The included descriptions of the battle’s aftermath are haunting.
As much as movies and documentaries usually reflect the horrors of combat itself, they rarely deal with the aftermath - not lights out in an adrenaline fueled moment, but lying for hours in a random patch of land no longer having a mouth, trying to cry for help knowing that no one will come until dying from exposure and maggots.
This was the reality for millions of young people; still is. Let’s hope we never see it firsthand.
These days there are drone recordings of wounded soldiers in Ukraine sometimes ending their lives using a hand grenade or their gun.
And several weeks ago whole Russia celebrated a video of knife fight between an Ukrainian soldier and a Russian soldier lost by the Ukrainian who at the end dies from his wounds.
Such deformity and mutilation may result from an errant jump on a dirt bike. I intend to fly because it is there, it is the right of children to be free. Do a flip. And, yes, some will break a jaw or crush a testicle like a grape. We are not meek souls.
Based on the title, I thought this was an article about The Kalinga War, a war so bloody it moved the Emperor Ashoka to embrace non-violence and spread Buddhism throughout Asia.
Ashoka's transformation after the Kalinga War is actually the first thing that came to my mind too. Wild how two completely different battles, in totally different parts of the world and eras, led to similar moral reckonings.
TFA points out that International Law (an output of moral reckoning, if you will) is being dismantled by those in power whose morals are lose.
I wonder, just how long is the memory of civilizations to remember the lessons + morals of the past & how many generations does it take for a civilization to unlearn the wrong lessons.
Interesting story which I didn't know. However, the author perspective is a bit flawed:
But the world did get more peaceful. There was no World War III, and countries at least had to pay lip service to these universal values of peace and human rights.
The world didn't really get more peaceful. Some nations which used to wage wars between themselves did not anymore after World War II (excluding "incidents" like Belgrade bombing). This doesn't diminish the rest of the article at all, if anything calls for more rules and diplomacy preventing war.
global nuclear annihilation did more to prevent WW3 than a Convention that most militaries do their best to tiptoe around (or just ignore where they can)
Europe used to be at constant war with each other. Only France and the UK has some nukes. Now the EU is one of the most peaceful and prosperous places in the world. That is built on rules and trade.
What stuck with me most is how fragile that whole structure still is. We take for granted that countries will at least pretend to follow international norms, but that's largely because a handful of idealists laid the groundwork and others kept it alive.
And they did, because the imperialist, walled-in-gardens, zero-sum multipolar world ran its cause and produced the hyper-imperialist zero-sum lebensraum madness that was nazi-germany. The old world was a dead end- and with nukes everywhere soon, its a dead end for humanity.
We either solve our problems together or we all die together.
Yes, where would we be without the rules-based international order? Perhaps we would be watching videos every day of children blown apart by weapons of war.
Those videos are occurring because of a major power hypocritically flouting the rules-based international order. In spite of it, not because of it. We know the counterfactual of the rules-based order. It's nonstop European warfare in the 19th and the early 20th centuries.
I can sympathize the with the cynicism, because I also see the bombing of Ukraine and Gaza in the daily news, which nobody seems to be capable or willing to stop.
Unlike Solferino, there are children dying on a daily basis, which breaks my heart. Yet it remains true that what Dunant has established is a better state than the world would have been in if he had done nothing.
Solferino was a big and cruel battle by the standards of its time, but not by today's standards - in stats: 150,000 men against 150,000 men, 24 km battle front fighting through one night, resulting in 6,000 dead, 2,000 wounded and 12,000 missing [1] (but note Solferino today has less than 2,600 inhabitants today). So a joke if compared to WWII stats. But the point here is a single individual made a difference, and beyond their lifetime, and that should give us some hope.
Logically, that is just stupid. And it glorifies human suffering as something necessary for peace.
It’s easy to imagine a world where violence between nations was almost forgotten and conflicts were always solved by negotiations and following previous agreements. See what the EU accomplished: can anyone imagine, say, Germany go to war with France today, even considering the history of those countries.
Yes, I’m afraid of wars! I don’t want my children dying alone in the cold mud. I don’t want my grandchildren crying of fear in a shelter. I don’t want our prosperity used to build tanks and airplanes instead of building schools and hospitals and fight climate change.
That means we should embrace life as it is, we should accept its good and bad sides because there is no good without bad, and no bad without good.
It's like in the story written by Khalil Gibran where a pastor passed by an injured Satan who asked for his help and to not let him die.
