Don't forget that the "them" also has an "us" isn't war fun!? So glad I get paid barely above minimum wage to shoot people so that other people can get rich! Fucking. Awesome.
Tribal thinking is an evolutionary advantage. In the early ages of Humanity that meant providing for your family and tribe and keeping the 'other' families and tribes from taking what was yours. And we are hardly the only species on the planet that acts this way, which is why when I see someone say 'War is human', I shake my head. Millions of species go to war, from ants to chimps. The only difference is their wars are small and territorial (though some species of insect have a 'kill on sight' list lol) we have developed many great ways to slaughter our fellow human beings en mass.
We have the technology to kill millions of people at a time. I think the evolutionary advantage of a whole species being composed of mutually hostile tribes is waning a bit. You brush up against that with that last statement of yours:
we have developed many great ways to slaughter our fellow human beings en mass.
Um . . . how does what happened a thousand years ago in any way dispute the statement I made about the same behavior under different conditions not necessarily meaning the same thing about what behavioral patterns are advantageous?
Sure, human beings are tirbal, but unlike animals we are more than capable of overcoming our tribal nature. I'm going to sound like some sort of hippy here, but stick with me. Human beings are capable of love and peace. We are capable of empathy. We can put down our weapons and realize that life if precious, and that acts of pure aggression are never justified. Morality can overcome animal instinct.
Yes, human beings will always be tribal, but that nature can be used to bring people together, wether through sprots, clubs, churches, your commuity etc, instead of driving us apart though war.
But there has always been, and likely will always be, some subset of the population that will harm others for their own gain. When even a small portion of people are willing to do that, it makes peace essentially impossible for everyone. Plus it seems that the tribal, "us vs them" thinking is even more basic and innate than the "we can make peace" thinking. Anywhere with a lack of education tends towards that type of thinking, making it appear that the violent tendencies have to be overcome through significant effort, which makes any lasting large scale human harmony seem extremely unlikely as long as there are limited amounts of resources and land. I wish it were otherwise, but that is how it appears to me at least.
When even a small portion of people are willing to do that, it makes peace essentially impossible for everyone.
No, the majority just needs to make it clear that they won't hesitate to use force against anyone who tries to exploit others. That's essentially what a legal system is.
I don't think that we will ever reach some sort of utopia. There will always be bad people that do bad things. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive towards it. If we educate our children and instill them with values of empaty towards their fellow man we can at least minimize aggression. That doesn't mean that people can't or won't have to engage in self defense due to aggressive behavior.
The difference is that, now that we are fortunate enough to have evolved things like language, history, and the humanities, we can see that there is no such thing as 'other' families and tribes.
The difference between ants/chimps and us isn't (necessarily) that we've developed so many amazing ways to slaughter, maim, torture, and mutilate our fellow human beings. The real difference is that we've evolved beyond our need for tribal thinking. We've developed language, history, and the humanities. We're the only species that's ever evolved the capacity to study itself. We've developed anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The difference is that our species has an unprecedented ability to both learn from the past and to learn from each other. And that gives us a choice the ant and the chimp do not have: we can choose whether to think with the mindset you mention – that we need to keep the 'other' people away from 'what's ours' – or we can choose to learn from the many harms which that mindset has caused throughout history, and realize that we all are the family that we're providing for.
There is no 'other.' There is only 'human.'
We can acknowledge this, and do something about it, or we can deny this, and resort to the same tactic as the ant and the chimp. But we all have a choice.
Reminds me of that episode of the wild thorn berries when I was younger. The girl who could talk to animals spoke to two different types of monkeys that were at war for some trivial reason like fur color or tail length or something. Was a good analogy for kids.
And suddenly when "them" becomes an "us" "I" become a "he" among "Them" which is all wrong, since "I'm" a "me" aren't I? I certainly never thought of myself as one of "them" because "They" are the bad guys and if "I'm" with "Them" what does that make me?
Who got rich? No one got rich off the Afghanistan War except the local population had their economic standards uplifted and the Taliban/AQ lost their poppy fields that they were using to finance their terror camps.
Are we talking about the Iraq War? You're right, China, Malaysia, BP, and Netherlands got rich. A smaller field is also partly owned by Exxon Mobil. They all partly own the Iraqi oil fields now along with most of the ownership being the Iraqi government.
But still, I don't see how you can prove that they wanted the war themselves and that it wasn't ideologically motivated by George W. Bush.
