Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: BGBMAW on July 19, 2006, 01:11:00 AM
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didnt knwo i coudl find it on the inter net..my friend gave me a bunch of old History mags..thsi is from an article in Military History Quarterly...
The Utility of War
While we hope reason and negotiation can insure peace, only wars have proven to create or preserve it.
By Victor Davis Hanson
In the thirty years since the American defeat in Vietnam, an array of anti-war catch phrases has permeated our popular culture: "Violence only breeds violence"; "Make love, not war"; "War never solved anything"; and "Give peace a chance." But behind the popular rhetoric that armed conflict is inherently wrong is the more problematic record of past centuries that suggests such pacifism is not only naive, but even quite dangerous. Theoretical, often utopian, arguments persist against the use of force to solve national and international disputes, as echoed by entrenched peace studies and conflict-resolution programs that now abound in our universities.
Military history is rarely taught these days. Even when wars are discussed in culture and history classes, they are not usually considered as being universal occurrences across time and space or as reflecting truth about the human experience in every age. Instead, conflict is presented as senseless, amoral, retrograde, and counterproductive in our own times, which are characterized as exceptional due to the novel threats of rogue nuclear states, international terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.
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FORGOT TO ADD LINK...its 3 pages..print it out..well worth the read...
http://www.thehistorynet.com/mhq/blutilityofwar/index.html
The end of the draft in the early 1970s, the creation of professional armies, and the collapse of a bellicose and nuclear Soviet Union have removed the immediate threat of war from the public consciousness. Yet an increasingly affluent and suburban citizenry is more abstractly sensitive to war's potential dangers and costs than ever before. Perhaps because of a dramatic rise in the standard of living in most Western countries, it is difficult to contemplate forgoing the good life in order to endure the misery and material sacrifices of battle. Instantaneously televised images from the battlefield also ensure that killing appears in our living rooms in brief sound bites-often broadcast apart from tactical, strategic, or moral contexts, and with instant editorializing by inexperienced journalists. Split-second scenes of shooting flash by, often accompanied by narration characterizing such acts as senseless and evil-without explaining who is shooting at whom, and why. There is also a great inconsistency in thinking about the utility of war. Anti-war activists and internationalists sometimes urge the United States to unilaterally employ its overwhelming military force against corrupt, authoritarian, and mostly weak states that spread mayhem among innocent civilians. Intervention of U.S. troops or warplanes to thwart the dictators in Haiti, Somalia, or Bosniaclear-cut moral causes to save thousands-seemed to entail few American casualties, confirming a real need for war. Yet riskier operations against more formidable powers like Iraq are often derided as "bellicose," even though Saddam Hussein has killed as many innocents as other dreadful despots. Modern Westerners perhaps increasingly define war as just and even necessary when victory is assured and cheap, but sometimes amoral and avoidable when real carnage and sacrifice are possible.
A common tenet of the new pacifism is the notion that war is altogether rare or, in fact, unnatural to the human species. A United Nations body of experts has recently declared war antithetical to man's nature, as an array of behavioralists adds that we have no innate bellicosity in our genes. Such rosy findings give "scientific" weight in turn to our sociologists and political scientists who favor international conferences and peacekeepers in lieu of U.S. aircraft carriers and Special Forces. Such faith accordingly argues that military investment is unessential, and so defense spending is reluctantly agreed to only when there are immediate adversaries on the horizon. Peace, in contrast, is assumed to be the natural order of events. Yet history more often proves otherwise. Note the use of the plural to describe chronic conflict-the Persian Wars (490 B.C.; 480-79 B.C.) or the Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.). Sometimes the noun "years" is necessary nomenclature-Seven Years' War, Thirty Years' War, or Hundred Years' War-to describe chronic fighting. Battles as well are often identified by numerical adjectives-Second Mantinea, First Bull Run, or Third Ypres-suggesting that the same places are the repeated sites of major campaigns. The Germans scattered the French in the Ardennes in spring 1940, before themselves retreating through the same forest in a failed second try in December 1944-a landscape pockmarked by the artillery of World War I. Epaminondas called the great plain of Boeotia the "dancing floor of war"-since the battles of Plataea, Coronea (first and second), Oinophyta, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea were all fought within a few miles of each other.
At the very beginning of Western warfare during the Athenian fifth century, Athens fought wars in two out of every three years. Its power during the twentyseven-year-long Peloponnesian War was finally ended not through the brief armistice of 421 B.C., but only when the Spartans destroyed its last fleet at Aegospotami and forthwith sailed into the Piraeus. Similarly, it would be hard to find a year in the twentieth century in which American troops were not fighting some type of small-scale war in South America, the Pacific, Asia, or Africa. In our own time, we have even resorted to Roman numerals for theater wars on a global scale (World War I and World War II).
