[lit-ideas] The things war never solves















Lawrence Helm defies anyone to say that wars never *decide* anything, by 
contrast with the mulishly repeated nonsense that "war never solves anything", 
as he characterizes the phrase.

I don't understand why Lawrence finds that phrase so nonsensical.  The phrase, 
it seems to me, means that the losers in a war generally do not take the loss 
as the reason to give up the position they had previously taken.

I think that there's a hidden quibble about the meaning of 'taking a position' 
at play here.  Generally the losers of a war can no longer occupy the position 
they previously occupied in the sense of having political control over a 
geographic space -- Germany no longer occupied France at the end of World War 
II, for example.  

But die-hard Nazis did not give up the 'position' (i.e. the idea) that Germany 
*should* occupy France.  

That's the sense in which war never solves anything, as I understand the 
phrase.  The disputes that lead to war do not go away just because someone wins 
the war and someone loses.  All that happens is that the winner has a greater 
chance of forcing the loser to act like he or she has accepted the winner's 
views than he or she had before.  Of course the loser might come to resent the 
domination...

And if one understands 'decide' in the same sense as I'm suggesting one might 
understand 'solves', then I would be happy to say that wars never decide 
anything, other than who happens to have won that war that time.

One of the things we parents try to teach our children is how to handle their 
conflicts without physical fighting, because the physical fight doesn't really 
settle what's at issue in a conflict -- unless all that's at issue is whether 
Mike or Sue gets to eat the last piece of pie...  And while Mike might get the 
piece of pie away from Sue by pushing her aside, Sue might also look for a way 
to get her own back later, so even that physical conflict that might be said to 
decide the question of who gets a particular physical thing at a particular 
time does not decide the issue between Mike and Sue for all time.

Parents don't succeed in eradicating physical conflict between their kids.  No 
more should we expect that arguments against war are going to eradicate violent 
conflict between large groups of adults.  But neither of those points means we 
should abandon the effort to reduce the frequency of violent conflict.  One of 
the techniques in reducing such conflict is to remind conscious adult human 
beings that physical conflict does not resolve non-physical sources of 
conflict.  That's every bit as true and practical a bit of insight as is the 
notion that the aggressors in our midst aren't going to stop because we wish 
they would.

Conflict will always be with us.  It can actually be constructive and healthy 
-- otherwise there wouldn't even be the phrase 'healthy debate'.  The real 
question is how we handle conflict, what we do with it, not whether it exists.  
Physical conflict is destructive -- things get destroyed, people get wounded, 
maimed and killed.  Is it really such a naive and foolish thing to look for 
alternatives for handling conflict that do not result in physical destruction?  
Doing so needn't mean we abandon the capacity to defend ourselves, nor that we 
inherently reject any argument for war.  It only means that we really do try to 
find alternatives before firing the first shot.

Regards to all,
Eric Dean
Washington DC

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