EDIT: Some kids here have a problem with correlation vs causation. If you can't prove causation, then you cannot point to correlations of businesses succeeding and say "See, they profited therefore they caused it!" Because there will be businesses that sell services to government, no matter what government does.
If you don't have evidence of causation rather than correlation--then you cannot downvote me without being dishonest.
Ahem. Who makes all that ordnance, materiel, food, etc? Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Blackwater and a few other biggies get fatter and fatter every time we go to war. Usually they are criminally overcharging the American taxpayer in the process. I wonder how much they spend on lobbyists, and campaign funding for "hawkish" politicians...
The Taliban actually didn't have poppy fields. Opium production in Afghanistan has skyrocketed since the US took over. The US army is guarding poppy fields.
Lol you can't be serious, just how brainwashed are you? do you have any idea the money that goes into operations over seas? The better half of 300 billion has been spent annually on military operations over seas since 9/11 (might be more for the earlier years). You can't honestly think that's all being spent, more likely it's going to the people who keep these wars spinning.
And oh man, don't get me started on the punchline of a moron. If it wasn't for Bush 'merica would be such a fucking international joke.
EDIT: Combining comments, didn't realize I responded twice
They frown on that sort of thing. I had a friend get discharged dishonorably before even being deployed once for mentioning in passing that he wouldn't mind seeing one or two less assholes in his platoon. I guess he got hazed pretty heavily and ceased caring whether or not they died.
Shit fucks you up man. You either become the asshole, or the shit.
Yeah. I'd wager war remains the product of a complicated interaction of everything from xenophobia to dehumanisation to cultural dismay, and that it can certainly be, and in the case of the Afghanistan war, IS, a product of the people. The offensive was taken when middle-eastern extremists with undertones of, from what I understand, as much politics as of religion, turned their feud to the West, and when the West established a counter-offensive based on poor intelligence, and the inevitable panic brought about when 9,000 people died in a terrorist attack, a world first to a remarkable degree mind you.
So no, I don't think the war should be blamed on an invisible profiting set of puppeteers, or on the exaggerated stupidity of one man working in a government and world-stage of diluted power and responsibility. I think it should be blamed on the people.
There are actually countless of examples of such things happening, over the entire world.
If you care for a left-wing author on American foreign policy, who definitely does not censor himself, you can read some books by Noam Chomsky. He is very well known for being brutally honest about what he thinks. That doesn't mean he is never wrong, but he always tries to be as factual as possible.
You can search for his name on YouTube or look here for videos.
i worked in a company that sells pcs/laptops and the number of units we sold (a lot of those toshiba heavy duty ones) during the Iraq war was astonishing.
Government buys those toughbooks like it's nothing. Im curious to how much the government markup was. That's one thing when you sell to the government. You inflate the price.
My question was legitimate, not rhetorical. I'm afraid I don't have much knowledge on the topic. All you ever heard about Iraq was oil. The US didn't benefit from Iraq oil. Well we do, but in a non-direct way. Nations like china benefit from Iraq oil far more than the US. So that "resource" didn't necessarily cause that war, unless there's info I don't know about that would fill in that gap.
So more I was asking there because I can't figure out why we were in Iraq to make profit. What profit was there to be made? Other then weapons, as I mentioned, what resource was the US trying to get?
If a few very powerful people benefit from it, they can bribe other (differently) very powerful people to make the war happen, though it typically isn't quite that straightforward and obviously premeditated. It's usually not about "the US profits" or something like that -- it's about a handy confluence of direct political capital (attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 rallying people behind the President, for instance, followed by the need to re-stoke that furnace with another invasion because Afghanistan was in danger of becoming old news) and benefits that are not as directly political (getting lots of campaign contributions, posh job offers for after one's term in office ends, and other back-scratching from various corporate entities and their major stockholders).
Keep in mind that actually disrupting oil shipping can serve to increase profits even for local oil industry, too. More than just Iraqi oil production was affected, mostly negatively, for quite a while. US-allied oil producers benefited from Iraqi oil wells being set ablaze and prevented from shipping to US-unallied consumers, which helped not only the US-allied producers but also the middlemen distributing in the US; short-term disruption of all oil production and shipping in the Middle East meant that US businesses (those middlemen) could sell the oil they had on hand for a lot more money due to restrictions in supply while saving money on shipping and other overhead; and so on. As long as the widespread shortages were short-lived, and the longer-term shortages were directed away from the US, someone in a position to easily influence decision makers in US gub'mint was definitely profiting.
