interesting
Except to say that there aren't any...of course.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
Nah, the weapons are just getting bigger and nastier and in less hands, thus stifling some (but not all) smaller skirmishes.
The majority of human beings denounce violence as a means to solving problems more and more. Each new generation is finding war and it's death tolls less and less tolerable as the years go by. Human traits such as hate, greed, violence, contempt used to be rationalized and even encouraged throughout our past. They are no longer acceptable by the majority. You would have to deny history to say this isn't happening.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
And hang on, here. What is this? What was The Iliad but the ultimate anti-war statement? Anything else is just margarine. Pretty strong words about a war that can't even be proved by archaeology, let alone modern day statistics!
You'll have to forgive me but I read the Iliad in 10th grade world history and it's a bit hazy to me nowadays.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
So we are all going out and living our lives based on the x-box? Sure, violence is all over media but that doesn't mean we mimic what we see there in our day to day lives. It's ridiculous to think that because a group of people watched a movie that included murderous acts that any of those same people will go out and murder anyone because of it. If anything, perhaps these 'virtual' type acts of violence help to get primal urges out of our system. Just a thought. And sure, some people will copy media and recreate things they've seen but I'm talking majority here.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
You read the greatest poem ever written, all twenty four books of it, in the context of some pre-University course, and it's all hazy to you now?
I'm sorry. I was in high school, afterall...you know the deal. Perhaps I would appreciate it more now with the little bit of maturity I've gained over the years.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
I live 5 mins from the projects where I live now and I take walks through there often. There's really not much to be frightened of. There is the occasional problem but it's not like it's boyz n tha hood or something. And I've walked around downtown Atlanta plenty of times, where many say it's so bad, and didn't see what all the fuss was about. Anyways, I'm not saying violence doesn't exist in today's culture...far from it. I'm saying it's not emphasized as an acceptable way to live and justified as it was in generations past.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
really great answer... i am REALLY REALLY great
I'm going to go out on a limb and say.............
Love rarely (if ever ) creates/wars.
Greed, selfishness, self-righteousness, hunger for power and control are what typically/traditionally creates wars. Although, love and anger in response to the former; will and has at times led to more violence/revenge.
Or of course, the 'ole "you stole my wife/lover from me, so now you shall pay". Which is pretty much the only circumstance I can think of where love will create a war.
Emotion are not the problem. Emotions are what make life worth living. If you're not feeling anything, you're not living life.
It's certain individuals on this planet who don't understand the concept of mentally and intellectually coming to terms, getting a grip and controlling their actions; after emotions are stimulated. Keeping their emotions in proper perspective, during dificult, stressful and strenuous times.
i am not really a fan of the whole short sighted, thats the way it has been and thats the way it will be, type of thinking and attitude towards life and the world
call me crazy
and on a further note... since war will always be... that somehow justifies it or excuses it? please tell me this is your justification for "staying the course" :rolleyes:
Yeah, if you paid attention to about 0.03 seconds of a quantum physics class, skipped the Marxist lecture about the naturalisation of ideology then slept through the anti-humanist nihilist's deconstructionist coffee break, but made the piss up at the teleological society dance. In other words, if you've had less than one day's college ed.
Um, not really. there are more wars going on right now than in any other time in history. Right now in Africa, there are roughly 40 wars that are either tribal or full on civil wars. Several of which on the western coast of the continent have recorded acts of cannibalism. IT'S EVOLUTION BABY!!!!
I never claimed all societies were at the same point on the evolutionary scale. That would be ridiculous given the extremely different variables each society has experienced, especially in the areas of technology and communication. Just because there exists differing rates of evolutionary progress does not negate the reality of 'change' human beings are always going through. I'm talking about how the majority of civilized societies reject oppression, slavery, racism, violence, corruption and greed. These are traits we de-emphasize in modern culture in contrast to the past when these traits were a part of everyday life...that's just the way things were. Nowadays these human traits are still alive and well, of course, however these traits are not considered 'acceptable' by society anymore so we work towards social 'progress'. This is how we have ended many old paradigms such as slavery, oppression against women, segregation, torture and we are now as a society starting to reject war...our tolerance for it has dwindled. Movements are created which in turn spread information to the masses through various communication efforts. Now we are in the Age of Information and Communication so I'm thinking this human progress will only amplify. This is all part of social progress due to evolutionary changes. And again, I'm not saying the undesirable human traits no longer exist...I'm saying they are no longer acceptable in our society. Do you deny the progress civilization has made? Are we still primitive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_progress
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
so the more educated you are, the more justification for war you will come to realize?
i disagree... the more educated i become, the less justifications i see for war and violence... but thats just me
Europeans Are From Venus
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The New York Times | Book Review
Sunday 10 February 2008
"Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe" by James J. Sheehan. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
At the time of the World Cup the summer before last, there was a nice cartoon in the papers by Oliphant, with two panels. One showed "Soccer as seen by Americans," a group of dainty chaps prancing lightly across the grass with purses dangling from their limp wrists, and the other, "American football as seen by Europeans," a heap of brutally moronic humanoids using severed limbs to batter each others' brains out.
