Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?
This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.
This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?
It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.
Oppose these ideas and these tactics, HN.
Yes, and the same happens in other posts on HN. This says a lot about HN's Overton window.
War is horrific in the short term, but everyone on this site has benefited from it in some form. Much of the internet came out of military research, as did flight, as did satellites, as did many nautical advances, the list goes on.
Whether those benefits are worth it and on what scale could be the subject of a dissertation, but we don't want to become the Eloi any more than we want to be the Morlocks.
Just because the concept can be twisted into pointless war mongering by fascists doesn't make it less true. For my part I think climate change alone is going to provide enough national challenges.
the people blabbering about war as a means of national rejuvenation are usually the ones not planning on bleeding out in a muddy ditch. 30 million people died in WWI and not much was rejuvenated
And military research is a result of war or potential war. And if you want to deny the lack of the military's influence in human flight, I'm not even sure what to say to that. Aircraft were adopted by militaries around the world as soon as they were viable. And military observation balloons go back to the 18th century. The military may not have invented human flight, but they funded a crap ton of it.
That's because nobody on this site has died from it.
My point was that war is not always entirely negative if you zoom out far enough. It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things. Would you rather the British to have surrendered to Hitler and the Americans refuse to fight in WWII?
And therefore your claim that everyone here has benefited from it suffers from significant survivor bias.
> It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things.
Sure. But we've seen way too many examples of people selling how wonderful a war would be (and you're flirting dangerously close to that). War's not wonderful. It's horrible. Only fight it when the alternative is even more horrible (which is not never).
Things that are wonderful aren't sad to imagine. Nor am I saying anything resembling calling a war "wonderful". I hear a lot of accusations and assumptions of intent with few real arguments other than "war bad".
From where I sit the conversation appears to go like:
Person 1: War bad.
Person 2: War sometimes good in certain contexts...
Person 1: NO! WAR ALWAYS BAD YOU FASCIST COWARD!!!
Depends on two things:
1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome).
2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.
Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term.
The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition:
> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.
> And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".
Emphasis on "as sad as it is to imagine". That doesn't sound all that nationalistic to me in the traditional sense. More like admitting that terrible sacrifices are sometimes necessary to preserve a country's strength. You may see a technically "peaceful" (without open war) transition as preferable, but it's an equally coherent opinion that in such a transition the violence simply takes different forms and in aggregate is no less destructive, and perhaps even more damaging.
Essentially it's the age-old argument of what's worse? Negative/unjust peace or war? Automatically calling arguments for the latter "nationalist" sounds like an attempt at dismissive guilt-by-association, depending on how specifically you define the word.
It's a natural assumption, I think in the aftermath of the excesses of 20th century warfare Western society (assuming you live in the west) at large overcompensated with an "all physical violence is bad, anyone who suggests using it is wrong" message permeating everything, particularly the educational systems, which has produced a broad cultural bias that should be accounted for in discussions like this.