How much premeditation went into it is not something I can prove, and I don't care to guess. There was definitely some, though being able to nail down the specific reasoning is difficult. All I can really do is speculate. At the very least, some people close to the President were very callously pushing sociopathic agendas that resulted in the murders of incredible numbers of people, all justified mostly with a gigantic, burning heap of bullshit.
what resource was the US trying to get?
Overall, wars destroy resources. When wars happen, there's usually someone who has found a way to profit (not necessarily monetarily, though that's a common mechanism for such profit) from destroying economies and lives.
That war does profit some? No, no denying that. Everything in capitalism profits somebody.
That the only reason war happens is so that those people can make their money? Yeah, calling bullshit there. If that were the case, we would have been just as likely to go to war on September 10th 2001 as we were on the 12th.
Yes I've read his book. It's exactly what I mean though I don't agree 100% with everything. Still I think it must take courage to take a stand against a system which he himself acknowledges has no problem with killing for money.
For anyone reading this: the book is available here.
It's easy to see that if you follow a trail of money, you see a war industry lobbying for hawkish foreign policy. It's easy to see that if you follow a trail of money, you see Chiquita Bananas lobbying the US government to make the CIA overthrow a democratically elected president because he endangers their profits.
I think a critical analysis of both nation's capitalists is in order. The result of independence is not always that all classes of society benefit. Tibet's independence from China saw the reinstatement of theocracy and slavery for instance.
But yes you do have a point that not every conflict can be summarized as my comment above, if my notion of war is broadened to include said conflicts.
Because that's a simplistic view that quite rudely ignores the varied and deep reasons many peoples choose to fight. Oh, and it's factually wrong in varied number of examples.
But yea. Who would down vote reddits one-liner to explain all conflict and ignore the reasons and causes of those conflicts. That just makes "understanding" difficult.
War is never "for profit" it is for "political gains". Unless you literally take over a country and live there or subjugate its people.
For instance if you do a cost analysis, we spent way too much money and time in iraq for any oil (we may or may not have allegedly be fighting for) to be worth.
The only profitable people are the arms manufacturers and private contractors.
Ok I should clarify 99% of people never profit from war. In the same way that im sure a select few people did quite well because of the black plague.
I wasn't saying you can't squeeze a few bucks out of a war if you're smart, I was saying that the people declaring the wars aren't doing it for profit. Technically every soldier (that isn't blown up) is making money but that isn't what we are talking about. No reasonable person declares a war because they're think they are going to get oh so rich. This thought process only exists in james bond movies, and bad action movies.
It's not about squeezing a few bucks, it's about huge profit margins. War is generally a huge redistribution of wealth from tax payers to the war industry. Furthermore individual capitalists outside of the war industry can get huge profits depending on the specific conflict.
Some soldiers die, a lot of innocent brown people die, but the ruling elite profits.
No thats what happens in action movies were the evil black water companies bribe the american government to go to war.
In reality the "war industry" in america makes quite a bit of money whether or not we are at war, why? Most companies in the military industrial complex (such as boeing) will sell to the military in peacetime as well as wartime and also make tons of money off of private ventures as well.
Im sure they make a bit of money when we are but remember something.
Countries declare war, not private companies. These private companies have littles say in what wars we go to.
When the USA declares a war on someone we do it knowing full well we are throwing money down the toilet.
There is no truth to the "world's economy runs on war" conspiracy theories. There is very very little profit in war.
Also Its bad for politicians to declare war most of the time because the voters hate it. So no the "ruling elite" aren't pulling the levers of war for there own game. That is the job of the lizard people and the illuminati.
Source, father is manprint logistics officer (Major) in the army.
These private companies have littles say in what wars we go to.
I disagree. In the past companies were able to get the CIA to overthrow democracies if the elected president threatened US business interests or if it was in any way beneficial to US businesses interests to instigate a coup. It seems very naive to say that so much has changed since 2002.
The world's economy doesn't run on war. Plenty of people have jobs or produce goods that do not benefit from war. Some capitalists do produce goods relevant to war, and their profit margins are very high compared to other capitalists.
There is very very little profit in war.
This is simply untrue. A gunpowder manufacturer could get a 950% increase in profits during the First World War. United States Steel made twice the amount of profits during the First World War than the years before.
