Thread: War, what is it good for........

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Is there, and can there ever be "honour" in war?


some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature,[2] others argue it is a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

Originally Posted by crackerjack101

Is there, and can there ever be "honour" in war?

Can there ever be? I think your cart is before your horse crackers.

War has been a glorified and highly honourable pastime throughout history and seen as an inevitable part of human tribal behaviour.

It is only in the last 100 years or so that it has started to be seen more as tragic, costly and best avoided and also practically avoidable through diplomacy and the increasing ties of gentle commerce.

Originally Posted by Looper

War has been a glorified and highly honourable pastime throughout history

glorified and honored by whom, is a question?

Originally Posted by crackerjack101

Originally Posted by Looper

War has been a glorified and highly honourable pastime throughout history

glorified and honored by whom, is a question?

Part of the remuneration of soldiering is in honour. You are glorified by your tribe for putting your life on the line.

The payback is in renown and respect and in greater opportunities to slip your nasty oily eel into bedazzled females.

That is why soldiers have traditionally had colourful dress uniforms with epaulettes and braids and shiny buttons (it is not for camouflage). So they can advertise their glorious exploits and reap the non-financial component of their remuneration package.

Warriors have been glorified in songs and poetry for centuries or millennia. It is only in the last hundred years that society has taken a step back and started to say that maybe war is not something to be glorified quite as much as it once was since there are now other means to resolving international disputes and the cost of war in a globalised economy is higher than it used to be.

Big big business.

Honor has more than one meaning. Just because somebody was honored does not mean their actions were honorable.

Kudos to the b0bbles with that insight.

Honour is generally associated with culturally backwards confrontational social practices such as honour killings for wanton young females and their paramours and fights to the death between rednecks because one of them looked at the other one's can of beer in the wrong way or muttered something or jumped the queue on the pool table.

It is past its sell by date as a concept in the 21st century for cognitively advance apes like us.

Originally Posted by Looper

Kudos to the b0bbles with that insight.

Honour is generally associated with culturally backwards confrontational social practices such as honour killings for wanton young females and their paramours and fights to the death between rednecks because one of them looked at the other one's can of beer in the wrong way or muttered something or jumped the queue on the pool table.

Only if you're some bottom-feeding pond dweller. For civilized people honour is about doing the right thing and putting others before yourself. I'm fully aware that both these concepts will be utterly incomprehensible to most posters here.

"War is a racket." ~ Smedley Butler

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [i] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

continued here:
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

War is not a racket. War is not about making money. That is a tedious and boring cliched pile of twaddle trundled out with great frequency by folk who want other folk to think they are clever and in the know about the fiendish machinations of the world of evil big business.

Yes a few people make money out of war but it is generally costly and expensive and most governments will go to great lengths to avoid a war.

War is a primitive negative-sum method of conflict resolution between coalitions of humans (and a few other higher order sentient creatures). It is certainly not about making money.

Fortunate to have seen the great man live back in the 90's...

Crank up the volume...

Fooking tune...

War is the enemy of civilization. We cannot grow through war it drags us down and fills our hearts with hatred and thoughts of revenge. Trade is the key every country has something to offer and something they need to buy. And as we trade we learn skills from those we trade with.


M Gandhi.

Originally Posted by birding

War is the enemy of civilization. We cannot grow through war it drags us down and fills our hearts with hatred and thoughts of revenge. Trade is the key every country has something to offer and something they need to buy. And as we trade we learn skills from those we trade with.


M Gandhi.

‘There can be no partnership between the brave and the effeminate. We are regarded as cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms...‘

M. Gandhi


War is a way of controlling the population of species at the top of the food chain. It's fooking inconvenient but without it we will all starve...

Troy....

Originally Posted by Looper

War is not a racket. War is not about making money. That is a tedious and boring cliched pile of twaddle trundled out with great frequency by folk who want other folk to think they are clever and in the know about the fiendish machinations of the world of evil big business.

Yup...Major General Smedley Butler("War Is A Racket"), twaddlemeister.

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I. Butler is well known for having later become an outspoken critic of U.S. wars and their consequences, as well as exposing the Business Plot, an alleged plan to overthrow the U.S. government.

By the end of his career, Butler had received 16 medals, five for heroism. He is one of 19 men to receive the Medal of Honor twice, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor, and the only Marine to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.

Originally Posted by Smedley Darlington Butler

Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

That would be fair to say in days gone by when wars were fought to save the face of kings, religious organisations and ideological dictators. The major world powers nowadays are democracies and wars are very rarely fought at all between them and are generally fought for more valid democratically agreed reasons than once was the case.

Originally Posted by SKkin

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable

The separate position he is proposing (this was apparently almost a century ago that he made these statements so hardly a fresh point of view) is that war is a racket to make money. This is patently nonsense. There are far better ways to increase the wealth of civilised populations than to send them to war with a neighbour. I don't think there was ever a point in history when war itself was a racket to make money.

In the age of empires war was a means to and end of conquest which added wealth to the conqueror (and subtracted it from the conquered) but it seems as if he is suggesting that the activity of war itself is a money-making racket which is not and never has been true.

Some people make money out of war but war itself as a whole has always been a negative sum game so it is not a wealth-creation racket.

The Second World War was a direct result of the Great Depression and the instrument of it's end. Major Wars are fought to rebalance the financial system, by depreciating currency and stealing savings.

War, what is it good for........

I met Edwin Starr a few times in the 90s... didn't get the chance to ask him ....always meant to..I regret it now of course

“Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose kind of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it? No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.”

― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

Originally Posted by Begbie

The Second World War was a direct result of the Great Depression and the instrument of it's end.

IMHO WW2 was as a direct result of WW1. There was no real end to WW1, the USA never ratified the peace treaty, which was more an attempt to humiliate than seek peace. Treating an armistice as surrender was not the smartest leaf in the book....

Obviously something as complex as a world war does not have a single cause. It has many causes and cannot be a 'direct result' of anything. However one of the biggest causes of WWII may come as complete surprise to some... It was Adolf Hitler.



It is not often that fate brings someone with a narcissistic personality, a deep conviction of the supreme destiny of their nation and an ultra-nationalistic, profoundly racist and dangerously extreme ideology to the helm of power.

If Adolf had been killed in any of the numerous attempts on his life in the 30s there is a better than even chance that WWII would never have happened.

You might think Trump is bad news but Hitler was the real deal.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

honour is about doing the right thing

Honour is quite often about doing the morally wrong thing in the context of a 21st century moral framework.

It is a notion of the honour of a family over the autonomy of their daughter that drives an Asian subcontinental man to burn his daughter to death.

Honour causes men to fight sometimes to the death over relatively trivial matters when the modern rational approach would be to let an insult go.