That is how war happens. Leaders who for various reasons taunt and provoke each other, implementing what to either populace seems a reasonable policy. (NK would like to be able to defend against the US, so they get nukes. The US would like to not be nuked, so they agitate strongly against them). Alas, these policies are in conflict, so tensions rise.
At some point, a small event - a misunderstanding, a border skirmish, etc - happens. In the context of already ratcheted up tensions, it spirals out of control because everybody feels the need to react quickly, before the other side escalates.
Nobody says "over my dead body". Everybody takes the next step, a step that's entirely reasonable from their perspective, but opens up "reasonable" steps for the other side. The core problem is that neither side considers the needs of the other side.
Peace requires active communication to constantly de-escalate and compromise, from both sides. An interest in a common good. War is what happens when you lose that and move to self-interest.
Of course I have to stipulate now that the Kim Dynasty are very bad no-good people whom we should all detest, otherwise trolls might pretend to misunderstand me.
Unless your parents are really young, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War is an obvious counterexample. There was a reasonably clear goal and the goal was accomplished.
I will grant that this is the only example I can think of right now, though.
I agree that keeping troops in place after the war was a bit questionable. Though one does need to answer the "OK, we kick Iraq out, what keeps them from coming back?" question. Which was answered in a ham-handed way, if at all. Keeping troops in Kuwait maybe made sense. Keeping troops in Saudi... one of the ostensible goals was in fact to prevent an Iraqi invasion of Saudi, not just to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. I do think in retrospect this was a bad idea. It's harder to tell how it looked at the time, and in particular what the Saudi government was telling the US government.
[0] One supposes that another option would have been to disrupt the governance of Iraq such that it would stop invading Kuwait, but later experience suggests that could also have had its drawbacks...
I don't think pre-1990 Middle East, where Iraq had just invaded and occupied a neighboring state (Kuwait) was exactly a stable place, either. Remember also the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War.
It is probably one of the most memorable (in the literal sense of the term) exhibits regarding the War that I've seen. I absolutely recommend it.
Short answer: nationalism and a lot of treaties and grudges from past wars.
Once the armies were assembled it was going to be
impossibly difficult to move them all back so they got
put into action instead.
In short, at the start of WW1, the Russians had two plans available: A plan to mobilise against the Austro-Hungarians only, and a plan to mobilise against them and the Germans at the same time.
But if they went for the Austria-Hungary-only plan, they'd be extra-vulnerable to German attack. After all, the troops and trains are all in the wrong place!
So although they were _mostly_ worried about Austria-Hungary, they were moderately worried about Germany, so they went with the mobilise-against-both plan. And as soon as Russia started massing troops at the German border, what could Germany do except respond in kind? Hence there was an escalation to war despite the fact neither side would benefit from it.
In other words: The logistics played a part, but it wasn't _just_ using the troops because they're here now - the logistics forced the Russians to choose between two bad options, forcing them into a choice that would inevitably trigger the escalation to war.
[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TX_yAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT161&lp...
A good military commander needs to be able to adjust plans on the fly to circumstances anyways, and while the logistical hurdles would have been substantial. Mobilization itself takes the form of several stages, and it's possible to hold at certain stages for lengthy (in comparison to the crisis) periods of times. Military commanders would certainly have objected strenuously, but politicians could have overridden them if necessary.
The real truth is that, by the July Crisis, most of the politicians weren't trying to avoid war anymore. Certainly not in Germany, which is the only case where the timetable argument comes close to applying.
Contemporary experts also claimed that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."
This is one reason I find the modern argument for MAD to be insane. Conflict escalates, despite it being a negative-sum game.
Orwell captured one way total war can happen: a powerful small group of people gains control of a propaganda apparatus, and uses control of messaging to divide a country, or turn a country against a demonized minority group or external rival.
That happened with Mao, with Hitler, with Stalin, with Mussolini. Today’s challenge is ensuring that the propaganda arms created by Murdoch and Mercer and Koch don’t do that to America.
I think we don't really know. We know that greed plays a role, but it is not always the case of someone stronger attacking someone weaker.
In Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, this is shortly discussed. IIRC he says that no reason put forward as an explanation for war can be conclusively proven from the available data (he mentions some war databases containing over 20k conflicts of more than 100 people each).
So, I think, unfortunately, conflict is like rain. You know that condensation is the cause, yet you can't really predict when and with what intensity it will happen. But you know it will.
So it has nothing to do with a "single event", but rather the "pre-conditions" which allow for that single event to evolve into such consequences. Don't blame an idiot who broke a brittle system.
