[roenxi]

The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions. Some group of people in comfortable offices look at a map, says "yeah, I think this option is more favourable to us than peace". Then a war happens. It is all about incentives and capabilities.

One of the lessons from being a Stallman watcher for many years - people are profoundly evidence based. If there hasn't been a war in 30 years, then they assume there will not be a war next year no matter how the background is changing.

The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is. There is a huge background risk that the age of abundance ends and then things get dicey.

[Danieru]

> The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions.

Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.

[arethuza]

The Cuban Missile Crisis is another example where if things had been left purely to the militaries of both sides things would probably have escalated very badly.

[mhh__]

LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba immediately...

One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.

Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.

[arethuza]

President Johnson in '67:

"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

[N1H1L]

Thanks for that name. I went down a rabbit hole, and found out that the double agent who blew his handler's cover - George Blake died less than a month back!

[mhh__]

I didn't realize he'd died. Good riddance, but still.

[Bakary]

The story of the CMC is absolutely bonkers. There were so many close calls and possible disasters that I am surprised we even ended up in this non-nuked timeline, even with the anthropic principle!

[smokey_circles]

I don't think that's true, but I'll also admit that the history of the cold war is very muddled and I am no historian.

The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.

TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).

Some facts we do know though:

1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office

2. The US moved missiles first

3. The military was following orders from the top

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg

--------

EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed

[arethuza]

I can strongly recommend "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" by Michael Dobbs:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi...

For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday...

The latter book literally gave me nightmares.

[wolfd]

Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.

[arethuza]

I need to watch that again - saw it years ago when it first came out. I'm currently reading Ellsberg's Secrets A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - which is pretty shocking - they knew all along they could never win in Vietnam but continued for "reasons".

[arethuza]

A quote from the latter:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

"A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.

[capableweb]

Any similar books that are not written by either born US persons or people heavily influenced by US either via politics or education? Not saying the information in the books are not true, but would love an opinion and summation on the matter from someone not so deep into US politics.

[goodcanadian]

Well, at least one anecdote to illustrate things are always more complex:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...

[clairity]

note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested. distance fosters dispassion, so the leader not being part of the military specifically, rather than simply being a civilian, is what makes decisions more rational (also, as others have noted, that dispassion can also foster war because the civilian leader has no real skin in the game).

[dctoedt]

> note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested

My strong impression has been that the Japanese military in the 1930s was a catastrophically-extreme illustration of Dunning-Kruger syndrome when it came to understanding international affairs and in particular understanding the psychology and industrial capacity of the United States.

(Admiral Yamamoto was a noteworthy exception: Having spent considerable time in the U.S, he strongly favored friendly relations with the U.S. and opposed going to war. When he was overruled by the militarists in the Army, he planned Pearl Harbor and Midway as a roll of the dice for what he judged to be Japan's only hope of success, namely by striking hard blows and trying for a quick negotiated peace. It didn't work out that way.)

[SllX]

Yes, but when the leader is a politician, he has skin in a different game: getting re-elected.

It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.

[clairity]

that's a different game from putting your life at risk.

[SllX]

I agree. It is however a strong motivation that has an effect on the choices of the civilian leadership of the military.

[ygjb]

That is straight up at odds with American (or Canadian, or for the most part, UK) history. In the United States Trump is the first "war-time" president to blow re-election during an active war, and his term was punctuated by attempts at troop draw down, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric towards Iran when he was low in polls.

Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.

[SllX]

The important part here is that they are forced to actually take the steps of justifying the war to the public and consulting the legislature.

If you have the public’s support for the war, then a war isn’t going to hurt your election chances.

[scarmig]

I'm not sure I'd count Trump as a wartime President, though perhaps that's a result of appallingly low standards for what counts as peace.

[ygjb]

Yeah, it's sketchy, which is why I put it in quotes. The reason he is not really a war-time president is the only war he is even close to actually starting is a civil war :P

[mechEpleb]

Just because you wear a uniform doesn't mean you hold the same incentives as the grunts you're sending to die in some far off place.

[inglor_cz]

Wars are scary regardless of who makes the decisions, but I think that the situation where the army obeys civilians is, in general, much better than the one where the military decides whether it wants to go to (or continue) a war or not.

For example, it seems that the civilian elite of Germany and Austria-Hungary was ambivalent about war in early 1918, especially in A-H, and willing to entertain possible ceasefire with subsequent negotiations; but serious peace negotiations were not possible anymore, because the de facto power shifted to general Ludendorff and other high officers, who were determined to go on.