In the beginning, the pastor refused because Satan is the enemy of humankind, he's behind everything bad that happens to us.
By the end, the pastor helped the wounded Satan because without him, the pastor's job and social status can not even exist.
Without the Satan/War/Bad there is no Pastor/Peace/Good. And vice versa.
This guy has the mind so brainwashed by western media talking points he cannot even understand the propaganda he cheerfully chews on.
Poor innocent 'rules based' order :(. I am sure the "rules based international order" prevented the USA from invading Iraq based on lies, right? Oh wait, the rules didnt work that time. But at least they are preventing Israel of massacring thousands of babies and toddlers in Gaza! Wait, also no. But at least they stopped the USA from deploying a mass surveillance system to spy on every citizen of the world, like Snowden revealed. Uhm, also no. The "rules based international order" is for suckers.
Please read the article again, all of it. Maybe this time you will be able to understand that it actually addresses your points (which are just propaganda of a different source, with certainly no better aims).
Yaya, I read how he "addressed" my points. "It isnt perfect but is the best we got" yadayada. "Rules based international order" never existed. It's just a buzzword promoted by NATO apologists to defend their imperialist expoliation. It never existed. There are no "international rules" for the powerful, the Hague was created to persecute poor third-world warlords or at best the enemies of NATO. It was not created to persecute Bush, Obama or Netanyahu. The WTO was created to sustain american capitalism and benefit american interests, when China started outgrowing american influence then suddenly the WTO is the enemy. There are no rules at all that stopped NATO to bomb Yugoslavia, Lybia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Its just a buzzword, a talking point parroted by american apologists. Never existed in the past and it certainly doesnt exist now. "Rules based international order" in practice means: NATO gets to do whatever the shit they want, as they have always done. That's it. That's the whole rules in actual practice.
And regarding the supposed reduction in warfare after WWII:
You can thank the existence of the Soviet Union, which united much of the western imperialist powers (Europe, America and its vessel states like Japan, Australia or South Korea) against the first real menace against capitalism in history. That's pretty much the reason why inter-european warfare stopped after WWII. And they focused on warfare against the third world (Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, South America, Central America, etc.) They function as an imperialist block with the same interests. It has little to do with the supposed existence of "rules" or an imaginary "order".
The "rules based international order" isn't perfect but better than what went before it. The percentage of the population killed in warfare has gone from like 15% in the ancient world, 2 or 3% in Napoleon/Hitler times and maybe 0.1% in the modern world (numbers approx).
Is not that "it isnt perfect". It never existed. The Hague was created to persecute backwater third world shithole warlords or at best the enemies of NATO. Not to persecute Bush, Obama or Netanyahu.
You can thank the reduction in warfare killing to the existence of the Soviet Union, which united much of the western imperialist powers (Europe, America and its vessel states like Japan, Australia or South Korea) against the first real menace against capitalism in history. That's pretty much the reason why inter-european warfare stopped after WWII. They function as an imperialist block with the same interests. It has little to do with the supposed existence of "rules" or an imaginary "order".
"International law is a funny thing. Within a country, lines of authority are clear. The government makes laws, it has agencies that enforce them, and the penalties for violating the laws are clear. But, in our modern system of sovereign states, no authority sits above the nation. Each country is sovereign. International laws are, therefore, more fragile, because they require the consent of everybody involved to keep them going."
This was the purpose of the imperium, not necessarily in the narrow sense of empire we often have in mind, but as a kind of order (e.g. the HRE).
In our case, the United States as hegemon has played the role of the global imperium over much of the world over the last few decades, and over a good chunk of the world since WWII. The reigning doctrine of the American empire has been liberalism (which explains why many if not most Americans/Westerners treat liberalism as a "neutral" position; it is the water we swim in). It explains why the US has intervened in numerous distant conflicts, engaged in countless "nation building" campaigns aimed at spreading liberal democracy around the world, and successfully influenced peoples worldwide through its film and media. These were all intended to preserve and enlarge the liberal imperium.
Now that liberalism has devoured and corroded the Protestant mother that held it together, and escaped the containment it created - in large part through the infusion of liberalism into Protestant doctrine - we are witnessing the fullness of the tensions inherent in liberalism playing out in the human psyche and society and unraveling liberalism and the liberal order. The shape of the emerging postliberal order is uncertain. The noisiest contenders seem to be an increasingly overt tyrannical liberalism and fascism, though a less conspicuous movement aiming to return to pre-liberal classical traditions is also in play.