I suspect that even if the assassination had failed they would have kept trying other provocations at least until they provoked an Austria-Russia war.
At best, wars are primarily a tool of the bankers and the international elite in a path towards control of all countries economic and physical resources. They finance and play both sides, and no matter the victor, they win. This is essentially the John Perkins position.
Even John Perkins claims there is no "grand conspiracy" though... and I would simply claim otherwise. Of course I've heard all the common retorts. "It could never be kept secret." "It's all incompetence, not malice." (hanlons fallacy) "It's just self-interest manifesting nastily." and so on.
Look, after the war I realized I had been lied to about so much, I sat down and decided to do what I call my "Descartes reset". Essentially, it consists of two parts. One, if I were to start fresh as if I knew nothing, and then evaluate the inductive and deductive evidence, if my past conclusions were correct I should arrive at them again. (they were't, and I didn't). Two, you must decide what you desire the most. The truth, no matter how ugly? Or a beautiful lie? I chose truth.
I won't get into the details right now, but suffice it to say I walked away believing there is indeed a "grand conspiracy". Of course that doesn't mean the other points of view aren't true at the same time, because they aren't mutually exclusive. If anything, the self-interested and the incompetent creates a nice cover for the abuse of the compartmentalization of black operations. There are often competing factions within as well, that sometimes align in purpose and sometimes don't. I still update and check my information and model as well. It's a continuous process mostly gained by gleaming bits and peaces of information from just straight up voraciously reading the best books related to the subject I could get my hands on.
That said, there are three primary sources that have a hefty academic background I used to pivot to other things. Carroll Quigley, Peter Dale Scott, and Antony C. Sutton. A third that was less academic and more experience based was Fletcher Prouty.
There are many other sources that have interesting things to say, but aren't as unimpeachable as the others. For this, a mainstream board, if you are really interested, I will just leave it at those four as a good start to pry open the very obsfuscated subject just a bit.
I agree that the first step is taking stock of all the lies. There are some obvious untruths that most Americans physically can't even consider, let alone disagree with, because they've been lied to from childhood. My current favorite is, "USA military is powerful and effective". Historians to come will puzzle over how anyone could have believed that, based on its unblemished record of ignominious defeat from Korea to Iraq and back again. When I talk about it today, however, I can see people's brains locking up.
I think it's possible there is no grand conspiracy, or perhaps we should say that myriad small conspiracies are reinforced by a larger unconscious equilibrium of interests. I'm not sure whether it would be better to react to the conspiracies or try to destroy the equilibrium...
First, discard any notions you may have regarding "winning" wars or "mission accomplished". The military hasn't been at war in a de jure legal sense since 1945. But it has been involved nearly continuously in de facto wars ever since then.
Is the world really such a dangerous place? Or is there another hypothesis that might explain it?
Here's one: the US military is an instrument for moving public funds from the Treasury into private hands with little or no public oversight, designed to work equally well when popular opinions swing in favor of the military or against it. To this end, media channels and public relations outlets are controlled through the use of financial incentives and proactively crafted narratives.
Milo Minderbinder is in charge. The US military spends $600 billion every year. Powerful means of moving money. Only $150 billion goes to personnel. Effective? Depends on what you think the intent may be.
In future I would suggest a less personal idiom such as, "...one might think". My HN posting history makes obvious that I completely agree with everything you've written here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
https://ia802605.us.archive.org/29/items/WarIsARacket/WarIsA...
My hypothesis. Party A wants Thing from party B. Moreover, party A things they could take it by force. Even if party B things they couldn't defend Thing, they can't just give it, because that sets a wrong precedent. Party B relies on being able to exact a very high toll should party A try to get thing.
Rationally, you don't declare a war you don't expect to win. So, in the above scenario, when part A declares war, they expect that party B cannot exact a high enough toll for Thing. When they do, it was a mistake.
The alternative are wars for 'moral' reasons, which are mostly about retribution or saving face. This is essentially how the murder of a prince lead escalated to a war that became WW1.
Unfortunately for the junta, they weren't the only unpopular right-wing government who saw warfare and jingoism as a handy distraction from internal economic and social problems.
Those are the kinds of things you say that already imply 100s of other theories and assumption and then you are like 'We have no choice'.
Germany was in a fantastic geopolitical situation after Bismark but then just fucked it all up because they had all these wrong (and sometimes crazy) assumptions.
The error you are making is that you are thinking in terms of groups or states.
Think of these people as individuals. Quite simply, some individual people wanted war to fulfill their political/personal ambitions and think war can make them happen. They really don't care much about the people who die. Its quite as simple as that.
