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leonine -> RE: Is war enevitable? (10/22/2013 5:25:59 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hlen5
Fighting for dominance is human nature.
So is co-operating and helping each other. In fact, both anecdote and scientific studies show that most people respond to crisis situations by being more helpful and co-operative. That's why the generation who went through WW2 are nostalgic about it: what they miss isn't the bombs and shortages but the feeling of fellowship, which recent neoliberal governments have tried so hard to stamp out in favour of competition at all levels.
In his enlightening book "Cows, pigs, wars and witches," one of the groups Marvin Harris looked at was the Maring of New Guinea, whose villages routinely go to war with their neighbours whenever they have enough surplus crops to be able to spare the men from field work. Their whole culture is shaped by constant war: women and children live in fear of raids, men are brought up from birth to be tough brutal warriors so they can defend the land - and so they can attack the next village, because, you know, we have to fight them over there so we won't have to fight them over here.
If you asked one of them, they would certainly say these wars are inevitable: the other tribes are hostile, so they have to be the same to survive, that's just the way it is. Yet in many other lands, the same sort of jungle farmers with the same culture of slash-and-burn farming villages live in peace and mutual support. Once a culture is locked into a pattern of war, it's a hard habit to break, but getting into it is not inevitable.
Less than a century ago, most people would have said that Europe was in the same position writ large. Nations had been fighting off and on for as long as there had been identifiable European nations, war was "a continuation of diplomacy by other means," the attempt to enforce peace by mutual treaties at the turn of the century had just led to a bigger and worse war, and it was clear that "the war to end wars" was going to be followed by another pretty soon. Only a crazy dreamer would have said then that we would see three quarters of a century when no European nation has even thought of taking up arms against a neighbour, with every prospect of that Utopia continuing into the foreseeable future.
The conventional explanation was the Cold War, which united us against a common threat. But the Soviet menace is history, and nothing has changed: we have not seen the sort of explosion of suppressed hostilities that happens when an artificially enforced peace ends, as in Iraq or former Yugoslavia. We don't all love each other - the Northern nations think the Southern are lazy parasites, the British think the EU is a conspiracy to rob us, and everybody hates the Germans for being too successful at everything they do - but even the lunatic fringe anti-Union parties don't talk even as a joke about settling these differences with tanks and bombs. It seems (whispering softly) that we have managed to break the habit of war.
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