Timeline to the next war?

Roberta posed an interesting question this morning, and answered it.

Y'know what the upper-limit boundary to the time between really honkin' big wars is?  The lifespan of the participants in the previous one.  Seriously, check your history books.  Oh, you'll get a few outliers and there's regional variations, but about the time the bulk of the guys who fought amidst massive loss of life are dead, another opportunity to look at people's inside on a large scale comes along.

There's more at the link.

Earthbound Misfit picked up the ball.

War is a messy business. A war between nations who possess nuclear weapons and the means to attack with them anywhere on Earth may turn out very badly, indeed. And then, it is not uncommon for famine to follow war like a ragged stepchild. If nuclear weapons are widely used, a global famine is almost a certainty, a famine that no amount of "prepping" will ensure survival from its effects. Not to mention that when things break down like that, disease is almost certain.

But the Russians have almost forgotten the suffering of the Great Patriotic War, suffering that was severe enough to deter the leaders of the Soviet Union from getting into a general war. The Chinese have almost forgotten the massive suffering of their civil war and the second Sino-Japanese War. As for our own warhawks, the oceanic moats have kept the effects of war away from our soil for 150 years (200 years since foreign armies trod on our soil). But the oceans will not keep ICBMs away. If nuclear weapons are indeed used, only a starry-eyed fool would believe that there would be any distinction drawn between "tactical" and "strategic" nuclear uses.

It takes all sides to a potential conflict to keep the peace and work things out. It only takes one side to start a war.

Again, more at the link.

I think both of them are absolutely correct.  There are so few people in our society today with personal, halitosis-range experience of battle, bloodshed and death that to most of us, war's become more of a sanitized Hollywood entertainment image than the horrific ghastliness it really is.  Relative to the whole of the society in which we live, very few people have witnessed a friend killed in battle;  very few people have had a friend raped and murdered in a conflict without borders;  very few people have lived through extended civil strife, subject to all the hazards and horrors of that environment;  very few people remember what it means, and what it costs, to live in the shattered ruins of a nation - for that matter, an entire continent.

In our ignorance of what those things actually mean - actually feel like to experience - we're blind, as a society, to the reality of war.  It's all too easy for the demagogues to whip up emotions and feelings to get the war they want.  As William Randolph Hearst said to one of his correspondents before the Spanish-American War, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war".  He did - and the same tactics are now in play in Russia versus Ukraine, and China versus Japan, and the USA versus radical Islam.  We haven't learned much from history at all.

What's even scarier is the blindness of those who so glibly talk about armed resistance to the US government if and/or when their disagreements with it become too great for them to bear.  They utterly fail to realize the extent of the suffering that would be unleashed in this country if their strident calls became reality.  The South was devastated by the Civil War, and took generations to recover.  If a new civil war breaks out, expect the same thing to happen over far greater areas of the country - and expect the carnage to be beyond your worst nightmares.  With so much of our population now urbanized, utterly dependent on modern infrastructure, any disruption would undoubtedly cause real hardship within days and spark massive unrest, leading to further casualties and destruction.  It would become a spiral of violence that would be almost impossible to stop until it had run its course.

War is sometimes necessary, but only under the most extreme provocation.  It's the last resort when all other means have failed - and even then, only when the alternative to war is too catastrophic to contemplate.  Unfortunately, too few people today are capable of recognizing that from experience.

Peter