War is an issue in Poul Anderson's works. On this blog, I have:
summarized Anderson's accounts of warfare;
discussed the issue;
repeated myself;
changed what I said about one passage;
learned from the combox.
See:
Space Battle II
More On The People Of The Wind
A Prayer
Killing Civilians II
Into Battle
War In History And Future History
- or just search the blog for "War."
On a Monday morning for a retired person, several activities vie for attention:
gym;
grocery shopping;
rereading, and also merely reading, Dornford Yates;
rewatching the Millennium Trilogy;
continuing to reread and post about The People Of The Wind;
first, breakfast.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree we make war or peace, that it doesn't just HAPPEN to us. But you did not go far enough: WHY does a war, any war, begin? Because one or both powers believe they can bend the will of the other to its own at an acceptable cost. Or because they believe not fighting comes at an unacceptable cost. Peace will be possible only if contending powers finds it mutually profitable to agree on being at peace. As Commander Abrams put it in Chapter 5 of ENSIGN FLANDRY: "Sure, war is degrading. But there are worse degradations. Sure, peace is wonderful. But you can't always have peace, except in death, and you most definitely can't have a peace that isn't grounded on hard common interest, that doesn't pay off for everybody concerned."
I think I have about half of the THERE WILL BE WAR series edited by Jerry Pournelle. Very much worth having, both for the stories and the non fiction articles discussing issues of war and peace.
Sean
As Marx put it, human beings make history -- but they don't make it just as they please.
That is, humans make decisions, but their decisions are always made in conditions of hard, narrow constraint -- constrained by physical law, by history, by their cultural background, and by the instinctive neurological frameworks which give rise to human minds in the first place.
Furthermore, we make decisions to accomplish something -- but chance, incomplete information, and the conflicting desires of -other- human beings mean that we can't count on getting the result we want from our decisions.
We make choices between a range of alternatives, but we we can't be sure, or even very confident, what alternatives we're actually going to -get-.
The really utopian (in the negative sense) fantasy is that there can be human beings without -politics-. And as the great German pioneer sociologist Max Weber put it, "violence is the ultimately decisive means of political action".
Note that we've had a very long period of "peace" in the sense that there hasn't been a repetition of the sort of no-holds, direct confrontation between Great Power nation-states out to break each other that occurred in 1914-1918 or 1939-45.
The reason is not that people renounced war; it's that technological developments drastically altered the calculation of the people running those Great Powers, in such a way as to make it very difficult to imagine good alternatives from choosing to start such a conflict.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I agree, with the caveat that the "cold peace" of MAD did not make it impossible for the Great Powers to fight proxy wars thru client allies.
A peace based on nothing but MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) stinks like a dead skunk, but it's better than having the Great Powers actually flinging nukes at each other.
Sean
The purpose of weapons and armies is not really to kill and destroy; that's more or less a by-product, as industrial pollution is to the manufacturing process.
Their purpose is to secure -obedience-. The -threat- of violence is often more useful (and much less costly) than the actuality; but it only works if it isn't a bluff.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I agree. I'm reminded of how even the USSR, despite intensive study of the risks and advantages of a nuclear war, including putting great s tress on civil defense, never quite dared to actually ATTACK. Because the cold blooded realists in the Politburo were convinced the US was more likely than not to strike back in kind. With totally unpredictable consequences.
Sean
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