Posted on 04/26/2014 9:34:04 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
Norman Angell, the Paris editor of Britain’s Daily Mail, was a man who expected to be listened to. Yet even he was astonished by the success of his book “The Great Illusion,” in which he announced that war had put itself out of business. “The day for progress by force has passed,” he explained. From now on, “it will be progress by ideas or not at all.”
He wrote these words in 1910. One politician after another lined up to praise the book. Four years later, the same men started World War I. By 1918, they had killed 15 million people; by 1945, the death toll from two world wars had passed 100 million and a nuclear arms race had begun. In 1983, U.S. war games suggested that an all-out battle with the Soviet Union would kill a billion people — at the time, one human in five — in the first few weeks. And today, a century after the beginning of the Great War, civil war is raging in Syria, tanks are massing on Ukraine’s borders and a fight against terrorism seems to have no end.
So yes, war is hell — but have you considered the alternatives? When looking upon the long run of history, it becomes clear that through 10,000 years of conflict, humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
WWI was a good thing. What a fool.
humm: progress through war (or let’s just say human conflict of varied types).
that strikes me as another very good encapsulation of leftist (progressive) ideology and practice.
Very arguably, everything we see today is the result of WWI.
What we have here is a perspective that shifts from the broad view to the narrow one when it suits the argument. Government is not always preferable to chaos, especially when it's trying to put your carcass into an oven for the Greater Good. Whether that beats a no-government situation in which a marauding barbarian puts a spear into your guts is one of those fine points I won't explore overmuch. Either way, you lose.
What does work is the empowerment of the individual to guard himself and his against both scenarios. If, to do so, he must make war, then once again we have shifted our perspective to the advantage of the fight. I'd offer a slight corrective: apparently we can't avoid it, so we might as well be good at it. That doesn't necessarily extend to celebrating it.
I’d like to be safer.
Can we nuke Mecca, Cairo, Jakarta, Karachi and Ankara please?
Wow, this is a thinly veiled attack on Ronald Reagan.
I know. If you could go back in time who would you kill?
Hitler or Wilson?
Hard choice.
Can somebody please go back in time and kill Karl Marx’s parents before they meet?
This is the logical fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The author fails to adduce evidence that the larger, more organized societies would not have been created without the violent conflicts he deems to have been necessary.
I don’t know about that. The poor fools were just itching for a fight.
Yes, I agree, The mentally unstable Kaiser with the withered arm was going to cause a conflagration in any case, and a reason would have been found for war.
Don’t forget that damned well in Qom!
Mohammed.
War didn’t create the United States, war largely enslaved Europe until Reagan freed it. Slavery was probably on it’s way out without war.
There are more slaves today than at any other time supposedly.
In the 20th century some 200+ million people were killed by their own governments, not in wars, so I’m not sure about the claim that modern people are safer.
He’s a bean counter and it’s true that certain types of wars have a bottom line to them. People like him can reason the human suffering away, while those suffering can’t.
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