Tag Archives: War

Maybe the world ends with a text message

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100 years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated which was the catalyst for the Great War.

That prompted someone called Night-Gaunt49 to comment on the Candorville comic strip of 27th June 2014 to say:

Seems insane that the murder of one person would start a global war, but it did. The stupidity of “entangling alliances” that Washington warned us about did them end.

The “entangling alliances” view is from pro-German revisionist thinking of the 1960s. Academia is now reverting back to its view of the time that it was about the unified Germany’s rapid growth and expansion not being matched by having a presence on the world stage. Germany would have started a war before 1918 whatever happened. The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was merely a conveniently timed catalyst. It was used by Germany as an excuse to push the Austro-Hungarian Empire to start a war (it mattered not with who) so that Germany could conduct either an expansion to the East, or, if necessary, follow the Schlieffen Plan to quickly defeat attack France and then Russia. Either would have achieved the desired effect and likely given Germany diplomatic presence on a par with France, England and Russia.

The Schlieffen Plan was ‘improved’ by a committee which reduced the size of the attacking force, which meant the German forces failed to sweep through Belgium and France as quickly as intended. That resulted in the trenches and the machine-gun meat-grinder that killed millions.

It was not one murder that started the Great War. That was just one tiny step in a long succession of events and circumstances.

It was not inevitably a global war. That was caused by Germany not following their well-designed plan, resulting in them being delayed by defensive forces, which allowed time for lots of other states to pile in to see what land or diplomatic advantage they could grab in the process.

War grave inscriptions

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From the Great War Forum, there is a thread of Favourite Gravestone Inscriptions.  One is:

I fought & died in the Great War to end all wars have I died in vain?

or (link):

I have fought in the Great War, the War to end all Wars. If there are to be more Wars then I have died in vain.

It is on the headstone of Sergeant Phillip James Ball MM, 44th Australian Imperial Force.

He was born in Birmingham, England and later moved to Western Australia to become, I believe, a farmer.

He enlisted 24/01/1916 and was killed 28/03/1918 aged 21.

His grave is in Villers-Brettonneux Military Cemetery, grave III. E. 1.

Selling licences to kill

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Acid rain became a publicly known problem in the 1980s and 1990s. Industrial pollution in the form of sulphur dioxide, SO2, would dissolve in atmospheric water to produce sulphuric or sulphurous acid. This falls in rain away from the pollution-causing industry and kills forests.

The solution was not regulation, which no politician would support, but a quota of how much could be produced and selling permission to produce SO2 up to that limit. Those permits to pollute could themselves be sold.

Trading in SO2 permits began in 1995. It was considered a huge success in that SO2 pollution was cut by half.

So how about introducing war quotas?

That is, the UN could sell licences to kill people, be it troops or civilians. Determine how many people are killed per year globally, and provide licences to kill people – initially say 90% of that number – and reduce the quote each year by 10%.

Year 1 – 100%
Year 2 – 90%
Year 3 – 81%
Year 4 – 72.9%
Year 5 – 65.6%
Year 6 – 59%
Year 7 – 53%
Year 8 – 47.8%

So after just 8 years we could reduce deaths by government-sanctioned war by half!

The licences would be for sale on the open market to despots or global police according to who can afford them. If democracies are willing to fund killing people, then fine, they can. Otherwise the despots get to do so, if they can afford to raise the necessary funds.

It would also allow an alternative way of prosecution major organised drugs crime organisations, international pirates, the Mafia, and so on. Provided they pay their way and can buy the licences on the open market, then they can continue in business

If it is OK and ethical for governments to kill people by war but we don’t like it, then why can’t we take a leaf from the environmental lobbyists book and introduce quotas to reduce the unwanted behaviour – killing people with bullets and bombs – to a more acceptable level?

No-fly zones cause greater suffering

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The purposes of air support are reconnaissance, tactical strikes and to support ground troops.

Denying reconnaissance results in (a) that side committing larger forces to pitched battles making destruction of the opponent more likely and (b) not committing enough of the right forces to pitched battles resulting in greater losses (one intention of the no fly zone).  It also increases the likelihood of successful assaults on those denied aircract.

Tactical strikes allow the destruction of tanks, opponent HQs and leaders, supply dumps and key infrastructure.  These actions lead to a shortening of the conflict.  Preventing these actions increases theneed for land-based assault using tanks, machine-guns and infantry against one another.  Destruction is more wide-spread, more troops are needed to be killed.  More homes, hospitals, schools, offices and business are destroyed as towns need to be flattened.

Without air support, warfare is more akin to the kind of close combat massacres that occurred up to the Great War.

When the great powers impose a No Fly Zone “for humanitarian reasons” it results in a longer war, greater destruction of infrastructure, more deaths, more civilian deaths, more trauma, more widows and orphans, more refugees, more cost to aid agencies, more influx of external combatants, more civilians becoming armed and involved.

The imposition of a No Fly Zone is not ‘humanitarian’; it is a cruel and cowardly way of manipulating the outcome of an internal conflict for poitical ends with wanton disregard for the suffering caused.

When did you become a pacifist?

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I have been asked a few times what happened last year that made me decide to become a pacifist.  What a strange question.

