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The Forum > Article Comments > Remembrance Day - the battle for the future > Comments

Remembrance Day - the battle for the future : Comments

By John Passant, published 11/11/2008

The war glorifiers have won the battle for the soul of Remembrance Day.

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Passy,

You might like to have a look at LeBlanc's "Constant Battles". The Malthusian views you quoted from my last post are a summary of his position, not mine, although I agree with him, so far as pre-State societies are concerned. He doesn't think this means no hope for the future. After all, we can control our fertility more easily, don't benefit economically from large families, and don't need them for defence or support in old age. Unfortunately, many of the world's people are still in the trap. Rwanda provides a good example of a Malthusian collapse. See this article by James Gasana, Rwanda's former agriculture minister:

http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=1780

Gasana's original article in Worldwatch Magazine (Sept. 2002) has a table showing the correlation between calories per person and massacres in the different districts in his country - pretty direct evidence of resource shortages leading to conflict. The truth may well be misanthropic, reactionary, and double plus ungood.

Your utopian socialist ideas completely ignore the role of natural capital and the need to look after it, although there is no doubt that bad management from bad political systems can increase human misery.
Posted by Divergence, Friday, 14 November 2008 4:23:41 PM
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Divergence

What do you understand by natural capital?

I have my own views but would be interested in exploring yours.

I think this idea that I am a utopian needs challenging but I don't have the space to do so. Essentially it's a question of relativity.

I also think the idea that population needs control is anti-human and accepts the dominant role of capital in determining among other things who eats and who doesn't.

I'll try to have a read of the material you sent. Thanks.
Posted by Passy, Friday, 14 November 2008 7:28:02 PM
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I notice from most of the comments here from both sides of the debate – many of which are excellent – that the distinction between war and conflict is being constantly blurred.

Yet the two are very different.

Conflict is normal – and important to the human condition. If a population comes under intolerable stress, it’s almost inevitable that people will descend into conflict.

By contrast, war is socially ABnormal, dysfunctional and self-perpetuating.

Conflict tends to be spontaneous, disorganised and situational, and often followed by shame. On the other hand, war is premeditated, well-organised and oblivious to its own morality (except, of course, for the losing side).

I think our inability to distinguish between conflict and war is part of our social conditioning. Because conflict is inevitable, we have been easily conditioned to accept the same about war.

War-based societies – whether rich or poor, primitive or advanced – tend to have similar characteristics: social inequality, gender inequality, a strong masculinity mystique, distrust of sexuality and birth, disrespect for nature, a strictly organized spirituality (religious or ideological) and a culture preoccupied with death.

All societies have these characteristics to some degree - but in war-based societies, they are much more intense and entrenched. For all our pretensions to progress, Western society is still very much a war-based culture.

Passy

Depending on how far back in history you want to go, you could try the works of cultural anthropologist Riane Eisler or 'Old Europe' archaeologist Maria Gimbatus. I've recommended them on OLO before but can't remember who to. If it was you, please forgive my repetition.
Posted by SJF, Saturday, 15 November 2008 9:32:28 AM
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Thanks SJF. I'll have a read.

Does your distinction then lead to the conclusion that there will be conflicts in non-class societies of the future? Over food or other resources for example?

War in class society is highly specialised etc and a non-class coeity removes the surplus and fight over that from the equation. Yet conflict might be another matter.
Posted by Passy, Sunday, 16 November 2008 8:17:23 AM
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I read the first two paragraphs of this article and fell over laughing.

I have this image of blokes in clogs drinking warm beer and polishing their coal shovels all outbidding one another for dramatic illustrations which condemned the evils of capitalism and extolled the virtues of the working class struggle (whilst secretly coveting the positions of the middle-classes), all in broad Yorkshire accents and liberally highlighted with expression like “Eh-ba-gumm”.

“Until we rid the world of capitalism there will be war.”

And after that there will still be war because

The demand for control of economic and geographic resources is part of human nature.

Only the completely naïve would ever assume that abolishing the economic model which has propelled human life experience out of the realm of absolute monarchs and into the modern world and produced the “consumer society” (that little thing, which enables many to benefit from the ideas of the few), "capitalism", is going to change human nature.

The danger with such simplistic beliefs and objectives as expressed in this article is

In reality, they bring about more misery and poverty then they claim to be abolishing.

The period known as “The Terror” came after the French revolution, not before it and it was not a “terror” inflicted upon the aristocracy but upon ordinary “citizen” by the revolutionary government of Robespierre and the “committee of public safety” in the name of “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality”.

What is offered by the author as an alternative are the rhetoric ideals of the “committee of public safety”.

However, what will be delivered is “the Terror” in any of the forms it has taken from 1793 through to whatever names Stalin, Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe gave it.

The great thing with capitalism, it leave the individual to make his own way.

The socialists rely on the gullibility of individuals to believe their lying rhetoric, until it is too late and the Terror is upon us.
Posted by Col Rouge, Sunday, 16 November 2008 10:13:59 AM
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Passy

‘War in class society is highly specialised etc and a non-class coeity removes the surplus and fight over that from the equation.’

It’s a chicken and egg situation. I believe war is essential to the MAINTENANCE of a class-based society – not the other way round.

The last 6000 years or so of history is depressingly full of examples of humanity striving for equal access to their own resources – material and social – only to be repeatedly thwarted by the armies of those who control the greatest slice of the resource pie. And the reason that access was lost in the first place was because someone's army was ordered to seize control of it.

That is why I don't believe that the cult of war remembrance is really about those who died in war. It's about maintaining the prestige of the military, on which the wealthy and powerful heavily depend.
Posted by SJF, Sunday, 16 November 2008 10:50:21 AM
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