The USA's efforts in South America (for example) were not aimed at spreading liberal democracy - the USA routinely intervened after democratic elections appointed leaders they didn't like, and installed military juntas or dictators that they did like. There was an overt tendency in US foreign policy to install right-wing leaders where possible, partly as a defence against Cold War Communism.
The wars that the USA engaged in since WW2 have not been about promoting liberalism, or removing totalitarian regimes. They have been explicitly about protecting US economic interests abroad, and generally feeding the military-industrial base as Eisenhower predicted.
> The reigning doctrine of the American empire has been liberalism (which explains why many if not most Americans/Westerners treat liberalism as a "neutral" position; it is the water we swim in).
Most definitely not. The reigning doctrine has been enforcing American wishes, wants and airs, both public and private, by force. Liberalism is a poor guise, mainly to brainwash the locals into accepting the status quo on both sides of the aisle.
The article could have been a nice recollection of a battle with a wonderful, long-lasting effect, yet unknown to most people - generally speaking, I mean... you'll surely have studied it if you grow up in the countries around the Alps.
But the conclusion is useless and wrong:
> the international order that diplomats have painstakingly built
Diplomats did not build anything, apart for those cases where the peoples had already decided they didn't want to go to war with one another.
In every other situation, it was the military R&D that shaped the current world order. Putin, Jong-un, and Khamenei still ruling their countries, while Gaddafi and Saddam are no more, does not let any chance of being misinterpreted: is you have nuclear weapons, you can be an a**; if you don't have them, you can only choose between complying with civil manners or being obliterated.
The included descriptions of the battle’s aftermath are haunting.
As much as movies and documentaries usually reflect the horrors of combat itself, they rarely deal with the aftermath - not lights out in an adrenaline fueled moment, but lying for hours in a random patch of land no longer having a mouth, trying to cry for help knowing that no one will come until dying from exposure and maggots.
This was the reality for millions of young people; still is. Let’s hope we never see it firsthand.
These days there are drone recordings of wounded soldiers in Ukraine sometimes ending their lives using a hand grenade or their gun.
And several weeks ago whole Russia celebrated a video of knife fight between an Ukrainian soldier and a Russian soldier lost by the Ukrainian who at the end dies from his wounds.
The video of the russian drowning in a ditch.. haunting..
Such deformity and mutilation may result from an errant jump on a dirt bike. I intend to fly because it is there, it is the right of children to be free. Do a flip. And, yes, some will break a jaw or crush a testicle like a grape. We are not meek souls.
You point out agency yourself, which is indeed the differentiator. Combatants in wars are rarely on the battlefield by their own choice or design.
23 replies →
Okay? What a weird flex. How does this relate to anything being discussed?
Based on the title, I thought this was an article about The Kalinga War, a war so bloody it moved the Emperor Ashoka to embrace non-violence and spread Buddhism throughout Asia.
Ashoka's transformation after the Kalinga War is actually the first thing that came to my mind too. Wild how two completely different battles, in totally different parts of the world and eras, led to similar moral reckonings.
> led to similar moral reckonings
TFA points out that International Law (an output of moral reckoning, if you will) is being dismantled by those in power whose morals are lose.
I wonder, just how long is the memory of civilizations to remember the lessons + morals of the past & how many generations does it take for a civilization to unlearn the wrong lessons.
Interesting story which I didn't know. However, the author perspective is a bit flawed:
But the world did get more peaceful. There was no World War III, and countries at least had to pay lip service to these universal values of peace and human rights.
The world didn't really get more peaceful. Some nations which used to wage wars between themselves did not anymore after World War II (excluding "incidents" like Belgrade bombing). This doesn't diminish the rest of the article at all, if anything calls for more rules and diplomacy preventing war.
Indeed there hasn't been WW3 yet but we had WW1 and 2 after Dunant did his thing.
global nuclear annihilation did more to prevent WW3 than a Convention that most militaries do their best to tiptoe around (or just ignore where they can)
Europe used to be at constant war with each other. Only France and the UK has some nukes. Now the EU is one of the most peaceful and prosperous places in the world. That is built on rules and trade.
2 replies →
What stuck with me most is how fragile that whole structure still is. We take for granted that countries will at least pretend to follow international norms, but that's largely because a handful of idealists laid the groundwork and others kept it alive.
And they did, because the imperialist, walled-in-gardens, zero-sum multipolar world ran its cause and produced the hyper-imperialist zero-sum lebensraum madness that was nazi-germany. The old world was a dead end- and with nukes everywhere soon, its a dead end for humanity.
