Has war ever worked?

[jamison2000e]

Torture and war do not work as well as education (simple fix to the world). Has war ever worked? Can history now prove that war doesn’t work? I know wars have helped built superpowers and occasionally a somewhat decent educational system, but at what cost?
I guess education is just going to be a long slow process.

[Mikal]

Hi Jamison...war has only worked to sustain culture and is about the enculturation of patriotism into the masses. This allows generals and admirals to play war games in the threatre of conquest of smaller nations.

Recently in another thread we were discussing the law, thou shalt not kill and to kill justifies imprisonment, which most posters said is for the protection of society.

However I suggested we take the idea of the protection of society to a more complex level by realizing that when a nation declares war on what they see as an offending nation the law thou shalt not kill becomes thou shalt kill and something as simple as a UNIFORM makes killing permissable and makes the suppossed offending nation an enemy. In all this the idea of protecting society is forfieted for the masses live amongst the war, the killing, the bloodshed, bombs, destruction of their cities and towns and the demolishing of any sense of sanity they once had in their lives...

The masses do this because it is enculturated in to bleed and die for your country. It allows as I said for generals and admirals to design and live war games and pin numerous medals on their uniforms all the while standing at attention at the graveside of innocent young and older lives slaughtered in a battle against their own humankind who in a solitary command became their supposed insidious enemy. Then when the war is over, a simple change to let us say your blue jeans tosses you back to the other law...thou shalt not kill....

It seems between not being allowed to kill and being allowed to kill lies a strange environment only understood by the manipulators of the masses...that is until you wake up and then you see how it was all an illusion....


Mikal

[labelwench]

My father, an East German, was a soldier for his country, and later came to Canada and served this nation.

That he married the favorite daughter of Col. John Wise, wounded by the Germans during the first world war, was a dischord in the family.

Raised as an army brat, we spent three years in West Germany with the peace keeping forces. After he left the army, my father was an underground miner. When the mine closed he had to go to a distant vocational school to learn a new trade, as being a soldier and labourer was all he had known.

I have known first hand, the personal conflicts of a man who was trained from an early age to be one of an elite fighting force.

There is no going back to a normal life, except on the surface. To those men and women who, through no fault of their own, have been swept into war, and served that we may know the freedoms we have in this nation, I have nothing but respect.

I walk the middle path, and hope it may always be open to me.

For all the conflicts and war presently underway, I weep. There are no "winners" of conflict.

[austintorn@aol.com]

President Nixon was giving me an opportunity to die in Vietnam, but luckily for me I didn't spend much time on that direct front. Some rockets came into a fort a Long Binh, but they missed me. Then I went back to my Hawaii base.

Good we won World War II, I think. So maybe we could say that that worked.

[Mikal]

Its sad there was ever a world war....


Mikal

[austintorn@aol.com]

Its sad there was ever a world war....


Yes, and perhaps we would have been even more encultured now if the other side had won.

World War III looms on the horizon. Hope our science guys have gotten us ready for it.

[labelwench]

The following excerpts are taken from an article that appeared in Mail Online. The link takes you to the complete article which is cites a London stage production, tited War Horse. LW

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/co...came-back.html

We know that World War I killed some ten million fighting men, almost 800,000 of them British.
Much less known is the fate of a million hapless horses, sent to France between 1914 and 1918. Only 62,000 returned. War Horse offers a glimpse of the experiences that befell them.
Man has been exploiting animals for centuries. But there is a pathos about the plight of horses conscripted to suffer in conflicts which they, unlike their riders

As the carnage grew, British stables could no longer supply the Army's needs, as many horses were needed at home for farms and transport. Animals were bought in Canada and the U.S., to be shipped across the Atlantic.

Many of the horses and ponies which served with Allenby's army, fighting the Turks in Palestine, came from Australia. Australian cavalry took part in some of the last traditional charges in history, during the advance on Jerusalem in 1917.

Here, instead, is a real-life account of the 7th Dragoon Guards charging during the Battle of the Somme on 14 July 1916, as seen by a British gunnery officer: 'An incredible sight, an unbelievable sight.
They galloped up with their lances and pennants flying.
"They were falling all the way, as the German guns played on the infantry. They simply galloped on through all that, horses and men dropping with no hope against the machine-guns. It was a magnificent sight. Tragic."

[austintorn@aol.com]

RECOLLECTIONS OF WAR
(IN VIETNAM)

A fading eagle flew frozen in fear
Past deserted flowers in desperate land,
And a rising earth halted for a hasty madness
As time awaited a dead sun.

Remember now the beginning, one fine day,
When we came out of nowhere!
In no cradle birth, one thunderous heartbeat
separated animal from plant,

And, we stood up straight one day,
Our minds still a drunk’s uneven crawling;
Later, in the breath of life, we knew that
A churchyard must yawn now and then.

But now we are helpless—
We must fight to our worthless deaths, dying,
Screaming forgiveness, but, die as we must
When peace is a barren land.

Daily now, one grips less firmly his last integrity,
The essential life slips.

Where are the grown men, stuffed and rigid?
Where are they? Where?
They are so silent and meaningless to us now.
They are no longer with us.

And throughout the aftermath
We could almost grasp it in our dreams,
And hope that we might live to die
Far from the River of Perfumes.

