Maverick and Toad:
I think I’ve chosen a very poor way of trying to express my views and feelings. Let me try to clarify what I meant. Please forgive me if this gets a little long.
There are indeed things in this world worth fighting for. I’ve no problem thinking of a few things I would gladly die for if the need arose. Examples would be my children, my wife, family and friends. The ideals I would fight for would indeed include stopping the marauding of a mad man or the ending of a genocide such as in our talk of WW2.
I’m in no way saying that defending ones self, or perhaps to a lesser degree ones beliefs and ideals is wrong. Far from it. But, and perhaps here is where my views are a little on the skewed side, I can’t think of a war that was started for those reasons.
Here as our example in this thread is China and Taiwan. What would be the actual cause of the war? In my eyes it would be Taiwan refusing to bow down to China and refusing to say they were a part of China,. The words causing this war would be "You are a part of China" Simply words that are not worth, in this case China, starting a war over. To me its absurd to think that the lives of people are worth those words. Defending that freedom would be worth it, but the cause of the war, the thing that started it, would not be worth even one life lost in it.
Maverick you’ve hit the nail on the head. War is a tragic waste. It seems they are usually started by, and please understand I speak of the people that start them and not the people that actually end up having to go off and fight them, mad men for reasons that in retrospect are so petty and meaningless.
What actually set me off on reading this thread was the thought that, and I’m not speaking of anything I’ve actually read here, people seeming to think that war between the US and China would be a good thing. Specifically things supposedly posted on other boards by Chinese students, and some things said by some friends of mine. That people would actually talk as if they wanted a war just astounds me. That there is even the remotest of possibilities of that war coming to be truly frightens me. The reasons that war might be started, a spy plane, an arms deal or a declaration of separatism made by a small island to a vastly larger nation, makes me truly sad.
I think there is where I was unclear. It seems the wars of our past and those still to come have or will have their start at the hands of mad men who seem eager to end the lives of sometimes tens of millions of people over things that are not worth actually starting a war over.