So the army marches because from their perspective a legit government said, because it is in the interest of the country, plus they get payed.
The defenders are just defending their home country because they don't want to see it destroyed.
WW1 is really that simple.
The part about getting people to not care about the people who die is, I think, very important as far as understanding how warfare can happen on the scale it does. Most wars are characterized by strong propaganda denigrating the opposing side in negative stereotypical terms. In many cases, I think that the leaders who push for war actually share similar beliefs as a nationalism-driven populace -- it's more than mere exploitative.
Such explains why how, say, conflict over scarce resources can turn into something like violent conflict, which often (ironically) has a negative impact on the scarce resources itself.
Nationalism (and some things which are tangentially related like imperialism) was by many historical accounts one of the major forces that led to WWI. (As well as many other wars, I might add.)
I don't think its as simple as inherent in tribal nature. Leaders are selected and they need to consider the opinion of the electorate (this concept applies to non-democratic states as well).
In Political Science this is called electorate theory.
> I think that the leaders who push for war actually share similar beliefs as a nationalism-driven populace -- it's more than mere exploitative
Agree.
> Nationalism (and some things which are tangentially related like imperialism) was by many historical accounts one of the major forces that led to WWI. (As well as many other wars, I might add.)
Nationalism I would agree but in the end the choice was with some leaders, and many of those were not really nationalist but rather classical conservatives.
Your point about resources is correct, they wanted to control those resources, not relay on markets and cooperation. After that the Nazis doubled down on those terrible zero sum ideas.
A similar argument could be made about the Haber-Bosch process. There's no way back from too much growth. And there are serious side effects.
I guess you could always explain any war by listing all the events that came righ before, but I don’t think that answers another question, which is this:
Why is it “ok” for governments to hire huge groups of people to murder other people, when murder is not ok in other settings? This is an obvious legal and moral contradiction right?
No it is not. Legally it is only for members of the own society.
But in war this society acts as a group against another group. Legally totally different. (morally different story) But still complicated especially today with asymmetrical warfare. (france for example has no death penalty, but don't want their (IS) djihadists to come back and create legal problems (proving guilt is hard and putting them in jail creates also problems) ... so apparently it is easier for the French government to (secretly) order their special troops to make sure that not much of the french jihadists ended up as prisoners in syria or elsewhere and then demanded being brought back to french .. because killing in war is legal .. but since they have doubts on their own, it is of course not officially practiced)
Oh and in theory of course, nobody is starting a war anymore, since this is somewhat outlawed. Everyone is only "defending".
Which does make sense, also morally - so yeah I believe in general it is OK to have a group of people trained to kill in case bad killers invade. Having a army to defend. Simple isolationist?
But what if there are friends of yours under attack somewhere else in the planet? You go and help them, morally right, I believe.
But then things get complicated ... as "friends", people, cultures and states are not homogeneous things. So those friends of yours might be part of a legally justified dictatorship.
So you invade that dictatorship? And teach them democracy?
Well, that failed quite spectacular all the last times, but maybe that was also because of different reasons, as there were usually not so much "friends" who needed help, but rather a lot of hypocrisy to disguise plain old power politic where war is just a tool for politics in the bigger cultural struggle.
It is, of course, possible that even Bismarck could not have continued to manage them given the strains of nationalism that he set in motion. However, Bismarck was very motivated to maintain the peace rather than motivated to engage in war and that served Germany very well for a remarkably long time.
Even worse, Bismarck understood about not letting things get out of hand. He was quoted in 1898--"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans"
I absolutely despise these statements, that are perpetuated to the present day. I'm from near the Balkans, from Romania.
They depict the Balkan region as being some sort of backwards warmongers, which is not the case (yes, the region is not very developed but it's far from the poorest regions on this planet; also, yes, I know about the Yugoslav Wars, but that's a rather extreme scenario and even people in the region were appalled at what the Serbs did, especially).
Anyway, the reason I don't like it: it was foreign empires vying in the region that made the mess. Turks, Austrians, Russians, Brits, Italians, Germans, French, they're the ones that started the wars. There was no way the local conflicts would have ever become global conflicts. The locals just didn't have the desire or resources to escalate such a conflict. Instead these empires just used them as battering rams against the other empires.
The statement is true and you give yourself a very good description of it. He did not say "it will come of some damned fools" but "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans", i.e. the power play between Russia and Austria-Hungary.