Yes, that sums up this reciprocal perception rather well - and it might have hinted at a contrast going beyond sports. The delicate midfield artists of Barcelona and Arsenal are vegetarian Venusians, shall we say? While the ferocious Giants and Patriots linebackers could be called Martian carnivores. The very games look like a metaphor for the gulf, growing between the two continents since World War II, that was the subject of Robert Kagan's "Of Paradise and Power" in which he denounced sybaritic, pacifistic Europe on behalf of "Americans from Mars."
As James J. Sheehan neatly observes in "Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?" Kagan's philippic was published on Feb. 5, 2003, just 10 days before Europe saw the largest political demonstration in its history. More than half a million marched in Berlin to protest the imminent Iraq war, with other huge rallies in Rome, Barcelona and London (prompting Tony Blair's bizarre comparison of the number of demonstrators with the number of Saddam Hussein's victims). This outpouring of popular feeling against war no doubt confirmed Kagan in his view that those "Europeans from Venus" are now incapable of the use of military force that still comes naturally to Americans, and that it was "time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world."
However that may be, it's a surely astonishing fact that no European war has been fought for more than 60 years, at least outside the ruins of Yugoslavia. Western Europe has become politically and socially demilitarized to a degree once unimaginable; after so many centuries of bloody conflict, Europeans don't want to study war no more. In his scintillating tour d'horizon - and de force - Sheehan suggests that such obsolescence of war is specifically "the product of Europe's distinctive history in the 20th century," and he argues that it has created a new kind of European state along with "a dramatically new international system within Europe."
There had been an earlier age of peace. The half-century following Waterloo was notably pacific after the violence from which it had emerged, and 1871 to 1914 saw the longest period until now without any war at all between larger European powers. There was besides a vigorous peace movement. Sheehan describes the vogue for such books as Bertha von Suttner's "Lay Down Your Arms," Ivan Bloch's "Future of War," which inspired the 1899 Hague peace conference, and Norman Angell's "Great Illusion." So it was that "at the beginning of the 20th century, as at the beginning of the 21st, a relatively peaceful Europe lived in a dangerously violent world."
And yet even then there were powerful contrary forces plainly visible. In that age of ever more strident nationalism, chauvinists saw the army - and war - as the crucible forging national unity. Great powers displayed their greatness with mass conscript armies, uniforms were seen everywhere, and when a Bulgarian general said in 1910 that "we have become the most militaristic state in the world" it wasn't a lament but a boast (not to say one of the many fascinating quotations with which Sheehan's book is studded). An unmistakable mood was bored with the very achievements of consensual government and material improvement, while "the revolt of the masses" itself had military implications, as some saw: well before 1914 Churchill said with chilling prescience that democracy was more vindictive than oligarchy, and "the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings."
In the end the Party of Peace did win, but only after the catastrophe between 1914 and 1945, with bloodshed surpassing anything ever seen and an utterly unparalleled murder of innocents; a regression that remains an inexplicable moral mystery. In those years one might say that the best lacked all conviction and the worst were full of passionate intensity: even after the carnage of the trenches, an important minority - Russian Communists as well as Italian Fascists - still believed in "the regenerating value of violence," and this was brilliantly exploited by Hitler. When the next war came it was waged just as he demanded, "with the greatest brutality and without mercy."
Although Sheehan's title alludes to Europe since 1945, almost two-thirds of his narrative deals with the years up to then - but in a way those earlier years answer the question he poses. By the second half of the 20th century, having given a most vivid demonstration of Walter Benjamin's saying that civilization and barbarism are far from incompatible, Europe was exhausted and ashamed. For all the exigencies of the cold war, there was an overwhelming desire never again to see real war, between France and Germany or among their neighbors.
The trente glorieuses after VE-Day saw three decades of astonishing economic growth, which coincided with another most remarkable change: "With or without a fight, Europeans abandoned their empires." This proved pure benefit for Europe, if not for the former colonies, and its further significance was that, as Sheehan says in a typically perceptive phrase, the brute force with which empire had been won and held now seemed anachronistic, "part of a vanished world in which the ability to wage war had been centrally important to what it meant to be a state."
