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Long intake of breath ...
Have we had peace since 1939? This question prompts me to ask another question - have we had peace ever? The leitmotif of human history seems to have been war, conflict, violence and destruction, but I'm sure none of us want to incur the wrath of the moderators by getting sidetracked into a debate on the nature of our species. At least not without starting another thread.
It all depends, as it always does, on your terms. What exactly do you mean by 'war'? For example, the coming conflict in Iraq (forgive my resignation to what I think is a likelihood and not a possibility) is, IMHO, not so much a war as an instance of bullying. The biggest kid in the playground, one might say, against any of the smaller kids. If and when this conflict escalates with troop deployments into actual battle, scud missiles liberally exchanged and lots of oil fields and indeed people on fire, 'war' sounds like a convenient word. But 'war', to me at least, has always implied a certain balance in the power of both sides, e.g. Hitler's imperial successes and the subjugation of millions of people to a massive and well-organised army, against a coalition of three very powerful states and several other smaller states resolved to stop him (and his army).
But the conflicts of the last half-century have seemed more like either disputes between smaller groups, perhaps of a similar size and therefore describable as wars by the above definition, or military machinations reducible in description to simple imperialism against a far weaker target.
By that definition, what Bush is trying to do in Itaq, N Korea and any other country that doesn't do what he asks (tells them) is pretty much the same as what Hitler did in Poland, Czechoslovakia and France.
But, getting back to the question, I don't really know enough about history to say whether the conflicts that took place before 1939 are in nature any different from those that took place after. You could argue, for example, that The Allies and the Axis Powers are little different from England and France in the Hundred Years' War, or from India and Pakistan in the last few months, except obviously in scale and numbers of lives lost etc.
More to the point perhaps, 'peace' implies people getting along with each other happily, and that certainly doesn't describe any of the conflicts, empire-building or land disputes cited above, whoever's perspective you're looking from.
Sorry, I've gone all the over the place I know, but hopefully there are some morsels of thought in there somewhere. But in any case, this topic has posed an excellent question. |
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