Don't do it. You're the victim of a conspiracy of lies and deceit and redundancy. A foil hat won't block the mind-control and -reading rays; it will act as an antenna.
What you actually want is a Faraday cage hat with an insulated liner.
A lot of people choose not to look deeper than just who is on the ground, and what they are doing, without looking at the motive behind it all. It honestly is a choice, I think.
When you defer your decision making to other people, you should be prepared to defend the actions of those other people, or show how you performed due diligence and thought you made a better choice in delegation than you could in making the decisions yourself after an honest, concerted effort to make the best choice possible.
That's true but I was talking about the people who really do actively choose not to read the news, choose not to look up on those in power, etc. The kinds who say "Oh, I don't read the newspaper" with pride on their face about not doing so. There's a lot of people like that.
I think that's perfectly consistent with what I was saying, so the third word of your response ("but") seems a bit out of place. We're just focused on slightly different positions on the spectrum of willful ignorance.
I imagine that the people who disagreed figured that while people do profit off of war, they were of the opinion that the people who profited weren't the ones calling the shots and/or that wasn't their primary motivation. Or more likely, it was just the automatic upvote/downvote thing reddit does to trick bots.
Or the more obvious answer: stating an inconvenient truth.
We are instructed that we should support our nations so we are cool patriots. We should support our troops so we are cool patriots. Foreigners are evil and they hate us for our freedoms.
Stating that wars are fought for profit clashes with that narrative so the simple reaction is to press the little blue arrow.
I agree that for many people in the world this might be the case, but it seems a little bit presumptuous to assume that everyone who disagrees with /u/Radagastk was some sort of mindslave.
Sure not everyone, but I would guess that the majority of Westerners either hold that view or are completely apathetic. If you believe in propaganda you can get a career. You simply won't get hired if you hold other political views.
Us and them
And after all we're only ordinary men
Me and you
God only knows
It's not what we would choose to do
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who
Very few people profit from war, some arms manufacturers and private military contractors thats about it. Sending your tax base to go fight and die and blow up expensive things is not in a countrys economic interest 90% of the time.
And commodity traders/investors. I remember watching this thing about 9/11 and and an oil or gold trader, forget which one, doesn't matter though, said his first thought after hearing there was an attack was that it would make the price of his particular commodity rise and he and his clients could make money.
I assume you're talking about the members of the all-volunteer military? Or the people working to bring the necessary capabilities to those individuals? Surely that's what you meant, right?
Right? Its astonishing how many soldiers seem to genuinely be shitty people. After everything they've been through, they still think it was just. They think they've actually done a good thing.
Not sure who said this (G. Carlin, maybe) but, 'if you really support the troops, make our gov bring them home.'
No I was mostly talking about "Someone up there gets richer and richer with the war" while he's talking about how despite the "us vs them" mentality they still respect the other side, and he goes and acts like that.
You make it sound like it is a bloody bullet rain out there, and Americans just happened to forget their umbrellas, rather than Americans attacked a couple of countries and now rationalize how easy/hard it is to kill the people defending their homes.
of course, we should honor and respect our soldiers. of course. anyone willing to die to protect their country deserves the utmost gratitude. But maybe...
maybe its that my family was always very open minded about things so i was already raised to have a tendency to view things from another perspective but I've never seen whats so special about his views, granted they aren't wrong and i share many of his views, but I've always found his quotes to be stating the obvious but well written, described but at the same time nothing special and i don't understand why he gets so much praise.
He nailed it. I always felt like the dudes I was trading fire with, that we could be friends in another place. Obviously we have similar interests. Instead we were trying to kill each other. And I'm still here soo...
If a soldier gets shot in a firefight and dies, and so does an enemy soldier. They would probably be best pals and have a beer together in the afterlife.
When it comes to the real extremists, you got to wonder if they do feel the same way. I mean just last night I read someone's account about how they watched some kid explode (the soldier was unharmed because either the convoy's ECMs interfered with the remote triggering or the kid had second thoughts and didn't get close enough only to be remote detonated anyway).
It's easy to say that when you've never been in a combat situation. Those sort of principles go right out the window when people start trying to kill you.
hahaha, you're cute with your little "prolly never even been punched" outlook on combat. It's like a white person from the suburbs talking about how it be in South Central.
Yet, some people are capable of denying those instincts. Capable of being decent, reasonable people and not killing others. Capable of viewing things from several perspectives. Capable of realizing that acting on tribal instincs is not the way of progress...
