Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

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> Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering.

Indeed. What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was, and of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointed to the possibility that World War 3 could be even worse. Several times during that long peace the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of war, only to be pulled back by leaders on both sides who remembered the horrors the war unleashed and didn't want to see them unleashed again.

President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, had both seen the war first-hand -- Kennedy in a PT boat in the Pacific, Khrushchev as a political commissar in the struggle against the Germans on the Eastern Front. When the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, Khrushchev explicitly called on Kennedy to let those experiences guide him to step back (http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/cuba...):

Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you.

So the question is -- what happens when everyone who carries those memories is long dead? When the leaders only know what war, real war, is from dusty history books and rah-rah action movies? Will they be as willing to swallow their pride in order to pull back from the brink as those who already lived through it once were?

> What worries me is how deeply dependent that peace has been on policymakers having living memories of how terrible World War 2 actually was

I worry about the same thing, and not just policymakers but the public too. I hypothesize that a few behaviors are connected to it:

* The disregard for the importance of the multilateral international institutions built after WWII: The UN, the EU, the WTO, the Geneva Conventions, and the general rules-based international order. Many conservatives seem to describe these as naive, idealistic and unrealistic, but these institutions were built by the survivors of WWI and WWII. They knew far more of war than we do; if anyone is naive, it's us.

* The war-mongering: Within a large segment of U.S. political arena, people compete to show who is most aggressive with the use of the military, as if to prove that they are not 'liberal'. War is not a last resort for them, but almost a first choice.

* The embrace of ideology and nationalism: It seems to me that a lesson of the World Wars is that nationalism and dogmatic ideology leads inexorably to war, and integration with your neighbors and pluralism prevents it. But now xenophobic nationalism and extreme ideologues, unmoderated by skepticism, are mainstream, from the U.S. to Europe to East Asia to the Middle East. We all know where that ends.

* The civilian-military divide and the glorification of the military: Also a product of the move to an all-volunteer force, few Americans have experience in the military or know someone who does, a far remove from the days of WWII or the draft. The results (based on what is written about more and more): Civilians that recklessly send people to the horrors of war (see "war-mongering", above); a military that resents the burden they carry for the civilians; and a highly partisan military. Another result is the recent glorification of the military: Around WWII (and other wars during the draft era), when a large portion of the public had military experience, the military was associated with terms like SNAFU and Catch-22, a bureaucratic disaster that soldiers had to overcome. Now, from a distance, with so few having familiarity with its realities, the military is glorified by civilians. It's almost unpatriotic to criticize it (which incidentally creates a lack of accountability that endangers the personnel we claim to care so much about).

  > the military is glorified by civilians.
  > It's almost unpatriotic to criticize it

I think that's because many people are unable to separate the idea of criticizing the decisions the military makes, or the fact that we're at war in ${Country}, from having respect for the courageous men and women willing to be soldiers.

You can see the same divisive narrative in the discussions of Bad Behavior by Police in the US (any criticism is derided as "hating the police", rather than opposing behavior), or in the discussions about Snowden's revelations.

Loving and Supporting someone doesn't mean that you agree with their behavior, nor does it mean that you don't hold them responsible for poor/illegal/destructive choices. I can hold deep respect for our soldiers and the jobs they do, while still feeling that we should not be sending them to kill/die in remote locations, or while criticizing the way we treat our enemies in prisons. For many people, they seem either unable or unwilling to take a nuanced view like that.

What you get is the current middle eastern situation. Everyone believed invading Iraq would be quick and easy, which it was, and that the reconstruction would be like the post-WW2 reconstruction of Europe, which it really wasn't.

Even WWII was started on the assumption that it would be a quick and relatively painless war. I suspect that modern missile technology makes this assumption flatly invalid.

Actually, is there some analysis on that?

I always suspected that, with all the high-tech equipment, after the initial stockpile is gone (and a few hundred planes is not a lot if you look at WW2), it's much harder to scale up production (if one country alone even produces all the necessary parts like semiconductors, rocket engines, etc.).

It's probably not going to be a free for all but a 2-3 sided conflict with alliances of several countries on either.

US+EU+allies can probably manufacture all the war machines they need, as does China+allies.

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