I saw a bumper sticker that said, “War has never solved anything…Except for ending slavery, fascism, Nazism, communism and creating the United States.”
Did war actually solve these problems? I feel that this statement isn’t that incorrect in all honesty.
Well, war solved the Carthage problem. Truthfully violence is often a wonderful means of solving problems. If it wasn’t, why would people engage in violence?
Marc
Sure, wars solved lots of problems. It’s not always the best solution or the right solution, but it is a solution.
only for the survivors of the winning side.
Of course it has solved problems.
William II, Duke of Normandy wanted to be King of England. His cousin, Edward the Confessor, was King of England. And William’s story is, Edward promised the throne to him because Harold Godwinson was most likely celibate, William also makes the claim that Harold promised the throne to him, even going so far as to swear it on a Saint’s bones (even if this is true it was almost certainly under duress.)
So William’s problem was, he wanted to be King of England, and the new King, Harold, wasn’t just going to step down. So, William starts a war, and he wins the battle of Hastings, Harold dies there and William becomes King of England.
Everyone knows this story. The problem William had (Harold’s claim to the throne) was effectively removed via military means. Now, that isn’t to say William didn’t have a whole mess of problems pop up because of this, but yeah, he did solve a problem with a war and it’s really hard to argue otherwise. At best I think you can possibly say, “wars create as many problems as they solve.”
I probably disagree with that, any war, no matter how “justified” or “necessary” is indeed going to create serious problems, but I tend to think there are many instances where fixing the problem in question was worth the problems that came up because of the war.
Ok, let’s debate bumper-sticker aphorisms, then. War did not end slavery; it still goes on in some places, apparently. OK, it reduced slavery considerably in the US. War did not end fascism; Generalissimo Franscisco Franco (still dead, btw) hung onto power for quite some little time. Naziism, I’ll give you that one but the Nazis actually went to war first, didn’t they?
Near as I can see, war did not end Communism; the Nazis tried it but didn’t do it, the US never went to war directly with the USSR, and the world’s most populous nation, plus a few others, remain nominally Communist states.
Lastly, the war sort of came after the United States was created, or at least proposed, not the other way round.
I suppose there may be some disagreement with the above, but I’m not willing to go to war over it.
Jet aircraft, computers, and the space programme are all direct results of WWII…
All would have been invented without war.
But of course, war solves problems. Hitler was a problem, then he wasn’t. How’d they get rid of him? War.
I beg to differ. I seriously doubt that the space program would have gotten anywhere near as far without the stimulus of the Cold War. Even the meager funding that Robert Goddard got was due in large part to War Departmnent funding. Similarly, computers (for dynamic calculations for the A-bomb, then the H-bomb programs) and Jet Engines (funded first by both British and German armed forces in the 1930s) were driven by military aims. There’s nothing “inevitable” about this.
What difference who went to war first…that wasn’t the question. War certainly settled things with the Nazi party in Germany though. You are right about fascism…it certainly wasn’t settled by war, and still rears its ugly head periodically throughout the world. Arguably the Ba’ath party in the ME has fascist underpinnings, and there are still several fascist parties in Europe…even one in the US.
The war kicked off before we declared independence. Regardless, by declaring independence war was inevitable. And certainly it saw the birth of our nation. No way the Brits would have given us independence at that time in their history without a war.
You are essentially right about communism (though a COLD war certainly was a severe blow to the Soviets, and I think had a profound effect on Chinese communism as well) and slavery (it DID end outright slavery in the US, but not world wide).
However, of course wars have and will solves problems. Anyone saying that a war never solves problems (i.e. wars are completely useless) is just blowing hot air. THey are not always good things that are solved, and they should be last resorts when all other options have been explored…but yeah, wars do solve problems.
-XT
Hitler would’ve never gotten in his position without Germany losing WWI. War begat Hitler.
Heinlein disdainfully took on the maxim “War never solved anything” in Starship Troopers, of course. I think the maxim is wrong because it is so short (as bumper-sticker slogans are wont to be). If the maxim was “War or violence cause only further suffering and vengeance-taking, more often than not,” then I would agree with it. Hard to think of the kind of country we’d have today were it not for the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II, though.
I never suggested war didn’t also cause problems.