Americans often assume that we have not really been at war since Vietnamforgetting in the last two decades alone the occasional bloody fighting in Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Afghanistan. And the enemies in those conflicts have not been uniform or their agendas predictable, as we have tried to enforce armistices, overthrow rightwing dictators, kick out left-wing strongmen, reclaim entire countries, escort oil tankers, stop the genocide of Muslims, feed the starving, and shut down a country-size Islamic terrorist haven. Almost every region of the globe in just the last decade or two has been in turmoil. India has fought three wars against Pakistan for Kashmir. Nearby China has engaged in border skirmishes with Russia and invaded Vietnam-after annexing and occupying Tibet. And the former Soviet Union, whether Russian against Chechen or Azerbaijani against Armenian, has been in as much commotion as during the Cold War when the Communist empire invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.
The ancient Greeks were empirical rather than theoretical thinkers and therefore based their conclusions on what they saw rather than imagined. They accepted the tragedy of war's ubiquity-an unfortunately common time, Herodotus said, "when fathers bury sons, rather than sons fathers." The philosopher Heraclitus remarked that war was the "father of all things," while Plato remarked that peace, not war, was the true parenthesis of human experience.
The Greeks found tragic the entire idea that innocent young men who neither knew each other nor shared any personal grudges would nevertheless seek to kill each other on the field of battle, without fear of criminal penalty and indeed encouraged to do so by the state. This wastage of manhood was deemed lamentable and often tragic, but not necessarily rare or always unnecessary, given man's innate craving for the things not his own and his propensity on a collective level to use force to satisfy those illegitimate appetites. So whether we like it or not, war seems to be omnipresent. We should keep in mind that more people have been killed in fighting in the fifty years of "peace" since, rather than during, the great tragedy of World War II, which saw fifty million destroyed.
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I am not impressed at all with what I am seeing from persia and arabia. Im afraid we are on the precipe of a great mass killing, perhaps the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity. The species itself may very well perish from the weight of it.
If we allow the persians and the arabs to stockpile nuclear weapons we guarantee our own demise, absolutely. Of this I am confident. Either our children will persevere or theirs will, both will not.
The next leader will have to be the bravest of all souls. The total opposite of what we have now. Elect wisely people, the next great leader may very well enable the eradication of 100,000,000 souls! Allah is Great, so they say.....
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Its kinda funny.... you putting this out here for discussion.
I didn't read it.
I have a rule or two about that.
If I don't think that you are capable of grasping its content, and you don't take the initiative to comment on what you've posted....
.... then it's nothing.
A post vanishing into the cosmos. Dust that nobody could be bothered to dust.
By posting this, you're implicitiy asking for our input. But you can't even be arsed to give your own.
And if you can't be bothered, why should we?
You hangin' out with rip 'n paste lately?
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A post vanishing into the cosmos. Dust that nobody could be bothered to dust.
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nash, thats ****ing beautiful. I am crying at this very moment by the profound beauty of it.
!
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It's all about the little people.
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Good read, thanks for the link.
Smart move skipping it Nash, you'd hate it.
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nash, let me summarize it for you.
peace is the dream of the wise, but war is the history of man.
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talk about vanishing into the cosmos..... posting about a thing you haven't read.....
Being negative about it because... well... it simply can't say anthing you would find worthy or interesting.
I read a lot of the stuff people link to here... I think it is all a pretty good way to get a handle on what is happening... certainly it is 100 times better than reading a newspaper or two or.... LOL... watching the news.
lazs
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Originally posted by Nash
By posting this, you're implicitiy asking for our input.
.........or possibly sharing it with others because some might be interested in reading it.
I didn't read it.
If I don't think that you are capable of grasping its content
Irony on parade.
why should we?
Multipersonality disorder?
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Maybe BGB posted it so that someone else could read it to him ;)
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I agree with all of it..Thought it was written very well..I really like the Military History Quartley Magazine
Nash..letting you speak prooves anything we need to know about you.
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Rather arrogant.
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good read BGB...thanks
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Originally posted by Nash
It's all about the little people.
and Nash knows that better then just about anyone :D
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Yes, it's worth the time it takes to read it.
Thanks, BGB.
The four great plagues of the twentieth century-German nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism-were all ended either through outright fighting or the threat of war, the butcher's bill made worse by the delays in using force to thwart such murderous regimes in their infancies. The ancient Greeks kept their freedom only through heroics at Salamis and Plataea. A century and a half after hundreds of thousands of Persians had been defeated and routed, another-and very different-generation of Greeks could not keep a few thousand Macedonians from doing what Xerxes could not. There were thousands of resolute fighters like Themistocles in 480 B.C., but not so many by 350 B.C. who still believed in preventing a foreign invasion from the north, despite the similarly prescient warnings of Demosthenes.
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Toad! You can't post common sense in here, this is the O'Club!!!
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I was wanting to find this article..It had a really good response to a thread ..soem guy started about his School teacher...and how he said..WAR is not the Answer..It never is..Busch is satan..blah blah..
I thought this author articulated soem points extremly well..I need to link it to his thread
Then when I did a search on the internet..thsi guy has a HUGE collection of writtings
Wonder if Nashy poo read it yet?..maybe change his mind?
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Originally posted by BGBMAW
...Busch is satan...
PBR = hitler = milwaukie's best = teh_evil
natural light = OBL