If you want peace, study war • Hacker News Board

Re: If you want peace, study war

#131

Post by busterarm » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

toopok4k3 wrote: post #37

golergka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalistic drive has nothing in common with the real memories of tragedies and horrors of the war.

But nationalistic drive has everything in common with how wars start.

Nationalistic drive is more a symptom than anything.

Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars. It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.

And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#132

Post by m0llusk » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

This is a backward way of coming to terms with conflict. In the modern world war is increasingly an outmoded way of handling conflicts. The number of wars, casualties in wars, and so on are a tiny fraction of what they have been historically. The idea that war is the basis of peace is held strongly by those who study wars, but a thorough analysis puts and social inequality and disasters such as famines as being both the current drivers of war and in many cases avoidable. At this time trade wars and competitions like the space race have a bigger effect on society than open conflict.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#133

Post by jeffreyrogers » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

pkkim wrote: post #45

roenxi wrote: post #14

The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Some group of people in comfortable offices look at a map, says "yeah, I think this option is more favourable to us than peace". Then a war happens. It is all about incentives and capabilities. One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based . If there hasn't been a war i…

Bret Devereaux of acoup.blog defends the idea of civilian control of the military here, with better references and more eloquently than I can. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1336392888629010437.html In particular, he argues that the way you avoid things like World War II is in part precisely by making sure the military does not make decisions of war and peace.

But the military didn't make the decision to go to war in WWII. Hitler did. The German military was hesitant about the idea.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#134

Post by jeffreyrogers » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #16

There are notes in Sapiens proposing that war (the violent kind) is no longer useful / does not produce outcomes because the global economy has shifted from one of physical resources to knowledge based. That it no longer makes sense to fight over things that aren't worth as much these days, like land, oil or gold, when you can just trade. Most of money comes from peace time commerce. This seems accurate, but time wil…

Maybe for now, but there's no way that is going to be true in 10-20 years. Resources are going to get more and more important as high grade ore deposits (needed for the nickel, copper, etc. that go into renewable energy tech) are concentrated in politically unstable regions (Congo, Central Asia, Russia). Couple that with even moderate economic growth in the developing world and you are going to see EU/USA, China, Russia, etc. all trying to secure access to these important resources.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#135

Post by Razengan » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #124

Razengan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wars end up with those best at surviving surviving. The ones best at getting allies to protect them, the ones who keep their children alive even at the cost of thousands of others' lives, the ones who groom an ally to throw themselves on the grenade, the ones who climb the power ladder and then use that power to keep themselves safe from the conflict… Yes, natural selection at the civilization level. Those survivor…

Next you'll be saying millions of humans want to be addicted to social media. I don't understand how you could even think this in the first place, let alone believe it to be true.

I mean you believe that human sentiments of “good” and “evil” matter much outside of human heads, or that the world would magically be a much better place if no wars ever happened.

(of course I predict you will cherry pick some wars to be perfectly justified)

Re: If you want peace, study war

#136

Post by vondur » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #30

roenxi wrote: post #14

The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Some group of people in comfortable offices look at a map, says "yeah, I think this option is more favourable to us than peace". Then a war happens. It is all about incentives and capabilities. One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based . If there hasn't been a war i…

Wars are scary regardless of who makes the decisions, but I think that the situation where the army obeys civilians is, in general, much better than the one where the military decides whether it wants to go to (or continue) a war or not. For example, it seems that the civilian elite of Germany and Austria-Hungary was ambivalent about war in early 1918, especially in A-H, and willing to entertain possible ceasefire wi…

Well it was said that Prussia was an Army with a nation vs. everywhere else. (nation with an Army) This militaristic attitude most likely fed the mindset of crushing of the Revolts of 1848 in Germany, and probably had a big influence on starting WW1. A large group of Germans who became disillusioned with the path that Germany was headed down migrated to the US after that. This probably furthered Prussia/Germany down the more aggressive militaristic path.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#137

Post by jeffreyrogers » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #5

I have a theory that offensive weaponry advancements produce peace, while defensive advancements produce war. If you're in a castle, it's easier to send armies around, knowing that you'll be safe. But if there are nukes and ICBMs, just stick with the status quo. Any validity to this theory?

I think it is the other way around. Cavalry could beat pretty much any group of non-cavalry unless they had a massive numerical advantage, so castles/walled settlements were the way to defend against that, but they only arose by necessity.

Carol Quigley's theory is that technology changes the balance of power, sometimes favoring centralized power other times favoring decentralized power. Cavalry/knights/castles favored centralized power because equipping knights with armor and feeding their horses required a lot of peasants. The invention of cheap firearms led to the masses having more power (and around this time democracy began to spread). Then tanks, ICBMs, aircraft, submarines, etc. centralized power again, where we remain today, although that may be changing with cheapish drones and semi-successful insurgency tactics.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#138

Post by clairity » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

Danieru wrote: post #28

roenxi wrote: post #14

The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Some group of people in comfortable offices look at a map, says "yeah, I think this option is more favourable to us than peace". Then a war happens. It is all about incentives and capabilities. One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based . If there hasn't been a war i…

> The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.

note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested. distance fosters dispassion, so the leader not being part of the military specifically, rather than simply being a civilian, is what makes decisions more rational (also, as others have noted, that dispassion can also foster war because the civilian leader has no real skin in the game).

Re: If you want peace, study war

#139

Post by bennysonething » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #112

ncmncm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US military did not win the war, at least in Europe. They pottered around in Africa, Italy, and Belgium while the Soviet army won the war. Ten of the ten biggest battles were on the eastern front, while a tiny fraction of axis assets held off the West for years. Western bombing (despite huge losses) had negligible effect on German industrial production, which increased right up to 1945. (US industrial imports to…

The same Soviets who started the war -- sorry if history hasn't smiled brightly on the Soviet war effort, they were gladly in the Axis when the conflict began.

Yeah I had never been talk that in school. Recently kasporov pointed it out in a pod cast I was listening too. It's so obvious but I'd never thought of it that way because of the narrative that we are taught.

Re: If you want peace, study war

#140

Post by waihtis » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #134

sudhirj wrote: post #16

There are notes in Sapiens proposing that war (the violent kind) is no longer useful / does not produce outcomes because the global economy has shifted from one of physical resources to knowledge based. That it no longer makes sense to fight over things that aren't worth as much these days, like land, oil or gold, when you can just trade. Most of money comes from peace time commerce. This seems accurate, but time wil…

Maybe for now, but there's no way that is going to be true in 10-20 years. Resources are going to get more and more important as high grade ore deposits (needed for the nickel, copper, etc. that go into renewable energy tech) are concentrated in politically unstable regions (Congo, Central Asia, Russia). Couple that with even moderate economic growth in the developing world and you are going to see EU/USA, China, Rus…

Exactly so. It requires just one suitable black swan event to destabilize an entire continent.

Extreme events are really badly understood by many popular writers as demonstrated by Harari's 2016 book "Homo Deus" which stated pandemics are a thing of the past.