We either solve our problems together or we all die together.
Yes, where would we be without the rules-based international order? Perhaps we would be watching videos every day of children blown apart by weapons of war.
Those videos are occurring because of a major power hypocritically flouting the rules-based international order. In spite of it, not because of it. We know the counterfactual of the rules-based order. It's nonstop European warfare in the 19th and the early 20th centuries.
The time between the Napoleon wars and WW1 (1815-1914) was very peaceful in Europe. Absolutely not nonstop warfare!
13 replies →
Yep, and UN had been expressing "serious concerns" every time. Although I haven't heard even those for a long time.
I can sympathize the with the cynicism, because I also see the bombing of Ukraine and Gaza in the daily news, which nobody seems to be capable or willing to stop.
Unlike Solferino, there are children dying on a daily basis, which breaks my heart. Yet it remains true that what Dunant has established is a better state than the world would have been in if he had done nothing.
Solferino was a big and cruel battle by the standards of its time, but not by today's standards - in stats: 150,000 men against 150,000 men, 24 km battle front fighting through one night, resulting in 6,000 dead, 2,000 wounded and 12,000 missing [1] (but note Solferino today has less than 2,600 inhabitants today). So a joke if compared to WWII stats. But the point here is a single individual made a difference, and beyond their lifetime, and that should give us some hope.
[1] https://www.kvwuerzburg.brk.de/das-brk/selbstverstaendnis/di...
1 reply →
"You who is afraid of wars
Tell me where does peace come from"
Ait Menguellet, Kabyle poet and singer.
Logically, that is just stupid. And it glorifies human suffering as something necessary for peace.
It’s easy to imagine a world where violence between nations was almost forgotten and conflicts were always solved by negotiations and following previous agreements. See what the EU accomplished: can anyone imagine, say, Germany go to war with France today, even considering the history of those countries.
Yes, I’m afraid of wars! I don’t want my children dying alone in the cold mud. I don’t want my grandchildren crying of fear in a shelter. I don’t want our prosperity used to build tanks and airplanes instead of building schools and hospitals and fight climate change.
What's the meaning here? It sounds very close to a Mao Zedong saying.
That means we should embrace life as it is, we should accept its good and bad sides because there is no good without bad, and no bad without good.
It's like in the story written by Khalil Gibran where a pastor passed by an injured Satan who asked for his help and to not let him die.
In the beginning, the pastor refused because Satan is the enemy of humankind, he's behind everything bad that happens to us. By the end, the pastor helped the wounded Satan because without him, the pastor's job and social status can not even exist.
Without the Satan/War/Bad there is no Pastor/Peace/Good. And vice versa.
2 replies →
"autoritarian regimes"
"Rules based international order"
This guy has the mind so brainwashed by western media talking points he cannot even understand the propaganda he cheerfully chews on.
Poor innocent 'rules based' order :(. I am sure the "rules based international order" prevented the USA from invading Iraq based on lies, right? Oh wait, the rules didnt work that time. But at least they are preventing Israel of massacring thousands of babies and toddlers in Gaza! Wait, also no. But at least they stopped the USA from deploying a mass surveillance system to spy on every citizen of the world, like Snowden revealed. Uhm, also no. The "rules based international order" is for suckers.
Please read the article again, all of it. Maybe this time you will be able to understand that it actually addresses your points (which are just propaganda of a different source, with certainly no better aims).
Yaya, I read how he "addressed" my points. "It isnt perfect but is the best we got" yadayada. "Rules based international order" never existed. It's just a buzzword promoted by NATO apologists to defend their imperialist expoliation. It never existed. There are no "international rules" for the powerful, the Hague was created to persecute poor third-world warlords or at best the enemies of NATO. It was not created to persecute Bush, Obama or Netanyahu. The WTO was created to sustain american capitalism and benefit american interests, when China started outgrowing american influence then suddenly the WTO is the enemy. There are no rules at all that stopped NATO to bomb Yugoslavia, Lybia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Its just a buzzword, a talking point parroted by american apologists. Never existed in the past and it certainly doesnt exist now. "Rules based international order" in practice means: NATO gets to do whatever the shit they want, as they have always done. That's it. That's the whole rules in actual practice.
And regarding the supposed reduction in warfare after WWII:
You can thank the existence of the Soviet Union, which united much of the western imperialist powers (Europe, America and its vessel states like Japan, Australia or South Korea) against the first real menace against capitalism in history. That's pretty much the reason why inter-european warfare stopped after WWII. And they focused on warfare against the third world (Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, South America, Central America, etc.) They function as an imperialist block with the same interests. It has little to do with the supposed existence of "rules" or an imaginary "order".
