Hi Jane...
-> Just gotta jump in here, was passing through and saw this
-> post.....I'd really love to know how the practice of sacrificing
-> hundreds and thousands of our best young in one conflict after
-> another to bolster our economy got started.  Any ideas?  Why is this
-> okay and the sacrifice of one or two young considered to be terrible?
I think that our era is very ideological, and we have trouble seeing our
own ideology.  John Keegan, a British military historian, says that
we're living in an era of massacre because of:
1) ideology-driven warfare, which leads to a lot of killing.
2) the glorification of close-up conflict, which has a high lethality.
3) the technology to make it all happen.
'Primitive' warfare is more ritualized and kills far fewer people.  The
idea of two men clobbering away at each other until one was dead would
have struck 'primitive' people as thoroughly stupid, and rightly so. The
current notion is to fight to the death.  The older idea was to survive
the encounter, and live to fight another day.
Two million people a year have been killed in war situations in the last
50 years - and this since WWII. I think we could improve our economies,
if we had the will to do so, without engaging in wars.
Canada got out of the depression of the 30's by starting to spend money
for WWII.  Suddenly the money became available.  In fact, the money
would have been available whether or not there was a war, but our
politicians had developed a policy of responding to the depression with
parsimony.  This aggravated the depression.
Unemployed young men who'd just the day before been considered a social
menace were given uniforms and praised as our brave fighting men.  The
money to feed, clothe, arm, train and transport them was suddenly there.
But the political will had been lacking in the 30's to create a society
actually worth living in, except for the privileged minority.
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