Well, I do recall that about 1974, aged 9, I suggested to my little friends my brilliant idea for global world peace: that we should nuke any country that attacks another one.  If everyone agreed with this plan, nobody would start a new war.  That is, if some country invades or attacks another, everyone else nukes the first country off the face of the planet.  Completely and utterly.

It seemed like a good plan at the time… to me.  I can’t remember if it was Saul or Neil who said “But what if we want to start a war?” which rather put a spanner in the works of my plan to start a global juvenile peace movement mobilisation.  I assumed that the rule should apply to us, too.  Also, Jason objected to the killing of all the innocent civilians, but I suspect that was because he was thinking of a few countries that we needed to give a good warring to.

In college, about 1983, aged 18, the Social Sciences lecturer (I think his name was Plank – at least, that’s how we referred to him) gave us a hypothetical question: the government has declared war on some country, what are you going to do?  I said “Protest”.  Over the next few lectures he added to the scenario until, after about three weeks, we got to the point that conscription had been brought in and the Military Police were coming to collect me at mid-day.  (By this point everyone else had attended the sign-up offices as their registered letter had told them to.)  I said I’d be a conscientious objector; he said the government had made that illegal.  “Fine, I’ll go to prison.”  He said that wasn’t an option: ‘conshies’ were being put in uniform and sent to the front.  “I’m still not going.  I won’t wear the uniform.  I won’t pick up the gun.”  So he said I’d be shot as a coward.

“In that case, I still won’t fight.  I won’t kill people on behalf of a government that says they will kill me if I don’t do it.  That kind of government is not worth fighting for.“

A society that kills its own people for refusing to kill other people they have never met, is exactly the kind of society we should be fighting against.

He went ballistic with me, calling me a coward and a bad citizen and that I was letting down all my peers and how I was an example of why social science teaching was essential – presumably to indoctrinate young people into cheerfully killing strangers to order.

(The expression “I voz only following orders” was still common parlance despite the Nuremberg War Crime Trials having finished 34 years earlier, and I have never quite understood the difference between shooting a civilian and shooting a conscripted civilian in an scratchy uniform.  If “I was only following orders” was not a valid defence then, why should it be now?  Since I cannot differentiate between a civilian and a conscript, I can shoot neither.)

When I was nine years old, I thought it was OK to kill innocent civilians for living under a bad government.  Then I grew up and realised it is the bad governments we should fight, not the poor souls that have to live under them.

So it’s not so much ‘when’ I became a pacifist as having changed my views on ‘how’ I should be a pacifist.

Proxy Wars

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(Originally written 05/11/2012.)

During the Cold War, because of fear of escalation between NATO and the Soviet Union, proxy wars were undertaken in third party locations.

Massive economies; substantial training and arming of civilians to produce armed militia from otherwise unarmed civilians; a legacy of weapons and gun-culture; little or no risk to the sponsors of damage; vast amounts of matériel could be deployed upon the citizens of the target country.

End-of-life or redundant weapons and date-expired ammunition and explosives can be disposed of en masse quickly and cheaply without the cost of safe disposal nor any fear of the consequences of their failure.

Consequently, huge amounts of damage are done to the victim country where the proxy war is played out.

Used as a way of striking at an opponent through a third party, at great cost in life and suffering to the third party.  The damage to the third party is far greater than to the opponent.

They also function as weapons testing grounds, thereby ensuring the newest, most unpleasant and yet-to-be-banned weapons can be tested on the people of the proxy country, without risk to the user or even the opponent.  Hence the effects can be far worse.

This is what providing arms and air support in the Arab Spring is all about.

Children of The Bomb

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(Originally written 19/10/2012.)

There was a common acceptance when I was at school that

“There’s not much point getting O Levels or A Levels.  We’ll be dead before we start work anyway”.

This was because we were growing up in the Cold War, after the Cuban Missile Crisis / October Crisis / Caribbean Crisis / Kарибский кризис had occurred, when it was clear the USA really would consider use of a first-strike with nuclear weapons, and knowing there were Mutually Assured Destruction policies in place on both sides.  That is, one small error or political crisis would result in the destruction of missile sites in the UK, and the death of most everyone in Europe and certainly us children before we’d had a chance to grow up.

This made it hard to find the motivation to plan for the future, as there was little point.  There were many of us who had poor grades as a consequence of this, including some who gave up althogether.

And we all knew how we were going to spend our last 7 minutes when the sirens went off.  We certainly talked about it often enough.

Growing up in such a climate cannot be healthy.  Off the top of my head, our cultural exposure included:

1979 – the Protect and Survive films like Casualties
1983 – 99 Red Balloons – Lena
1983 – WarGames
1984 – Two Tribes – Frankie Goes to Hollywood (“War!  What is it good for?” *)
1984 – Threads
1985 – The War Game
1986 – When the Wind Blows

All manner of cheerfulness: www.atomica.co.uk/culture.

Perhaps it is no surprise that my generation, born in the 1960s, have such a strong “think of the children” and “children must be allowed freedom” and “children must be protected from fear” mindset.

My mother, who lived through the second World War, said the Cold War was a huge improvement over the hot sort.

 

* Record sales, apparently.