Comment by paulluuk

2 days ago

I consider myself an optimist, but given that the US has been in 229 wars over it's 249 years since founding, it seems highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a "next war".

14 comments

paulluuk

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xp84  2 days ago

There’s nothing peculiar about the US, every country or even tribe has fought many wars.

  • krapp  2 days ago

    Not every country or tribe has been engaged in near continuous violence for over two centuries. That isn't simply "fighting many wars" it's being "existentially bound to warfare." The US is peculiar. It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder. It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war. It's the only nation to wage nuclear war, and did so primarily against civilians. It's (for the time being) the world's only superpower, with a military orders of magnitude larger than any other. It put the right to shoot people into its Constitution because its founders wanted a government that normalized regular revolutionary violence as a civic principle.

    The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.

    • shipman05  2 days ago

      I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.

      > It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder

      Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.

      > It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.

      I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)

      1 reply →

    • gustavus  1 day ago

      That's stupid.

      I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.

      And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.

      I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.

      In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.

      So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?

wartywhoa23  2 days ago

My point is that war is the worst thing that humans can engage in, and that the prevailing sentiment is that constant war is an immutable status-quo, and hence it's okay, there's nothing we can do except downvoting those fucking negativists.

  • eth0up  2 days ago

    I think the folks disagreeing with you maybe haven't spent much time in war. Almost certainly some in harsh skirmishes, but I reckon a few Nam, Korea and WWII vets would at least entertain your position on the subject. Pretty much every meta variation of terror has surfaced or has the potential to surface in war. Parts of Ukraine, I think, easily represent hell on Earth, for both sides.

    Edit: I will go a bit further..

    I consider Military the greatest power on Earth. It's sacred, necessary. But those who abuse its power commit, in my view, the greatest of sins. I don't mean the soldiers who fight, but those making the decisions of who they fight. The soldiers do their job, often willingly. And they are the ones who face the consequences. To betray them by corruption is the ultimate betrayal. War is a power that, I think, should be reserved for situations with no other option. Mercenaries not considered.