[mindslight]

> It's possible that they unconsciously believe war is something they bring to others, never something others bring to them

Spot on. As an American who is quite critical of the imperialist dynamic, I still catch myself thinking this way. Like "what if Iran actually attacks something around me?" But it's war, shouldn't one expect that an enemy might attack at any point?! Except, we just don't think of war as something that might have direct repercussions for us personally, which is why most of us vote for chucklefuck leaders who start them so readily.

[fastasucan]

This is interesting. Even though its many years ago most of Europe have a big open wound from WWII. That might be a missing ingredient for the american people to be less trigger happy when it comes to bombing other countries. The act of bombing a school full of children would have turned everything on its head in my country.

[mindslight]

Your "big open wound" is my country's stepping into what was still mostly an elective war, saving the day, coming out as the head of a global economic empire, and being lauded for all of it - including well after the war itself for being the alternative to the more direct-subjugation-based empire of the USSR.

I'm not saying this to brag or something, but to drive home how radically different the perspectives are. Even our stories that are fundamentally tragedies (eg Saving Private Ryan) are still tales of distant heroic sacrifice, rather than the nihilistic smothering of helpless humans that war actually is. And to that above-it-all entitlement, we've mixed a cocktail of religious fundamentalism to help with the rationalization.

Vietnam was seemingly the only time since that there has been serious society-wide anti-war sentiment, and that's because people were being forcibly conscripted against their individual will. They fixed that by (effectively) removing the draft, while the economic treadmill was turned up such that more people "volunteered".