> Even this personalizes it too much for my taste. Rather: the problem
> is the capitalist social structure that facilitates this kind of
> reckless militarism.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's the main problem, as far as war is concerned.
After all, war has been around the human race for tens, maybe hundreds of thousand years (depending on how you define it -- more or less organized violence between groups, perhaps). In perhaps the weakest part of his whole theory, Marx argued that, because capitalism had a beginning, it will have and end, and suggested (without much real proof, I think) that social evils in general would end with it, because there would be no more class divisions in society, and what causes social evils besides class?
Well, I fear that a lot more causes war than class division; even if capitalism were eliminated, I doubt that it would do much to end war, because there are lots of things people can fight about besides economic issues, if they want to. The only way I can see war ending is for the human race to learn how to settle all of its disputes by negotiation and mediation without threatening violence, and since threatening violence is a very efficacious way of ensuring that your side will have the upper hand in subsequent negotiations (assuming that there aren't any negotiations because you've completely annihilated your enemies), the "without threatening violence" part of this statement is the crucial one. We know how to negotiate; we don't know how to negotiate without fighting first.
The problem of ending capitalism and the problem of ending war are two separate ones, it seems to me; solving either one will not solve the other, and, hard as it is, I think the former one will be solved before the latter one.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile