[lbo-talk] Western states have created the biggest wars in history ( was fartback)

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 20 10:12:42 PDT 2005


I think Wojtek's precise point is that Western democracies -- and it seems, as Chris implied, we should limit this description to the post World War Two era (since, of course, the states that produced the two global wars were not all democratic -- have, in his words, "created unprecedented peace and prosperity, thus ending the state of perpetual war that characterized earlier stages of development."

As is often the case, this is technically true but leaves a planet-sized portion of the story untold.

Undeniably, large groups of people have enjoyed "unprecedented peace and prosperity" while many others, even inside the democratic Western states, have been compelled to live impoverished, violence vexed lives (with the violence sometimes coming from local factors such as criminals and police, and other times coming from the wars they're fighting on behalf of the state...such as Vietnam and Iraq).

It's important to understand the importance of Europe and Asia's 1930s/40s era devastation and the introduction of nuclear weapons (a category of device few people properly understand) when evaluating the lack of large, set piece warfare and the creation of the so-called Pax Americana.

The US could more easily craft a global order to its liking -- and suited for its

economic and strategic needs -- with former adversaries and current allies lying

prostrate before Washington's feet; exhausted by years of super mechanized war.

The arrival of nuclear weapons raised the stakes in unexampled ways of embarking on large-scale aggression against fully industrialized, nuclear armed states -- contributing to a kind of selective peace, one in which WW2 size conflict was replaced by small scale proxy and asymmetrical wars (with important exceptions outside of the Euro/American axis such as the Iran-Iraq war...a conflict between two non-nuclear rivals and, therefore, in some aspects an example of the sort of pre-nuclear age conflicts Europe experienced).

.d.

---------

http://monroelab.net/ <<<<<>>>>> "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"...Momus



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list