[lit-ideas] Re: The things war never solves

I think Eric D is right (for a change:). Interestingly, "taking a position" is
similar to "premises" in linking an epistemic with a geographic or physical
location sense. Premises are the grounds one stands on in justifying belief or
action; and loitering on the premises of the space of reasons is verboten.

Musing his way through a mild Newfoundland winter,

Walter O



Quoting Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

> 
> 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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