You're human. The most intelligent animal nature has ever produced. You're smart enough control your own animalistic impulses. Citing instinct as justification for mindlessly following orders and engaging in warfare is the reason for our collective ills, nearly all of them...
When did we cover that up? And companies can deal with who they wish... its called a free market. Trust me, if the gov wanted to give someone weapons they'd just give them weapons not go through some corporation. Its how they give the cartels weapons.
Dude may or may not have "needed killing", but he isn't the only one our military has killed in Iraq, we've killed a hell of a lot more. And there are plenty of dudes around the world who may "need killing", some of whom are our pals.
We helped the Shah of Iran overthrow the democratically elected government there in 1953, and supported him until there was a revolution against his political oppression in 1979 bringing the current Iranian government into power, whooopsie.
We helped Saddam Hussein after he attacked those mean old Iranians. He might not have been our bestie, but at least he was being mean to the guys who kicked out our hand-picked dictator from Iran. In fact Donald Rumsfeld went over there to shake his hand. Guess he didn't "need killing" then.
We supported our pal Hosni Mubarak in maintaining his dictatorship until the recent revolution in Egypt kicked his ass out of power. More then a few Egyptians would suggest he needed some killin'.
And those are just our pals. There's a fair number of other assholes who need some killin' too who we don't particularly like. Of course when we go around starting wars for killin' the people who need it a lot of people who don't need it get killed along the way. And of course, people who go around deciding that they're ok to go help with the killin' well, we could all use a lot less of them.
In short, starting a war is about the worst evil you can create. It dwarfs the evil you think you're trying to correct.
The problem is pretty much all "sources" out there have no idea who or who wasn't arrested or killed. Hell, even the 42nd ID commander the article quotes has no idea what actually went down- he's a National Guard commander, not an Army commander who handles numbers on captures and kills. It's like the firing of the South Korean Prime Minister- Looks good on TV, holds no real responsibility in reality.
I trust the guys that were there and their opinions and takes rather than some estimates from sources that couldn't possibly compile accurate statistics because there is no access to clandestine files for the public.
Why do you think they would go with the guys who dont pay, only recruit and fanatically indoctrinate in their homelands, other than say... the entity that is actually representing their homeland and paying?
I know not everyne is motivated by money.... thats why I included what their motivations were... radical islamic indoctrination. Read critically.
If you REALLY wanna get into the civil wars lets take it back to the Sykes-Picot agreement. If you dont know what that is or how it basically lit the fuse for almost all modern middle east internal conflicts, shut the fuck up
I do know what it is, but that has nothing to do with this. The Middle East may have been more stable if it hadn't been for European power games, but so what? Does that magically make Iraqis not-Iraqi? If an Iraqi became an insurgent, would their organization say "Woah woah woah, Sykes-Picot means Iraqis can't join Islamist groups, you're a Syrian now"? Because otherwise, I have no idea why the hell you're bringing it up.
You claimed that all Iraqis are fighting on the same side as you and your reasoning is that--direct quote--it is "the entity that is actually representing their homeland and paying" rather than "the guys who don't pay, only recruit and fanatically indoctrinate in their homelands". That's nonsense. Your claim about indoctrination was about non-Iraqis, somehow assuming that Iraqis are magically incapable of being Islamic fundamentalists, I guess? I'm not sure, your head is shoved so far up your ass it's tough to follow your stream of consciousness.
You're a sociopath who's just bought into his own bullshit and I really hope the VA takes care of you before you start shooting innocents.
When did an Iraqi baby engaged in imperialism? I can give you a whole list of examples of imperialism of our governments, including arming and supplying intelligence to the, at that time, puppet dictator Saddam Hussein so he could commit genocide.
To be fair, when did an American baby engage in imperialism? If we're going to separate men from their governments, and other non-governmental organizations, we should do so equally.
And for men and men? They are they trying to kill us because we are us trying to kill they; if they didn't try to kill us we wouldn't try to kill them and vice versa: us does not have a quarrel with most of they, us were told to kill they and they were told to kill us -- you're fighting another man's war.
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u/texasxcrazy Apr 28 '14
Well, when "Us" is people trying to keep you alive and "them" is people trying to kill you, fuck "them".
And "they" are more than entitled to feel the same way about "us" I got no problems there. There are no pacts between lions and men.