War

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=mamboman]
No it doesn’t. His brain would have been transplanted into the body of a Great White Shark years ago.
[/QUOTE]

A Cyborg Great White Shark with 1920’s Style Death-Ray Lasers.

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I go by Augustine’s principle. A war is justified if it causes more good than bad. World War II had a high cost in human lives and general destruction but it’s generally considered to have been worth the cost to defeat Hitler. World War I, on the other hand, is generally not considered to have had enough good results to have justified the millions of lives lost.
[/QUOTE]

St. Augustine said no such thing. His ideas on the justice of war can be boiled down to a few rules:

  1. You must have a just cause.

  2. You have to be more in the right than the other guy. If you screw with someone and he screw you back, you don’t then get to claim that he’s being mean and go to war over it. If you do, it’s a sin.

  3. You have to actually have some sort of legitimate authority. You don’t get to just go off an kill people because you declare you havea grievance. This one actually more or less shafts groups like Montana militia-men or Al-Qaeda. It basically says you have to have authority before you go to war. It doesn’t inherently stop civil wars or rebellions, but the rebels must actually get together and start something which can be considered a nation.

  4. You have to mean right. You can go to war to correct an injustice, but not just to fill your purse (lest this seem modern to you people thinking of the old BusHitler wants Oil! slogans, dont forget about barbarian raids).

  5. You must have some chance of winning. If you are going to lose, and go to war, it probably means you’re desperate to keep your power and are willing to toss away your subjects/citizens/whatevers rights for it. Time to find another option.

  6. You should try to negotiate and find another solution first. Many people misinterpret this one: they say that it requires you to try all possible alternatives. But Just War only requires you to do things which might rationally succeed. You don’t, for example, have to bring your Happy Kitty Puppy Ice Cream baskets to the invading German army, just in case they decide to give up oppression and conquest because of it.

In any case, many wars can be justified by an honest man, and a dishonest man can justify any war at all. That is not a flaw; if people wind up in a war, it’s often better to just have the thing and be done with it than let whole nations smoulder in enmity forever. Better to lt bygones be bygones, but if that’s not possible, better to have a duel and end it than live a life filled with secret efforts to “do the man in.”

62

Really? I’ll admit I’m not that familiar with Augustine’s works (my Comparitive World Lit years are long in the past) but I thought the idea I was expressing was his. But if not, it was either formulated by some other philosopher or I’ll claim credit for it myself. Augustine or not, I still think it’s a good standard.

63

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I think you’ve been whooshed. Bryan was quoting Bart Simpson.
[/QUOTE]

Aw ain’t that cute. My first whoosh here.

64

Yep. We’re balding apes who are full of ourselves just because we wear pants and know how to work metal. The scary thing is, apes might use sticks and stones to kill the clan over the next hill but we have access to machine guns, squadrons of bombers, and nuclear tipped missiles.

Look at any transnational war close enough and you’ll find one group of people trying to interfere in someone else’s business.

65

You must remember that the Cold War ended without war.

Notice that the other country that is always characterized as evil often becomes our friend soon after a war. Still think all those “Jerries” are evil? How about the “Japs”? Vietnam vets return to Vietnam and share meals with former members of the Viet Kong who aren’t so evil after all.

Some women and men in the military of all countries can do evil things. But people are basically alike.

You say that the Jews have been “willing to go to war to defend themselves, and as a result have been relatively safe since.” I guess anyone would be “relatively safe” compared to being a Jew in Europe during the war. But certainly the Jews in Israel have not lived in peace since the war. Too often, they are the aggressor. But they are also very vulnerable.

I also disagree with the two classifications you have described. Anti-communist hysteria in the United States was a terrible problem in the 1950s. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else. And to this day it is the main reason we don’t have a good health care program. People are still afraid of the word “socialized.”
They forget that we have had other socialized programs since our founding.

Do you see any advantages to diplomacy? Does diplomacy mean that we can’t be armed and prepared?

66

[QUOTE=Zoe **.
You say that the Jews have been “willing to go to war to defend themselves, and as a result have been relatively safe since.” I guess anyone would be “relatively safe” compared to being a Jew in Europe during the war. But certainly the Jews in Israel have not lived in peace since the war. Too often, they are the aggressor. But they are also very vulnerable.

[/QUOTE]

I’m not Jewish and as far as I know dont actually know any Jews though I have been to Israel,thats my declaration out of the way.

Israel has what ? five million Jews surrounded by five hundred million Muslims who have declared that they want to drive the Israelis into the sea.

Yep it sounds like the Israelis are real bullying bastards.

Also having a long memory I cant actually remember Jewish terrorists machine gunning air passengers waiting in line in W.European airports,I cant remember Jewish terrorists hijacking civilian airliners and murdering passengers,I cant remember Jewish terrorists hijacking cruise liners ,I cant remember Jewish terrorists murdering olympic athletes ,international envoys and all the other nasty little events that the West had to put up with from Muslim terrorists even before 9/11 and the rest.