[dragonwriter]

I don’t think what the GP found disturbing was civilian control of the military, but the distance between the decisionmakers choosing to go to war and the people bearing the cost, which is not significantly different in systems which lack civilian control of the military than those that have it.

[inglor_cz]

This is perhaps an argument to have more veterans in politics.

Former Czechoslovak president Ludvík Svoboda, a general who fought in the WWII and went through some of the bloodiest battles involving Czechoslovak forces [0], was known to be very wary of militaristic ideas later.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Dukla_Pass

[notahacker]

This probably is an appropriate time to Godwin the discussion and point out a certain Austrian/German leader's very different ideas were also shaped by his negative experiences of a world war. Veterans react differently even to similar experiences and cover the full range of positions on war from gung ho militarism to unapologetic pacifism. Perhaps military experience lends them a more informed perspective on what the realistic outcomes of a war might look like, but it's no inoculation against militarism.

[mentalpiracy]

In the United States, we specifically block appointment of officials to civilian office that have recently left military service with the National Security Act of 1947 [0]. A waiver from Congress is required to grant exception to this rule, and the first time that waiver was ever sought and granted was just a few years ago in 2017 for General James Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense only a few years after retirement from the Marines.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_194...

[jacobr1]

It is probably an argument for having diverse views in politics in general, and beyond quick reactions, limiting the power to declare war, or engage in aggression more broadly, to more control by deliberative bodies

[masonic]

Just as Eisenhower warned of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex in 1960.

[XorNot]

This is not always the outcome with veterans though, and veterans experiences are not uniform.

[jhelphenstine]

They are, however, informed by experiences in uniform.

[vondur]

Well it was said that Prussia was an Army with a nation vs. everywhere else. (nation with an Army) This militaristic attitude most likely fed the mindset of crushing of the Revolts of 1848 in Germany, and probably had a big influence on starting WW1. A large group of Germans who became disillusioned with the path that Germany was headed down migrated to the US after that. This probably furthered Prussia/Germany down the more aggressive militaristic path.

[joshmarlow]

> people are profoundly evidence based. If there hasn't been a war in 30 years, then they assume there will not be a war next year no matter how the background is changing.

I model this differently - people are very conservative about narrative change. I feel it works more generally.

Examples:

If we've had peace for 30 years, then war seems impossible.

If we've had government fiat currency for a centuries or more, then of course cryptocurrencies are a joke.

If we've been on the gold standard for long enough, then of course that's how money should work.

[travisjungroth]

Yeah, “first principles” is such a SV cliche, but it’s very powerful for getting around this.

I think the pendulum can swing too far the other way, though. People imagine a blank slate, but we don’t live in a blank slate, so you’re essentially imagining a fantasy world. Or, you just end up recreating the old world in the new one but worse.

[pkkim]

Bret Devereaux of acoup.blog defends the idea of civilian control of the military here, with better references and more eloquently than I can. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1336392888629010437.html

In particular, he argues that the way you avoid things like World War II is in part precisely by making sure the military does not make decisions of war and peace.

[jeffreyrogers]

But the military didn't make the decision to go to war in WWII. Hitler did. The German military was hesitant about the idea.

[gen220]

The link is actually referencing Germany in WWI, not WWII.

For context on that, Bismarck's abdication in 1890 left a leadership vacuum that was was gradually filled-in by military elites, who were more interested in the mechanics of warfare than the nuance of politics. Where Bismarck used military force as political tool, in his absence every problem began to look like something that only the military could solve.

Although, it's worth taking this opportunity to repeat: the same military elites responsible for the tragedy of WWI and the Dolchstoss myth were responsible for appointing Hitler into power and legitimizing his militant tactics. Hindenburg and Ludendorff created Hitler, from inside and outside the establishment, respectively.

[dragonwriter]

> For context on that, Bismarck’s abdication in 1890 left a leadership vacuum that was was gradually filled-in by military elites, who were more interested in the mechanics of warfare than the nuance of politics.

The significance of that, while it shouldn’t be dismissed either, often exaggerated; while, yes, that absolutely did happen, you see in the entirety of Europe, no matter the role of military vs. civilian authority, the myth of offense dominance, aggressive mobilization plans and hair-trigger activation, etc.

Basically everyone, civilian and military, had drawn the wrong conclusions about the direction of the evolution of warfare, and it affected every major powers diplomatic strategy, military posture, etc., because everyone saw the other side getting ahead of them as an existential threat.

[lmilcin]

That's very simplistic view on military.

