War! Huh! Yeah, what is it good for?
Filling up textbook in history classes. Say it again.
War! Huh! Yeah, what is it good for?
Spontaneously supercharging the push for new technologies.
Er...
The truth is that I don't like war. From a philosophical standpoint, all it is is the use of the apparatus of the state, to justify the murder of some other country's people; for some usually tenuous and dubious goal. In general, a war in principle is a complete failure of diplomacy, which some people get to decorate themselves with medals afterwards for taking part in it.
This is the 105th anniversary of the disastrous landing by ANZAC troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in a campaign that would ultimately prove to be useless; in a war which was in all honesty completely pointless.
After four and a half years, millions of people lay dead in the fields of Europe; for what essentially was an argument between nine cousins that got way out of hand. If they'd been locked in a room in May of 1914 and had been told to sort out their differences, then no-one would have have had to show up, and it wouldn't have kicked off a second time a generation later.
The only difference at the end of all the fighting was that hundreds of millions of lives were ruined early. All of the princes, kings, clowns that caper in their sawdust rings, and ordinary people who are like you and me, ended up in the same place. There ain't no place like a hole in the ground!
I don't want to take anything away from the professionalism of military personnel, nor the bravery of people who fought on the battlefield, nor do I want to minimize the terrible losses and heartache paid by the families who suffer but I do not think that the vast majority of wars are remotely necessary.
The people who seem to get the most glory from wars are a similar class of people who would get rewards from the regular economy. There is more of a meritocracy in the military but the people who rise through the ranks and become generals majors, often get there because of patronage and connection.
When it comes to the waging of negotiations, or rather the lack thereof in a l of cases, that sends a nation's sons and daughters off to become bits of exploded meat on the fields of some far away place, it is not the people who have to do the work who make the decisions. The coin of the battlefield is the blood of the nation's sons and the people who get to spend that coin, often bear no consequence for doing so. It as if they feel that they have no responsibility to the nation whatsoever.
We should remember the sacrifice that people have paid but by the same token we should remain very very angry that men in offices many thousands of miles away, exacted that sacrifice. I don't even mean the toll exacted by the enemy because on both sides, it was shopkeepers and tradespeople, clerks, and academics, who otherwise would have had no reason for animosity at all; yet by the vissitudes of fate, they find themselves at either ends of rifles pointed at each other.
Just think about Gallipoli. Johnny Turk would have preferred to be at home reading the newspaper on Saturday and noodling around his back yard with his kids as much as Billy Brown from Sydney Town. A hundred years later, their grandkids might have grandkids of their own who want to play footy with each other. 105 years later, I want to go to Mo's place and have a barbeque.
To that end, what did the First World War actually achieve? From our point of view which is more than a century later and where literally nobody who fought in it is still alive? Nothing. It redrew some lines on a map which in the long run of things are all up for contest anyway, it made a lot of people dead, homeless, poor, and a very select few rich and famous. Oh wow. Big deal.
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