In my eyes the main difference between those and the Balkans was that the former were mostly allowed to blow themselves up. Peace only came when they got tired of it. In the Balkans they got tired of it in 1999. They couldn't do it earlier because of... empires :)
Of course, there are no guarantees in life, but if I were a betting man I'd say that for each extra peaceful year of peace in the Balkans you can add 1 year of peace in the future.
So my forecast is for at least 19 years of peace :)
The reality is simpler, there was a group of people in Austria who wanted war with Serbia, and a group of people in Germany who wanted war with Franz and Russia. Unfortunately for world history those people happen to be in particular places at that time, and so they started the war.
It is really that simple, a number of people wanted war, so they started it.
As for technology, the purpose of a machine or a construct is primarily a solution to problems which made people's lifes difficult. The solutions of technology make people's lifes easier, more secure, but it also bears risks and unsforseen consequences. That's not always that case, as the special case of war clearly show it. War machinery makes people's lifes worse, but it's not the fault of machinery or technologies, it the fault of people waging wars.
Rudyard Kipling's writings (before and during WWII) are probably the best source if you want to learn the sentiment that leads to the war.
>million other people decide to also join in this fight
Most people don't get to decide. Most of them are conscripted.
I don't think it's controversial to say that there's way more going on behind the effort to staff an army than threat of punishment from the government. Historically there are many examples of citizens eager to line up and fight for their country (whether for pragmatic or idealistic reasons). This isn't just patriotic rhetoric, it's a very powerful social force once set in motion.
If our species has any enduring trait then violent conflict through war must be pretty close to the top of the list.
I’m pretty poor too but I feel like I have other options than to put my life in danger.
Different wars start for different reasons.
The Great War started because the Serbian government financed a small group of separatists in Austria-Hungary, who assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Austro-Hungarian government naturally objected, and presented the Serbians with an ultimatum essentially demanding the ability to investigate & prosecute anyone involved. Serbia refused, supported by its ally Russia, who mobilised & threatened to invade Austria-Hungary & Germany if either did anything to Serbia.
Due to the military realities of the time, if one country mobilised and another didn't, the former country would be able to take great swathes of territory from the latter before the latter could do anything. So of course with Russia mobilised Germany had to mobilise. And of course with Germany mobilised France had to mobilise too. France, meanwhile, really wanted to take back a piece of territory that Germany had won in 1873 (and France had previously won in 1648 …), so planned to invade Germany as soon as Germany & France's ally Russia were fighting.
The Russian army was large but poor, while France's was smaller but deadly. Faced with a two-front war, the German plan was to hold Russia at bay while defeating France first, then swing to the east and defeat Russia second. However, a fight across the heavily-fortified Franco-German border would have been far too slow to defeat France in a timely fashion, so the Germans planned to go around the French border fortresses by marching through Belgium, never mind that Belgium had not agreed to this plan.
So, Germany invades Belgium, invades France, almost makes it to Paris, gets pushed back, the Brits join the fight, the Western Front solidifies into a four-year stalemate in which roughly 3 million men die and 8 million are wounded; Austria-Hungary invades Serbia but does remarkably poorly; Russia invades Germany & Austria-Hungary; Turkey joins the fray, hoping to reconquer some of the Balkan countries which had won their independence.
Ultimately the victorious Allies assign guilt for the war to Germany, imposing reparations which set the stage for the much nastier Second World War; the monarchs of Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia & Turkey lose their thrones and/or lives; Russia falls to Bolshevik Communism (which sets the stage for the much nastier Second World War); Eastern Europe is broken into a patchwork of states with an unstable ethnic mixture (which sets the stage for the much nastier Second World War); millions die; and the Belle Époque, the highest point of western civilisation, gives way to the horror & madness of the twentieth century, the single bloodiest hundred years mankind's ever seen.
As for the assassin who started it all? Too young to be executed, he wastes away & dies in prison of tuberculosis.
Humanity’s foremost achievement is overcoming its biological roots, and any view of the world based on supposedly unchangeable evolutionary mechanisms is deeply flawed.
I think we're very far from that. I would say our biological roots are responsible for our individualism, which often doesn't manifest as boundless reproduction, but rather as greed.
I don’t really understand how and why war happens. Like, it starts out as two parties both wanting the same resource, and then somebody says “over my dead body” or something and then a million other people decide to also join in this fight? I do not get it.
The other thing is : The “inherent harm of technology”. Every single advancement will 100% hurt someone. In this case it hurt a lot of people. But it’s impossible to stop progress, even if you keep a discovery secret for a while, it won’t last. Humanity will advance, and somewhat destroy itself in the process.