Maybe one of the reasons I appreciate JL more than most of the others on Lit-Ideas is that he values the meanings of words. If we use a word we ought to intend something by it and our intention ought to grow out of its meaning, its tradition, how it has been used in the past. If we don?t choose to rely upon common or at least previous usage, then we must define our terms. A philosopher may say "whenever I use the term dasein I mean X by it." Or if one is Martin Heidegger, he may leave the term poorly defined so that all you know about it is that whatever it means to Heidegger that meaning isn?t to be found in a dictionary. Let?s return to the circumstances that set me off, the end of the movie _Anzio_. Edward Dmytryk has Robert Mitchum, his war correspondent utter this saw to a Major General: ?Wars never solve anything. History tells us that.? He uses the word ?solve? not in a philosophical sense but in a common sense ? at least I saw no hint that he was intending this word to be taken in some new and unusual fashion. So what does ?solve? mean? The following is from the on-line American Heritage dictionary: solve (slv, sôlv) v. solved, solv·ing, solves v.tr. 1. To find a solution to. 2. To work out a correct solution to (a problem). v.intr. To solve an equation: Insert the values of the constants and solve for x. ________________________________________ [Middle English solven, to loosen, from Latin solvere; see leu- in Indo-European roots.] ________________________________________ solver n. Synonyms: solve, decipher, resolve, unravel These verbs mean to clear up or explain something puzzling or unintelligible: solve a riddle; can't decipher your handwriting; resolve a problem; unravel a mystery. So if these are the things ?solve? might mean, let us look for the ?problem? that some war-starters expect to ?solve.? Eric, it seems to me goes off in the wrong direction. He looks for a hidden quibble held or entertained by ?the losers of a war.? Losers and winners don?t seem to evolve from the need to solve something. The nation with the problem, the problem requiring solution, the ?war-starter? is where we must look, it seems to me. Who but the war-starter would have the ?problem? that requires a ?solution?? I suppose both nations could have a ?problem? and start a given war simultaneously, but I doubt it would help to explore that possibility. Let?s just take Germany. The movie was about a war the German?s started and Eric seems happy to consider that but he doesn?t stay with the right words. He moves off to ?position.? How he gets from ?war never solves anything? to a ?position? mystifies me. It is a veritable problem requiring a solution, but Eric?s note doesn?t provide it ? although he seems to think that it does. [If it does, Eric, I missed it. Move more slowly from the definition of the key terms ?solve? and ?problem? to your word ?position? so I can follow the bouncing ball.] I have been reading the _On the Origins of War, and the Preservation of Peace_ by Donald Kagan. On page 8 he quotes Thucydides to say that people go to war out of ?honor, fear, and interest.? Kagan, an expert in such matters, thinks Thucydides is right ? well he doesn?t exactly say ?right.? He says, ?I have found that trio of motives most illuminating in understanding the origins of wars throughout history and will refer to them frequently in this work.? Fair enough, and he does refer to these terms. In World War One for example, he says all the nations feared something. Germany feared a two front war. It feared that France and Russia might get together; so if they could just wipe out one front before the other got started they would have just a one-front war. Otherwise, they thought, Germany was doomed. I can understand ?fear? quite well as a motive for the various participants in WWI. I?ve read several books and almost all the participants were afraid of something. The only possible exception was the U.S. They entered late because their parent nation England asked for help. But even the U.S. could be said to ?fear? something when they formulated the sentence, ?unless we enter the war, Britain may lose.? So there we have a very brief discussion of the motives for a major war and all of them fit more or less well under the heading ?fear.? None of them fit under a "problem" requiring a "solution." If we move down the line from the "origins" of wars to the tactical ?problems? related to defeating the enemy in battle, then yes, we can say the enemies approach represents a ?problem? requiring a tactical ?solution.? More than that it requires engaging the enemy and defeated him. If the leadership selected the right ?solution? then the ?problem? presented by the enemy would have been solved. More importantly he would have been defeated, but I won?t quibble. ?Problem? and ?solution? do mean something in regard to tactics. But they don?t mean anything that I can see in regard to the origins of wars. Let?s take another war discussed here recently: The Falklands War. The Falklands was claimed by the British during their empire days. The people who live there are British and they don?t want to be free of the British Empire. They don't want to belong to Argentina. The Falklands are also claimed by Argentina and one day Argentina occupied the Falklands. What was their motive? Was it a problem they wanted solved? No, it rankled that the British claimed this Island when they thought by virtue of proximity or something else (Perhaps JL can provide a better definition). It ought to belong to Argentina. The British didn?t really need the Falklands but could it afford to abandon the 1800 people living there? British honour was at stake and so they set sail. Once they got there then tactics became important. The land, the disposition of the Argentines, the forces at the disposal of the British, the three groups made of by the Martial Races the Scots, Welsh and Gurkhas were set into motion in accordance with the tactical solution developed by the British leadership. The Battle (War) was fought. The British won. The Argentines lost. The 1800 Falkland Islanders were happy. Eric moves on to the matter of handling conflict, and I strained to relate this back to ?problems? and ?solutions? and couldn?t manage to arrive there. So while I couldn?t arrive there, I can go back to the end of Anzio and listen once again to ?wars never solve anything. History teaches us that.? No, no, no, Dmytryk! That?s utter nonsense. Lawrence Helm San Jacinto From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eric Dean Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2008 7:13 AM To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [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 ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html