The Jews have one country and the Muslims have how many?
Personally I wouldn’t call them the aggressors in their particular conflict.

67

I’ve read that the human capacity for war evolved as a means for men to secure females. All other forms of selective pressure tended to foster cooperation, but when it came to sexual access to women, it always came down to war. Of course in modern times this doesn’t follow; the 82nd airborne division didn’t invade Iraq to steal Saddam’s nookie. But the capacity to work oneself up into a bellicose froth, to see others as subhuman and ignore impulses of compassion or sensitivity, that is just an unfortunate holdover from the days when we had to fight for women. The rest is thanks to our stellar inability to intuitively assess logic, risk, and probability (oh, and bad intelligence).

68

What Lust4Life said in spades.

My take on it is, the Jewish people have been kicked from pillar to post for so long that they decided enough was enough.

They’d had it up to here and were fucking sick of it so once they had their own country it was a case of “OK you wanna fuck with us anymore?”." Go ahead do your best but don’t be surprised if you get your collective arses kicked 'cos we have had quite enough"

69

[QUOTE=Zoe]
You must remember that the Cold War ended without war.
[/quote]

Wrong. The cold war was an endless series of small and medium-sized wars, often carried out by proxy. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America, South America, the Middle East… There were wars a-plenty, with the Soviets and Chinese lined up on one side, and NATO lined up on the other.

What ended the cold war was not appeasement and diplomacy, but a constant wearing down of the Communist world by the west - militarily, philisophically, and economically. The things I mentioned - a nuclear freeze, various demands for appeasement in the face of communist agression - would have prolonged the cold war.

The U.N. was almost completely useless as an instrument in ending the cold war. So like I said, keeping the peace was not done through ‘understanding’, forming the right international organizations, and appeasement, but through strength, the willingness to oppose evil, and the buildup of an unbeatable military force.

So… You’ve got some Nazi friends, do you? You don’t think the Nazis were evil? Or the Imperial Japanese army that raped Nanking? Or the communist Vietnamese who began a brutal program of executions and cleansing that led to millions of Vietnamese boat people fleeing their country after the fall of the south? How would you feel about having a nice lunch with the Khmer Rouge, who ‘liquidated’ millions of people for the horrendous crime of having an education or living in a city?

You may want to believe that everyone’s the same, and all we need is a little love and understanding and a few sit-downs over tea, and all conflict is the result of ‘demonizing the enemy’, but the world really isn’t like that. There certainly are evil people, evil philosophies, and countries that are dominated by evil philosophies.

Of course, there is Realpolitik, and after a war is over you have to find a way to get along with your former enemies, but that doesn’t mean there was no reason for the conflict in the first place.

Of course, humans are all biologically the same. We all have the same capacity for love, hatred, destruction, and construction. But there are evil philosophies, and sometimes large swaths of people come to believe in them. and carry out horrible acts en masse.

Do you think sitting down with and understanding a fanatical Islamic militant is the key to solving our current problem with radical Islam? Or do you think it’s just a handful of individuals who are the problem, and not millions of people who adhere to a philosophy that says a woman should be caned for being disrespectful to men and killed for adultery? Or that it’s okay to issue death warrants and expect them to be carried out on people who simply write books that portray your religion in a way you don’t like?

The point is that only their willingness to stand up to their aggressors and defend their property has kept them relatively safe. If they had laid down their arms and tried to negotiate a peace through understanding and love, they’d all be dead or dispersed now. Do you deny that?

And could you name some episodes of Israeli aggression? I’m curious as to whether you’re talking about the occasional poor judgement on the part of a commander, or something larger.

And for good reason. The start of the cold war was a terrifying time. Not to excuse everything that went on under the guise of anti-communism, but I wouldn’t sweep the real issues under the rug, either. The Soviet Union WAS evil at this time. As in, 40 million people murdered evil. And there were plenty of Soviet spies in the U.S. At that time, it was not at all clear that the U.S. had superiority over the Soviets, and the world had the horrors of WWII fresh in their minds.

Absolutely ridiculous. Fear of the Soviet Union is what has prevented socialized medicine? Stated that way, you make it seem like the only thing preventing socialism is an irrational fear, and not honest disagreements about the right way to organize a society. You might try reading a little Hayek, or Friedman, or Von Mises - three scholars of high repute who managed to oppose socialism without mentioning the Soviet Union.

Against enemies, I believe in ‘hard’ diplomacy. Negotiaton through strength. “Walk softly, and carry a big stick”. To successfully negotiate with someone, you have to give them a reason to want to negotiate. Starting from weakness and appeasement almost NEVER works.

70

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Against enemies, I believe in ‘hard’ diplomacy. Negotiaton through strength. “Walk softly, and carry a big stick”. To successfully negotiate with someone, you have to give them a reason to want to negotiate. Starting from weakness and appeasement almost NEVER works.
[/QUOTE]

Whoa, that’s interesting stuff. Could you tell that to this guy? I’d really appreciate it.

71

I’m not sure I’m getting your point.

72

Oh, sorry, I was just snarking against the Democratic leadership.