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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (421098)

10/18/2019 11:41:56 AM

From: koan

Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 541791

John, you are sort of doing the same thing, IMO, equating ability and intent. The last century was not any worse than any other preceding century as far as general conflict goes.

As far as Russia invading the Ukraine, notice they only took Crimea. Russia could easily defeat the Ukraine, but modern sensibilities effected by education does not allow them to be that blatant, so they fight around the edges using proxy combatants i.e. THEY ARE RESTRAINED, as are the Iranians in Yeman.

What countries were able to do in the last century was effect much more war and much more damage with modern technology. They had planes and bombs and rapid fire guns, submarines, etc and all sorts of technology to wrought hell on earth.

Imagine if Napoleon and other nations had that technology hundreds of years ago. Look at what we did to the natives in our country. Imagine if we had planes and machine guns then.

When the Germanic tribes wiped out Rome in about 450 AD Europe was so lawless that people could not hardly travel for fear of bandits and had to stay in their villages.

What if they had modern technology during the civil war or all the other wars in history?

When you talk about India invading Kashmir you actually make my point. India, Pakistan and other eastern countries do not have populations as well educated and free of dogma as those in Europe. Their democracies and rule of law is pretty weak and thin.

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You are equating the "ability" to kill people with the "intent". Those are two different things. Apples and oranges. Yes big wars last century, but today the idea of one European country invading another is not even a worry. That is due to our increased ability to think. Education.

You need, in order to make this argument sufficiently concrete to have some persuasive force, to deal with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, India's invasion of Kashmir, etc.

Today, the people in every society on earth are hitting misogyny, racism, homophobia and caste systems very hard. All one has to do is watch foreign films to see how hard the writers and directors are addressing those subjects in their films, in every country.

In so far as you've wrapped these kinds of assertions within a progressive view of historical change, you will need, once again if you wish to make it persuasive, to deal with the many assertions that the 20th century may well rank as one of the worst--two world wars (unprecedented), the holocaust (fomented within the European country with a long history of a vibrant "high" culture), Stalin's mass slaughters in Russia, ethnic cleansing in southeastern Europe, the same in southeast Asia, and so on. Perhaps there is a case to be made here. But it needs to be made.

One of my favorites historians, Eric Hobsbawm, dealt with this conundrum by calling much of the century, "the age of extremes." A German historian, Heinrich Winkler, calls it the "age of catastrophe."

Whatever, however, one calls it, any progressive view of historical change has to address these concrete and extremely disturbing manifestations of the dark side of human activity.