The "rules based international order" isn't perfect but better than what went before it. The percentage of the population killed in warfare has gone from like 15% in the ancient world, 2 or 3% in Napoleon/Hitler times and maybe 0.1% in the modern world (numbers approx).
Is not that "it isnt perfect". It never existed. The Hague was created to persecute backwater third world shithole warlords or at best the enemies of NATO. Not to persecute Bush, Obama or Netanyahu.
You can thank the reduction in warfare killing to the existence of the Soviet Union, which united much of the western imperialist powers (Europe, America and its vessel states like Japan, Australia or South Korea) against the first real menace against capitalism in history. That's pretty much the reason why inter-european warfare stopped after WWII. They function as an imperialist block with the same interests. It has little to do with the supposed existence of "rules" or an imaginary "order".
2 replies →
"International law is a funny thing. Within a country, lines of authority are clear. The government makes laws, it has agencies that enforce them, and the penalties for violating the laws are clear. But, in our modern system of sovereign states, no authority sits above the nation. Each country is sovereign. International laws are, therefore, more fragile, because they require the consent of everybody involved to keep them going."
This was the purpose of the imperium, not necessarily in the narrow sense of empire we often have in mind, but as a kind of order (e.g. the HRE).
In our case, the United States as hegemon has played the role of the global imperium over much of the world over the last few decades, and over a good chunk of the world since WWII. The reigning doctrine of the American empire has been liberalism (which explains why many if not most Americans/Westerners treat liberalism as a "neutral" position; it is the water we swim in). It explains why the US has intervened in numerous distant conflicts, engaged in countless "nation building" campaigns aimed at spreading liberal democracy around the world, and successfully influenced peoples worldwide through its film and media. These were all intended to preserve and enlarge the liberal imperium.
Now that liberalism has devoured and corroded the Protestant mother that held it together, and escaped the containment it created - in large part through the infusion of liberalism into Protestant doctrine - we are witnessing the fullness of the tensions inherent in liberalism playing out in the human psyche and society and unraveling liberalism and the liberal order. The shape of the emerging postliberal order is uncertain. The noisiest contenders seem to be an increasingly overt tyrannical liberalism and fascism, though a less conspicuous movement aiming to return to pre-liberal classical traditions is also in play.
This is a very skewed reading of actual history.
The USA's efforts in South America (for example) were not aimed at spreading liberal democracy - the USA routinely intervened after democratic elections appointed leaders they didn't like, and installed military juntas or dictators that they did like. There was an overt tendency in US foreign policy to install right-wing leaders where possible, partly as a defence against Cold War Communism.
The wars that the USA engaged in since WW2 have not been about promoting liberalism, or removing totalitarian regimes. They have been explicitly about protecting US economic interests abroad, and generally feeding the military-industrial base as Eisenhower predicted.
another one is the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh in Iran
> The reigning doctrine of the American empire has been liberalism (which explains why many if not most Americans/Westerners treat liberalism as a "neutral" position; it is the water we swim in).
Most definitely not. The reigning doctrine has been enforcing American wishes, wants and airs, both public and private, by force. Liberalism is a poor guise, mainly to brainwash the locals into accepting the status quo on both sides of the aisle.
At nations level anarchy is the rule of law.
That is one theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_(international_relatio...
It's ironic that in my city there's a bridge called Solferino which was blown up by nazis retreating from pisa in 1944 (it was eventually built again)
The conclusion of the article is flawed.
The article could have been a nice recollection of a battle with a wonderful, long-lasting effect, yet unknown to most people - generally speaking, I mean... you'll surely have studied it if you grow up in the countries around the Alps.
But the conclusion is useless and wrong:
> the international order that diplomats have painstakingly built
Diplomats did not build anything, apart for those cases where the peoples had already decided they didn't want to go to war with one another.
In every other situation, it was the military R&D that shaped the current world order. Putin, Jong-un, and Khamenei still ruling their countries, while Gaddafi and Saddam are no more, does not let any chance of being misinterpreted: is you have nuclear weapons, you can be an a**; if you don't have them, you can only choose between complying with civil manners or being obliterated.
Khamenei doesn't have nukes as far as we know, although they've tried a bit.
And I don't think the relative peace in Europe since WW2 has been down to military R&D. (I'm excluding Russia attacking Ukraine from that.)