Comments below.
--- On Tue, 9/15/09, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Among the _lower classes_, there is no reason to think that
> war was ever viewed as anything but an unmitigated disaster.
We really are lumping a whole lot of different societies together, from societies where the bulk of soldiers were press-ganged peasants (part of medieval history), where they were professional mercenaries (part of medieval history), where they were free citizens (e.g. Athens, in which the lower classes did not become soldiers), or where the entire society survived by war (e.g. Cossacks and similar warrior societies -- such a society really does not have much of a difference between upper and lower classes).
and the opportunity that some men had to steal some
> booty, rape some women, and see the world five miles from
Or steal a wife and see the world hundreds of miles away, depending on the society and war.
> Or maybe the Mongolian/Crusader treatment, Kill 'Em All! Let
> God (or the Gods) sort em out! (This from the attack on the
> Albigensian heresy
> in the 13th C, roughly.
The Mongols didn't actually do that, unless a city resisted. They were pretty much like the Romans that way. Of course then the city had to pay up a tithe in goods and slaves, which isn't that great either.
> More: the Enlightenment floated schemes for Perpetual Peace
> (title of essay by Kant), even before Hegel wrote the War Is
> The Health of the State passage in the PhR. Hobbes was
> probably the first thinker of the bourgeois era to see
> clearly that war is an impediment to commerce.
Homer would be disgusted. :) Seriously this is an effect of the European religious wars, is it not?