Think of a corporations that make all decisions at top level vs corporations that at the top level mostly worry about creating correct environment for the individual contributors and low level managers to be able to make right decisions, individually.

US military won the IIWW war because it created that right environment.

Mobilizing people (people who are not interested in achieving goal are almost useless), keeping spirit (for example US military will always do what's necessary to save individual solders vs Japanese that treated soldiers mostly as expendable), ensuring that people are promoted on merit and not birth, ensuring people are trained and are given right tools.

All those things are so that soldiers can make the right decisions, on the spot.

It is naive to think that a general can say whatever he wants and make it happen. It will only happen if all those people want to make it happen and are prepared to make it happen.

[ncmncm]

The US military did not win the war, at least in Europe. They pottered around in Africa, Italy, and Belgium while the Soviet army won the war. Ten of the ten biggest battles were on the eastern front, while a tiny fraction of axis assets held off the West for years. Western bombing (despite huge losses) had negligible effect on German industrial production, which increased right up to 1945. (US industrial imports to Russia through Iran were important, though.)

The US did win the Pacific war, despite that its torpedoes were wholly almost wholly non-functional until 1944. It won at monstrous cost in wasted Marine Corps lives, apparently because blockade work was not dramatic for home audiences.

[barry-cotter]

The Soviet Union could not have won without US support of arms and materiel. It might have been able to survive in some form by completely abandoning everything east of the Urals. US industrial production was crucial to Soviet survival, not a nice to have. Costly business, dividing up Eastern Europe in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

[mbrodersen]

Russia stopped the Germans by building more than 34000 tanks and sacrificing millions of lives. The US only really entered the war after 4 years of sitting on the side lines. Yes US support of materials to Europe was important but don’t overplay it’s significance. Also, remember that Europe paid for the US materials in gold. The US was basically acting as an arms dealer, with the 2nd world war being a huge business opportunity for US manufacturing, and the direct reason for the US moving ahead of Europe.

[ncmncm]

"West of", perhaps?

But it had beaten back most if the invasion before US materiel showed up in substantial quantity, and its industrial output (also) grew dramatically throughout the war.

Whether it could have secured enough food to sustain that output, without US SPAM, is unclear; the Soviets openly acknowledged the importance of the SPAM. The hundreds of thousands of trucks, millions of tires, millions of tons of steel, and corresponding amount of refined petrolem the US delivered probably mattered too, when it finally got there. Soviet pilots liked the P-39s, sort of proto-A10s.

The Soviet materiel placement in 1941, immediately before Germany invaded, was consistent with immediate plans to invade Germany.

[AnimalMuppet]

What were you going to use to enforce the blockade? Torpedoes?

[barry-cotter]

Mines, lots and lots of mines.

[lmilcin]

Hey, wars are messy business. Usually if there is so much disparity in power that the outcome is known beforehand it does not come to war.

US had declared Axis powers to be the enemy and then the enemy was defeated. Nobody questions that US was key to winning WWII. It seems impossible that soviets would hold if Nazi Germany was able to send all their resources to eastern front. Even with the help on the western front, soviets held JUST BARELY. And at key moment US troops landed in Italy forcing Hitler to divert his forces that were necessary to win battle of Kursk.

I don't see how you can question that US won the war, it is a fact documented by representatives of states involved in the war signing their capitulation to US.

[bluGill]

It was a joint effort. To claim any single entity won alone is wrong. There are alternate history questions, but they will never be conclusive.

[lmilcin]

Well, every one of those entities won. Do you want to say nobody actually won the war?

In a sense it is true, but not in the sense we are talking about.

[ncmncm]

What we are after is who, if anybody, was responsible for a clear majority of the total effective engagement of Axis forces.

On that question, it is dead clear that the Soviets were, and by a huge margin.

Did US and British troops contribute? Yes. Did P-51s and P-38s help clear the skies of effective German air power? Sure. Would the outcome have been notably different without them? Probably not.

The biggest single setback for Germany, driving deep into original German territory, happened while the US and Britain were pinned down in Belgium and Southern France by a tiny fraction of German assets. Without, the war might have gone on for up to another year, and the Soviets would have ended up owning all of Europe and, probably, Africa. We must be satisfied that that did not happen.

[deterministic]

The US did almost nothing for 4 years, except selling materials to Europe in return for gold. It only joined the war after Europeans had already killed more than 23 million Germans, and destroyed most of its military. Claiming that the US won the war is BS. The US was part of a large group of countries that won the war, all contributing to defeat the Nazis.

