> "Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war."
I think there's been a profound change in popular thinking on this since the end of World War II, and it's all due to the nuclear arms race. Maybe the aerial bombardment of cities in the later years of WWII had an influence as well, and to some extent the reality of chemical and biological warfare, but it's really the threat of immediate nuclear annihilation that has made the 'world leaders' less enthusiastic about sending the young people off to die in wars in the name of national patriotism and defense of the country.
The result, however, has been a long string of proxy wars between the so-called 'Great Powers' (which are now defined as those having a sizeable nuclear arsenal), right on up to Ukraine today, and the rise of smaller nations with nuclear arsenals (Israel and North Korea) who view them as an indispensable protection from external forces. There's also the case of India and Pakistan, who likely would have fought several WWII-scale tank/air/sea battles by now without the looming threat of MAD to dissuade them.
It's not an argument that the nuclear disarmament organizations like to hear, but I think if we really got rid of nukes then we'd be back in large-scale aerial bombardment and mass tank battles, and of course in that situation there'd be frantic efforts to rebuild the nukes. I don't see them going away ever, sans their actual global-scale use, in which case it'll be back to sticks and stones.