But from, say, the perspective of the United States in 1945, war had clearly solved some fairly significant problems. Given a choice between going to war or not going to war, it is clear that not going to war would have allowed an unacceptable situation to continue, whereas going to war solved it. The USA, after all, did not start World War I and got into that mess only at the very end, and was not primarily responsible for the Versailles conditions, so it wasn’t THEIR fault. Clearly, with regards to the problems of Hitler and his temporary allies as faced by the United States, war was a very effective solution indeed. (The same could be said of the other peripheral Allies who didn’t help start WWI, like Canada, Australia, India, etc.)
War is the final appeal for justice against an uncaring world. Without war, Palestinians (or Jews, take your pick) would have been left to be ruled by others against there will. Without war, Pol Pot could have just said ‘ninner, ninner, ninner’ to the whole world while slaughtering his own people.
Nope, war is unpopular with those who are on top, those who have a lot to loose. To the disenfranchised war is the only hope of salvation.
War’s solved lots of things. Perhaps the reason why it hasn’t worked recently (WW2 onwards) is that those who wage war have been insufficiently brutal.
Were it not for the Korean War, we can be pretty sure that South Korea would have spent the last 56 years under the loving care of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader–which among other things would have reduced its standard of living by 90-95%. So from the standpoint of 48 million South Koreans, yeah, war accompished a lot.
“War solving things” is just a specific subset of “coercion solving things”.
In the short run, nothing is as efficient as coercion in letting your will be realized.
The context in which any existing decision-maker operates is that of a world already (and historically) managed on a largely coercive basis, so tradeoffs are not always apparent. There are tradeoffs though. By using coercion, you buy into dumping a lot of your available resources into remaining in control of the people you are coercing:
• you have to keep maintaining control of them, directly or indirectly, to keep them doing what you want done;
• you have to keep maintaining control of them, directly or indirectly, to stop them from retaliating against you for coercing them, quite aside from keeping them doing what you want done;
• if you’re doing the above indirectly, you have to keep maintaining control of your middle-tier agents of coercion, to keep them doing their job (if they have been coerced into doing their part) and/or also to keep them from wresting control of the others from you and supplanting your authority with their own
In contrast, if what you want is not in conflict with what other people want, there are other ways of obtaining their cooperation which do not involve the same heavy investment in retaining control. The tradeoff there is a more complex and time-consuming investment in communication. And while “if what you want is not in conflict with what other people want” may seem like a massively huge disclaimer, it is also true that a wide range of desirable outcomes are possible through voluntary cooperation that are difficult-to-impossible to obtain from coercion, and if that kind of stragegy comparison is to be done it needs to be done in both directions.
Meanwhile, as the technologies of large-scale destruction become ever more widely available, the costs of coercion as a central modality for getting things done becomes ever more costly.
Having said all that: yeah, lots of objectives have been accomplished via war, from ancient times through current era. It may be that some such behaviors are chosen for primitive aggressive emotions expression etc, but mostly I think they are chosen because the objectives are desired and war is available as a means to those ends.
I don’t know.
Each War seems to create it’s new set of problems. For exampleThe Napoleonic Wars created the new hotbed of Nationalism leading to the unification and Rise of Germany. That in turn created new Rivalries leading to WWI which created the Russian Revolution and eventually WWII, which begat the cold war and all the lovely wars in that time space which created a new vacuum when teh Societ block collapsed creating more wars . ETC ETC ETC…
How about this “War: Short term solution; generator of new long term problems.”
I had written a line about this in my first post, but then deleted it. Basically, what I was thinking was that there might not have been a wide European war solely over the idea of Naziism, if Hitler’s regime had not been so centered on the notion of lebensruam demsonstrated by invading its neighbors. I guess, though, it would be difficult to separate that notion from other Nazi objectives, so I’ll concede your point.
Conceded as well. Told ya I wasn’t going to go to war over this 
I was not taking the position that “wars never solve problems”, however, just pointing out what I saw as inaccuracies in the statement the OP used in support of his premise.
In the last segment of Journalist/Military Historian Gwynne Dyer’s PBS series war he makes the same points that Paul in Saudi makes. War gives those not in power and the underdogs the means to set things right, from their point of view. It’s also , as Clausewitz noted, the instrument states use to enforce their decisions when all else fails. You can say that erach war has consequences, but each large action by states have consequences as well. A great many issues have been settled by war. That’s not to say that any war has necessarily settled all questions or issues it raised, or that wars haven’t raised other issues. But, as Heinlein’s Rasczek said in the aforementioned Starship Troopers, it certainly made a difference to the Carthaginians. Even if it took more than one Punic War. I disagreed strongly with the second Gulf War, but there’s no doubt that the first one crippled Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, and the second removed him from power.