[AnimalMuppet]

Four years? Counting how? War in Europe began in September 1939. So the US didn't do anything until September 1943? Bull. (I mean, I guess they didn't land in Europe until Italy, which was 1943. But even though it wasn't in Europe, they were still fighting Germany in Africa in 1942.)

> It only joined the war after Europeans had already killed more than 23 million Germans, and destroyed most of its military.

German military casualties were only 5.3 million by the high estimate. Total German casualties were only 7.4 million by the high estimate - for the whole war. So... I don't know where you get your ideas, but they are objectively very wrong.

[mbrodersen]

So you agree that it took 4 years before the US entered the war in Europe. And yes I am probably wrong about the 23 million. It doesn’t change my conclusion though: the US spent 4 years on the side line selling weapons to Europe, and only joined the war after most of the German war machine was defeated.

[lmilcin]

Exactly. I was brought up in Poland during communist rule and even then nobody claimed US wasn't key to winning the war.

[baud147258]

if it was the soldiers making the decisions, it'd still be a group of people in comfortable offices looking at a map, they'd just be wearing uniforms while doing so. And I think (going back to Clausewitz), that military goals should be subordinated to the political goals of why there is a military action in the first place. And if it's the military that decides the political goals, they're in power and it's a junta.

[vinceguidry]

Any modern military defers field-level decision making to soldiers in the field. It’s become an absolute necessity as the post WW2 diplomatic regime put in requirements for individual soldiers to refuse illegal orders and making them personally liable for war crimes.

Individual soldiers don’t plan wars, obviously they don’t have a high enough level view to do that adequately. So much of war planning is logistics and not tactics or strategy. The idea is to get the troops there, make sure they have enough weapons and ammo, give them their objectives, then let field commanders do their jobs.

[RobRivera]

thats a great simplification for the nature of war. there is an entire school of thought among western nations that agrees that war is politics. Political influence in geopolitical situation is often enabled via primary instruments of Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic actions from a nation state or independent actors. each instrument retains different costs for their desired effects, and the very real cost of global nuclear annihilation is one of the defining characteristics of the cold war.

soldiers devotion to duty is ingrained in their head from day zero because they MUST be better than their enemies to win the fight, and the people in comfy chairs MUST devote themselves to the study and strategy of war, not tactics, to enable proper deployment of said soldiers. The danger is when innovation on the battlefield outpaces innovation in strategy, and leads to situations like the American Civil War and World War 1...real life meatgrinder horror.

[onetimemanytime]

>>people are profoundly evidence based. If there hasn't been a war in 30 years, then they assume there will not be a war next year no matter how the background is changing.

Not just that. Neighbor dies of COVID, people are careful for a few days. Then they forget what the virus can do

[loceng]

This is why the ideal scenario is the whole military is voluntary, meaning you're forced to make sure everyone is educated and trained well enough to understand the consequences of different scenarios, enough that people will volunteer when the time comes. Well, at least historically that's how it would work - now it's technology that's used without human life at stake, to those who send, and hopefully modern warfare will use AI and weapons that are designed for no collateral damage; destroy infrastructure and military tools, so if well targeted then soldiers et al will learn to simply avoid this infrastructure and tools and they will live.

[zaptheimpaler]

> The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is. There is a huge background risk that the age of abundance ends and then things get dicey.

Perhaps this is really what peace means. It is the security of being able to live and plan a life or a business without ever once worrying about "but what happens if there is a war?". The collective impact of that on psychological security and the free movement of goods, people, ideas across the world is huge.

[krapp]

Forgetting the past is what dooms us to repeat it.

[watwut]

On average, military tends to be more pro-war then civilians. Partly it is self-selection, partly it is values taught in training (values taught because they make you more effective soldier).

> The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces. There are too many people who just won't understand how bad and how possible total war is.

People who started WWII were WWI veterans - that is who Nazi leadership were. Starting from Hitler, through Goebbels, down the rank. Not being veteran was seen as weakness. For that matter, Stalin was veteran too.

[dctoedt]

> On average, military tends to be more pro-war then civilians.

A lot of veterans would disagree about your "on average" thought. Sure, there are belligerent vets out there, but most have a better idea about the not-so-good stuff that happens in a war.

[jariel]

That's not 'scary' it's rational.

What's 'scary' are the stakes involved.

People in 'comfortable offices' are right now deciding who gets vaccines, and who will not until later.

People are dying in the US due to lack of access to healthcare due to other people making decisions in 'comfortable offices'.

We entrust those in positions of power with such legitimate authority.