>From the 1970s the economy stalled while Europe faced numerous social problems. And yet as the cold war ran down the clock, it became gradually clearer that liberal democracy and a market economy mitigated by welfare had won a complete political victory over "actually existing socialism." At the same time Europe was fully "civilianized": conscription was abandoned, armies themselves assimilated the values of civilian society and, as the great English military historian Michael Howard has put it, "death was no longer seen as being part of the social contract."
But life is full of surprises. Sheehan's book is sprinkled with confident but foolish predictions, like H. N. Brailsford averring in the early summer of 1914 that "there will be no more wars among the six great powers," or The Economist in September of that year dilating on "the economic and financial impossibility of carrying out hostilities many more months on the present scale."Just over 70 years later, as cocksure as ever and as wrong, that magazine asserted in 1985 "that nothing much will have changed by the year 2025." Shortly after those words were published, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire imploded and savage violence consumed the Balkans, whence so many of Europe's woes had long stemmed.
Here Sheehan is most sagacious. He sees that the game was up for the Soviet regime the moment Gorbachev disavowed "force and the threat of force," and he gets the break-up of Yugoslavia right. In late 1991, at the insistence of the German government (itself egged on, one might add, by Serb-bashing right-wing columnists in papers like The Frankfurter Allgemeine), the European Union recognized the sovereignty of Slovenia and Croatia, and then Bosnia, crucially and disastrously before the nationality questions in those territories had been resolved. This encouraged a competitive round of territorial acquisition and ethnic expulsion and "intensified the predatory war being fought by Serbs and Croatians against Bosnia."
It was of course ludicrous as well as hubristic for Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, to say at this juncture that "the hour of Europe has dawned," but trans-Atlantic denunciations of European weakness were also misplaced. When the tub-thumpers of Capitol Hill and the op-ed pages were asked 15 years ago what kind of military intervention in the Balkans they had in mind, it turned out to mean American air cover while the Western Europeans provided the P.B.I., as the British Army used to say, the poor bloody infantry, a division of labor that had little appeal in Europe.
What sense does "Mars and Venus" have in the light of the past century, and the price paid by different countries? In 1914-18, 1.3 million Frenchmen (those cheese-eating surrender monkeys) were killed defending their country, which is to say more than twice as many as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war from 1776 until today. There has been much anguish about American casualties in Iraq, where last year was the worst since 2003, with all of 901 deaths. Reading that, the European may reflect silently on the dates Aug. 22, 1914, when 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a day, or July 1, 1916, when 20,000 British troops died.
It isn't necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene - "Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service" - to see clearly that the United States isn't a warlike country at all. In many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.
And is the civilianization of Europe such a bad thing? Although there has been much grumbling about the Bundeswehr's inadequate contribution in Afghanistan, some of us cannot see it as an occasion for pure regret if the Germans have changed character so drastically. In World War II, the Wehrmacht was unquestionably the best army, man for man and unit for unit, not least against the less ferocious "citizens in uniform" of the British and American Armies. Is that really a cause for British or American shame? When German rearmament began in the 1950s, at American urging, Gustav Heinemann resigned as Adenauer's interior minister, with the words, "God took arms out of our hands twice; we must not take hold of them a third time." Was he so wrong?
In a bravura final chapter Sheehan explains "Why Europe Will Not Become a Superpower." As he recognizes, the European Union is already a superstate economically, but its failure to develop a common foreign and defense policy will continue to disappoint some enthusiasts. Disingenuous and ignorant at once, Blair once said that no one had ever envisaged a United States of Europe. In fact that very phrase has been current since the mid-19th century. But it was always a false analogy, illustrating Johnson's saying that life's follies stem from the attempt to emulate that which we do not resemble: the European Union no more resembles the American Union than the Soviet Union, and why should it?
It is not complacent to say that "the European idea" has in many ways been a heartening success, even if it never achieved all that its early proponents hoped. Europeans may have chosen butter instead of guns, and Europe as a whole may even be what Churchill said he hoped to see Germany become after 1945 - fat but impotent. And yet, while the continents are certainly drifting apart in some ways (secular Europe looks on with bewilderment at the contest between preacher-men in this presidential campaign), Europeans aren't quite the decadent lotus-eaters that some Americans claim.
One can talk about European soft power against American hard power, but the point is made better by Sheehan in the peroration to this excellent book. The birth of the Bolshevik regime - and then of Fascist and National Socialist regimes - was a direct consequence of the "intense violence" then poisoning Europe. The astonishingly peaceful collapse of Communism rather more than 70 years later reflected in turn "the decline of violence that, by the 1980s, had transformed international and domestic politics throughout Europe": a change for the better if ever there was one. To put it another way, soccer is not only England's and Europe's gift to all mankind. It really is a better game.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Wheatcroft-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin