81–90 of 265 posts
It looks like the closer you are to a thread, the most willing are you to fight. Being close to Russian is a good indicator on how much you are willing to go to war. So I agree with other comments, probably people that feels threatened read the question as "I'm willing to protect my country from an outside attacker". While people in "safer" places read it as "I'm willing to go to war with another country for some str…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I have a lot of experience of soldiers and junior officers competing to get posted into units scheduled to deploy on operations. In the Army there are three types of people: psychopaths, brainwashed patriots, and scared kids. You're describing the first two, and the second one will become the third as soon as bullets start flying.
I just can't relate that to the people I know in the military at all. Most people are skilled professionals who are keen to do the best job they can in what are almost always complex situations.
I imagine you're talking about Navy/Airforce? They tend to be normal intelligent folks for sure. Line units in the Army are a completely different world.
I think a strong pattern here is: the more cultural/social homogeneity the more willingness to fight a war for your country. See Italy, Spain, Belgium for instance: people from different area of those countries really feel belonging to different cultures. Contrari to the Nordic & Easter European ones. In Germany is more of a historical thing instead.
You've touched on one theory of why European governments are seemingly so in favour of mass immigration; a people with no common identity are much less willing to go to war for it. The theory goes that this is favourable for the wealthy euros in power because it lets them hold on to their wealth.
But I don't think there's much of a correlation. People forget that migration was much easier administratively before WW1. Austria-Hungary was a multicultural state with a dozen languages whose residents could live anywhere within the borders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary#/media/File:Au...
Similarly the British Empire had free movement of people within it.
It would be interesting to ask: Are you willing to fight a war to defend European countries against an outside threat, such as Russia.
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Would you be willing to be part of a pre-emptive attack against a much more prosperous neighbouring country with empire-building aspirations? How about a pre-emptive attack against a country where populist polls show overwhelming support for invading your country, even if its current administration is against the idea? How about joining in to defend one neighbour against another, aggressor neighbour—one which you hav…
Asking the first three questions of a German is some serious WW2 history trolling. You forgot one: would you join in a war to protect people of your ethno-linguistic background who live in a country who are (you are told) under threat as second-class citizens? I believe that was the stated reason for invading Czechslovakia.
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I just can't relate that to the people I know in the military at all. Most people are skilled professionals who are keen to do the best job they can in what are almost always complex situations.
>I just can't relate that to the people I know in the military at all. Most people are skilled professionals who are keen to do the best job they can in what are almost always complex situations. I imagine you're talking about Navy/Airforce? They tend to be normal intelligent folks for sure. Line units in the Army are a completely different world.
I think you're working off ancient stereotypes. Modern land warfare is highly technical and extremely mentally and physically demanding. A modern professional army doesn't have any room for psychopaths, brainwashed people, or scared kids.
Look at all the effort the military goes into in combating 'brainwashing' - mission command and encouraging people to use as much initiative as possible.
It looks like the closer you are to a thread, the most willing are you to fight. Being close to Russian is a good indicator on how much you are willing to go to war. So I agree with other comments, probably people that feels threatened read the question as "I'm willing to protect my country from an outside attacker". While people in "safer" places read it as "I'm willing to go to war with another country for some str…
Japan with 11% is really amazing, and yet it's near real threats with China and North Korea.
It would seem, countries who remember what war is actually like, would rather not fight; that would explain the results of Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the UK. The only exception is Russia, who suffered immensely during WW2 and yet would apparently fight again?
Or does it have something to do with age?
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> Russia suffered by far the most of any countries on the Western front, I do not know, Germany had more displaced people => after Between 1944 and 1948 about 31 million people, were permanently or temporarily moved from Central and Eastern Europe. The newly created UN even decided that a criteria for "migrant/displaced" person would exclude German people from the Poland/Hungary/etc... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
In terms of loss of civilians and military personnel though, it does not compare: the Soviet Union accounted for more than 40% of all WW2 deaths (both civilian and military) worldwide - including deaths on the Pacific front. The Soviet Union lost a total of 26.6 million people, or 13.8% of their 1939 population. Germany suffered tremendously as well of course, with 5.7 million dead, or 8.2% of their 1939 population […
My point was about the countries as a whole, including civilians and by including the displaced people. And I did include them because you pointed at the amputation of territories, which is something that happened nearly 70 years after the WWII, so I felt I could talk about what happened in the ten years after the WWII.
You know this point about displaced people strikes me because I am French:
I did work with (old) Germans and sometimes I felt some bitterness, including an occasion where one guy in an hotel told me of bombardments on Heidelberg (not a town that suffered heavily) and I was thinking that my father suffered also from bombardments (bombs exploded around him) as a 18 years old in France, so what was his point? Many years later I learned that the Allied discourse of "the good and the bad people" was an heavy (re) writing of history.
I think a strong pattern here is: the more cultural/social homogeneity the more willingness to fight a war for your country. See Italy, Spain, Belgium for instance: people from different area of those countries really feel belonging to different cultures. Contrari to the Nordic & Easter European ones. In Germany is more of a historical thing instead.
You've touched on one theory of why European governments are seemingly so in favour of mass immigration; a people with no common identity are much less willing to go to war for it. The theory goes that this is favourable for the wealthy euros in power because it lets them hold on to their wealth.
As for Germany, by the way, the explanation is kind of simple. Contrary to popular belief, the German border cannot be effectively closed, and once someone has seeked for asylum, this needs to be checked. At the same time, the Dublin II regulation is extremely unfair and unsolidaric, it was designed for a few refugees here and there, and insisting on it would have tumbled Greece even further into crisis and alienated Italy. More importantly, however, the German constitution would have made rejecting refugees impossible, as it guarantees the right to asylum to someone who comes from a country in which a war rages. Moreover, rejecting them would also have violated Article 18 of the EU constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1951 Refugee Convention. This is constitutional law and ratified international law, so Merkel thought something like "Blimey, what do I do now? Break all these laws and loose in front of the Supreme Court or European Court of Human Rights , or risk my career while standing in for those fancy human rights values I've always held speeches about?"
