[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 :)