Were the World Wars a feature or a bug of Western civilization?

[tramendous]

Would like to have seen a more formal debate about this, but being fairly illiterate with respect to history I'm still interested in your opinions.

Is there something about the Western world, whether it be its politics, its economics, its ideologies, its people etc, that precipitates industrialized violence on a national level? Should we expect these forces to produce similar events continually in the future?

Or, alternatively, were these wars products of countervailing forces, misinterpretations, or hostility toward the developing West? Can these events be considered exceptions to an otherwise upward trajectory for Western society?

Feel free to add more flesh to the question as you see fit.

Its a feature. Its the long peace thats the bug. Mutually assured destruction is the bug thats delaying ww3.

 

[deltapapha]

This isn't really that special, though. Literally the first observation about the Versailles we made in history class in middle school was that it landed in an unfortunate middle. Also, you seem to disregard half of it, going immediately to it being not punitive enough when it being too punitive is also part of it (and punitive in the wrong way, too).

You are right. Here is a more controversial view of Sheffield's (fleshed out in the book as well) that better reflects my comments on his book:

The first world war was far from futile

I just slapped up the former post kind of in haste.

 

[HunterSdVa29]

a feature of Imperialism and entangling alliances, not the current Western World

 

[VivaRevolution]

You are scaring me..

WW3 rise of the Machines!

Yup, I shake my head at people who have kids. I get it, it's a good life, plenty of reasons to do so, but it isn't a risk I would take.

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

Why do you specify Western world. It is a feature of human kind.
If anything, there is less violence in western countries then anywhere else.

 

[IDL]

Why do you specify Western world. It is a feature of human kind.
If anything, there is less violence in western countries then anywhere else.

In part (besides high standard of living), I think the reason for current peace is because the empire has spread and now controls such a large part of the earth. Wars are power struggles, and when there is one dominant power able to keep others from trying to take the throne, so to speak, then there is peace. In WWII Germany was conquered as a competing or dissenting force.

And of course, the world is still at war now, but it just isn't 'hot'. We are in a constant state of ideological, economic, and subversive war.

 

[Armbars]

War has and will haunt us for all our time on this planet. There's nothing special in that regard about western civilisation.

 

[RockstarChris]

huh? the east started it over in germany

 

[ShinkanPo]

Yup, I shake my head at people who have kids. I get it, it's a good life, plenty of reasons to do so, but it isn't a risk I would take.

Ah but our kids could be the John Connors fighting the T-1000s of the future.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

Well, considering in WWII we saved the world from Hitler, I'd say a feature.

You get one right every once in a while...

There is really no telling what the world be like had we given in the Hitler's overtures for an alliance.

Soviets dont get no lend lease, and likely dont beat Hitler, and thereby no cold war, no Nam, or Mujahideen etc, etc. Nazi scientists were pretty cutting edge. Too bad they did some nasty things, but who hasnt?

Hitler was an ally to Chiang Kai Shek. Maybe China never suffer under Mao and his cultural revolutions. If they find a way to get the Japanese to quit, who did not really like HItler to begin with.

 

[deltapapha]

Last paragraph of Chesterton's "Chaucer". I think it is relevant to this thread:

The moral is that no man should desert that civilization. It can cure itself; but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius nor Mahomet nor Calvin nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure, the real evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole body. Those outside the body will endure only centuries of separation and then death. Where are the Nestorians? Meanwhile, within the body of the Christian world, there was a perpetual and centripetal tendency towards the discovery of a just balance of all these ideas. All those who broke away were centrifugal and not centripetal; they went away into deserts to develop a solitary doctrine. But medieval philosophy and culture, with all the crimes and errors of its exponents, was always seeking equilibrium. It can be seen in every line of its rhythmic and balanced art; in every sentence of its carefully qualified and self-questioning philosophy. It was everywhere in the air, though it affected various people in various degrees now impossible to distinguish. But it was everywhere a movement towards civilization; towards the centre of ideas; whatever might be the wild decentralization of events. And, while there are many proofs of this, there could be no more full or unanswerable proof than the shout that showed that normality had been found. For a great voice was given by God, and a great volume of singing, not to his saints who deserved it much better; not to any of those heroes who had made that clearing in the ancient forest; but only suddenly, and for a season, to the most human of human beings.