Meanwhile, we are dying to live everyday
As we surrender our souls.
Around us we see the bodies—
They lie upon us; they died among us.

Rising to our last stand we look:
Where are the grown men, the old men?
We thought that we were loved then,
But we’ve been betrayed, sold, lost ...

Shall I try for fading woods,
Scrambling over the trails, searching for my life?
I’ll flee and fly over the leaves of yesterday—
They crumble before my eyes.

And there I’ll come out of it all
With firm desire to laugh, love, and live—
There in a hilly grove
Near swelling stream by daisies, grass, and tree.

Once more I escape the horrid death
As the grown men approach;
I try to see my way past
The swiftly moving figures of the human race.

Even now, those men with guns so loud
Are silently dying in the strife.
Living in a time nigh for sighing,
We rise for dying.
Can this be life?

Of course, all this it was our duty to bear;
We bled our blood; we served.
And during the lull of the monsoon rains,
I began to drink, to honor my life—
To hope, as dawn comes,
Much like a Chinese painting—
Too real to be true.

I wake the artillery-man,
And cross the Song Ba to disarm the claymores.
Now it is lovely April and we’re dying
On this fine day in the time of our life.

Slightly sighing for crying Charlie,
My bayonet blazes in scarlet, in death,
And yet another hasty man
Gropes for the earth and escapes this horrid life.

But there, on a cloud of thought,
We fly by their ways with a life for ourselves.
And, then, they wither with the wind,
Those thoughts that once echoed,
Where they once were teeming, fighting...
The forums now emptied.

There is only room to say
“Let us kill him,” as wrath’s way becomes us,
And there in the cells of a brain
Where currents of feeling once surged,
The mind’s will falters, and waivers
Between the Emotion and the Intellect.

A shrill siren chilled with ill will,
Then, when he was yet young and fine—
Houses were crumbling, streets were heaving,
People were weeping, dying;

And others wished to live,
From brothers to mothers—all lived but the father;
Can you see the tears in the young one’s eyes
As the deathman cometh?

The love and the feeling were nowhere,
The men motionless and rigid,
And, too, the air was not worth breathing,
But, was filled and smothering,

Leaving the men breathless, helpless,
and, of course, so lifeless.
The blight was so deathtaking;
The sight of goodness never so breathtaking.

Once in awhile I’ll wince in a smile for truth,
Cringe at the fringe of love;
It is my dream,
A star shining somewhere in the universe—
I can see it there in all of its dimness,
Through the plight of my brightness.

It is there forever and still;
It is there while the thinkers thought for ages,
As dreamers dreamt time after time,
When hoped even the hopeless,

As slept the sleepers into oblivion,
While philosophers pondered infinitum,
As wept the weepers for a long time,
When pitied even the pitiful . . .

All that I saw on Earth was lost.
There hated the loveless in the wasteland.
There the dying lived for a lifetime
As all the wise men greyed and died.
So now I’ll let my “enemies” grow old
As my wine yet flows sweet and pure.

Here comes the slush of doom seeping over us,
Belching with contagion.
The pleas of the corrupt fly out;
They cry out; their lives are snuffed out!
The Good Friday mourners yet weep for man,
For everyone, for eternity.

At life’s end
The silent men array themselves, finally—
There for the asking
In the stead of the dead,
Prisoners of themselves.

Cautious Pilate ponders,
As there my star shines in the springtime of life.
The star is a beacon in the night of terror,
Fading in the search for the valiant.

How can I live, how can I die?
Look around—there are other worlds!
See, the grass is high and green
On the far side of never.

Find for me the sun shining, the streams flowing,
The forests, the fertile meadows.

The soldiers moved slowly now
To make their lives last,
A searching band;
And fighting has flared on the border;
Now hurry death or hurry darkness.

Deciding at last, I made an easy day of it,
Staring life in the face, indulging
In a vast wonderland and wilderness
Of childish fancy and fantasy,

And I laughed a lot louder then,
Feeling no need to weep in pity for them,
Or to cry for the scoundrels
Who would grasp at life from graves in war.

It was then that I saw the life,
The awe, the infinite,
The good, and my end.

To see where my youth and laughter could go,
I lived and died to be free;
My mind took no mind;
Yes it was good to be loved then,
To be young again.

[Profpat]

" War What's it Good for; Absolutely Nothing "

But the USA did get California, Texas, etc from wars with Mexico. I think the Mexicans are taking it back.

Israel was born from war.

Some of the inventions which came from wars or military: Penils, Cans, Burberry's Trench Coat, The Jet Engine, Radar, Sonar, The Microwave Oven, Atomic Bomb and Atomic Power, The Internet, Etc.

War, Famine, Pestilence, Disease, grim reapers of life, and yet we have them.

" War what's it good for....?

[austintorn@aol.com]

If we gave Texas back, then, I guess, President Bush would have to go back with it.

Severe personal disputes can mirror some of those of war:

1. The best state is helping

2. The neutral state is neither hurting nor helping.

3. The lowest state is to lash out, hurting.

Those employing state 3 are two levels removed from the top, this often being an unbridgeable gap, as it is hard enough to even know the next level up. Plus, they are at the lowest level possible—the absolute bottom. Even worse, and there always is with this 3rd state, it invites retribution.