My regulars know that I am an anti-war person…after seeing it first hand I firmly believe that few are inevitable but it would take rational thought to prevent….
I am NOT saying that ALL war is unnecessary just most wars……
This is where I insert my usual historic perspective…..(to the chagrin to some)…..but people need to think about the wars we have and the necessity for them at all….
The breakout of World War I upended many lives, including those of two great thinkers: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and the American journalist Randolph Bourne.
The young Mises had just revolutionized the economics of money and the business cycle. And he was on the verge still more breakthroughs when his career was interrupted by the Great War. Other economists in Austria were given cushy assignments in war planning offices. But Mises, who was radically out of step with prevailing politics, was sent to the front lines as an artillery officer.
Source: The Sociology of War – Antiwar.com Original by — Antiwar.com
I wish that the American people would wake up and show a little more concern for the endless wars that we are now fighting……when the dying starts it is then too late to care…..
“Philosophy’s first and most general task, in the war against anger and fear, is to make things clear—to give the soul an understanding of its own situation and its possibilities. . . . the anxiety that gives rise to strife can be put to flight only by knowledge and self-knowledge . . . . Anxiety is the soul’s darkness, philosophy its light. . . . The triumph of philosophy, in short, is a triumph not through political action . . . but within each human soul in relation to itself—as the soul learns . . . to understand and accept the ways in which a human life is necessarily vulnerable and incomplete, to be willing to live as a soft body rather than an armed fortress.”
Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994)
All that requires thought….and I doubt that is possible anymore….
The dying is VERY one-sided. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, but I’ll hazard a guess that the numbers of American dead to “Sand Negro” dead are at least 1:100,000. As for displacing, wounding and the ruination of lives…the ratio is probably several times that. But nobody over here cares if they were Enemy Combatants, or just ordinary Civilians. Their lives are worth less than the lives of blacks during slavery. Just another dead savage.
But in all the body counts & the (minimal) press coverage focuses on the only lives that matter on the planet, American ones. (Hmm, why do they hate you again?) But it’s worse than that. Even those American bodies don’t matter much to Americans because:
1) Everyone is self-obsessed now, the only life that counts is your own.
2) Nobody notices. I mean, Blowchunks547 tweeted a picture of his date passed out naked.
3) The American dead didn’t count when they were alive in America. They were “disposable” over here and they got “disposed of” over there. The Volunteer Army has made American culture more insensitive to their plight. “They volunteered, so they knew the risk.”
So as long as none of these lives matter, the Perpetual War will just keep chugging along like a runaway locomotive, smashing everything in its way.
An excellent summation….I cannot argue with a thing you have written….well done.
Bourne is one of the greatest authors of his generation and should be looked at today. Mises and Bourne may have agreed on war issues, but they differed greatly on economic views. For the most part we live in the world of Mises.
Thanx for the comment and I agree….chuq