Gorilla warfare is no monkey business!
I canāt decide if I agree with you or not. It seems plausible that in feudal times, life was such constant warfare that it was impossible to imagine any alternative. Weāve inherited so much social infrastructure from that time, it seems completely obsolete, compared to the weapons our soldiers are fighting with now.
Back in 2003, I totally believed that if enough citizens voiced objection to Iraq, that the government would listen. I was wrong. Now it seems to me that itās not so much the support of the people thatās needed to fight a war, but the absence of meaningful resistance to that war. I donāt see a much support for Afghanistan these days, but neither do I see much objection either. As long as its not our own sons and fathers and husbands and friends dying, we seem content to let Unocal have their fucking pipeline after all. Not so much a matter of support, as externalising the costs far enough away that people donāt care so much.
The biggest propaganda coup this century so far, is to make terrorism the new normal, so we hardly blink an aye when a swat team is called to a high school. If you can normalize that, then an extralegal war in some oil state far away should be easy.
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No, I think we might be in agreement here. I think that from about the mid-19th century to the late 20th (and maybe beyond) the state of warfare changed. it went from something that the state did not feel the need to justify to their populations, to one that they had to get some sort of consent for. Hence the rise of propaganda to promote the cause of war.
Keep in mind, Iām not really arguing there that peasants/comment people were not impacted by war, but that the notion of consent was just not part of waging war. Whether or not things were more or less violent, I honeslty canāt say. I just think it was different. One could make the argument that the 20th century was the most violent century on record - I think that people who lived in central Europe from about the early 1920s to the early 1950s might agree with that assessment. But we also live in a time where the impact of these things on common people are far more documented than even a couple of hundred years ago. Think about all the narratives about the holocaust we have, and that has been extended to other groups, not just the Jewish population of Europe that managed to survive. We probably have a clearer picture of the human costs of WW2 than of any other war in history. I think thatās a good thing to have, actually. I would like to think it makes clear how destructive war actually isā¦
I suppose you could look at one region to test that. The Balkans might provide a good example. We talk about the western fronts of both world wars, but in reality, I think East, central, and the Balkans were much worse off during the 20th century. The Balkans with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century really started to see far more violence than the period when the Ottomans had pretty firm control of much of that region. But again, thatās just one location on earth, one feudal, imperial system. Europe at that time was far more chaotic than the European Ottoman landsā¦
I think youāre right about the Iraq war. they wanted it and they got it.
And the militarization of police is terrifying if you ask me. They tend to use these more aggressive methods if they have access to them. Incidents like this are becoming far too common.
Heh. Splendid typo 
Thatās what I get for posting when Iām working on my prospectus!
This page has some facts that may help explain why people speak about WWI the way they still do. While WWI may rank as possibly the third most deadly war in recorded history, that doesnāt record all the losses. Remember, by WWI people could survive massive trauma, and men and boys came home both physically and mentally horribly torn apart.
To further discuss the comparison of death in war: Location and whether or not āyour peopleā are being killed really does matter when looking at how people perceive losses.
Here in America, weāre often told how many U.S. soldiers and civilians died in the Iraq War (4,424). More than 1,000 Iraqis, all civilians, died just this June.
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