And finally: "I think this option is more favourable to us than peace" - is an inappropriate analogy because it's generally never the case. If the US were to have entered WW1 and 2 earlier, a lot of lives would have been saved. While those were easier decisions in hindsight, they're all nuanced, for example, the US+Coalition decision to liberate Kuwait after Saddam's incursion.

[jakubp]

Oh boy. In my country, memories of war (World War II in particular), tragedies, sacrifices, "heroes" etc. are continually fueled by the ruling party. They built hundreds of new monuments in the past 10 years, gave thousands of streets names related to their selection of war and post-war heroes, etc.

Let me tell you, this is the main way to drive nationalistic divide, because the other half of the people in the country recognize for what it is -- evil manipulation of people's emotions for political gain (through conflict, much like Trump was doing in US).

[golergka]

Nationalistic drive has nothing in common with the real memories of tragedies and horrors of the war.

[watwut]

You can remember sacrifices as horrors to not be repeated. Or you can remember sacrifices as aspirating thing, the one that motivates you to pick up the gun to go sacrifice yourself, so that you proves your manhood.

The latter is what militant regimes do and did.

[jakubp]

Thank you, you put it well. That is what I meant.

[toopok4k3]

But nationalistic drive has everything in common with how wars start.

[busterarm]

Nationalistic drive is more a symptom than anything.

Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars. It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.

And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.

[qsort]

Is there any evidence whatsoever to this claim? France, UK, US, Canada all have huge chronic trade deficits.

Weimar Republic's economic problems were mostly related to hyperinflation caused by their unsustainable debt, not sure how you're factoring trade deficits into that.

I agree nationalism is just an excuse like any other, but it's a remarkably good one: it's a cancerous mind virus that makes solving problems impossible, everyone is too busy calling everyone else unpatriotic or something.

[busterarm]

Not only could Germany not get any credit because of the Dawes plan, but the Great Depression caused Germany's creditors to start calling all existing loans.

It caused central banking failures all throughout Central Europe. Germany's banking system collapsed in the early 30s. In the wake of the Depression, European nations had very protectionist trade policies. With weakened international trade as a result of such policies, countries like Germany that did not have global empires had to resort to military force to acquire raw materials.

WWII was inevitable and that summary of the Weimar Republic's problems is overly-simplistic to the point of being misleading.

It's not enough just to look at trade imbalance from the lens of balance sheets. It's about what resources markets are (un)able to provide. You can look at the Opium wars similarly, which we think based on the name are about Opium but really were largely about the Silver trade from West to East and China's refusal to circulate that Silver back into the market.

Defecits are fine as long as everyone thinks they have reasonably fair access to the same resources. Notice the soft trade war that started mostly as a result of global manufacturing shifting to China and China's theft of IP...

[ersii]

In what way do nationalistic drive have everything in common with how wars start?

[kubanczyk]

Nationalistic drive is a great way to convert "that politician took away 2% of power from this politician" into "that nation offended our nation!!!1one1!" without any new facts happening. It's especially important within a democracy, because war would need huge popular support - and that support needs to be manufactured by media by pushing any emotional buttons available.

[arethuza]

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in American, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Hermann Goering

[bluGill]

Historically that is false. The common farmer might want to come back to the land - but his younger brother needs to leave the farm because it can't support him! Thus those younger brothers have nothing to gain by coming back to the farm. Their gains can only be found in being really great at something the city needs (cities are less than 5% of the population because farms don't have enough surplus to support more than that, so this is worse than farming), or winning a war and making a farm on the enemies land. If the war is fought to a stalemate, but only one of the two brothers returns back to the farm that is okay too.

The sexist language is historically correct. Sorry ladies, history wasn't kind to you in general.

[TeMPOraL]

For a war to be supported by people (soldiers, and in democracies, civilians as well), they need to view the other side as the Other side. The Enemy. The Others.

Nationalism is about building a strong us/them split, about having people internalize clear categories of Our Nation and The Others. This directly facilitates war.

[pbhjpbhj]

Current evidence suggests it works pretty well in fomenting civil division as a precursor to a coup.

[tpoacher]

Agreed. If anything, it serves the opposite: it creates this false glorification image of war as a noble pursuit.

[jakubp]

I made a mistake. I was responding to the first commenter's words "The fading of WWII in the public memory could be argued as the biggest single risk that society faces". And in my view, the continued attempts at making people remember the war are a very bad,destructive thing, because they are used to political ends. Will remember next time to quote :)

[Haga]

Nukes prevent total war. The people in those offices care about themselve.