[lbo-talk] Peace, War, Inequality (Was Geras on Morality)

[Miles Jackson]

On Sat, 1 May 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:

> Against your two examples over 150 years, one which
> was a civil war and the other a war involving a civil
> war in an at-best half-democratic country, we have
> hundreds of wars, big and small, over that period,
> involving nondemocracies that -- this point should be
> neglected -- are not enmeshed in the web of
> international agreements, or wars of imperialist
> aggression (many carried out by democracies), or of
> national liberation, some against democracies.  Btw,
> the point is not that democracies are pacific in
> general, just towards each other, and the web of
> agreements part is important too.

People talk about how fuzzy psychology is, but this
kind of poly sci stuff is even more speculative
than Freud.  "Capitalist democracies" have thousands
of sociopolitical charactertics in addition to
making international agreements with other capitalist
democracies, and any one or more of these could be
the true reasons why they rarely engage in war
with one another.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but the data are
ambiguous here.

Miles