I read this passage in today's Telegraph and wondered if we have learned anything at all since 1914:
"The current job of the Ukrainian infantry is basically to sit in trenches and get shelled. Those who survive the barrage must then engage in firefights with approaching infantry and tanks. The survivors of that encounter then wait for the next artillery barrage. And so on.
Their Russian enemies have it even worse. Accounts from prisoners of war, pro-Russian military bloggers and public quarrels between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s chief, and the army command paint a picture of apocalyptic casualty rates, suicidal human wave assaults, and piteous shortages of ammo and kit."
I wondered how to head this post and only came up with cliches about smashed innocence and a lost golden age. Rejecting these, I went searching for sayings by the famous on the subject of war. Several caught my attention:
"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means." ~ Ronald Reagan
"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli. (Vladimir Putin must be beginning to recognise this truth, surely).
"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war." ~ Mao Zedong (this one struck me as worthy of Orwell at his most satiric)
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding." ~ Albert Einstein
"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace." ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick
In the end though, this is the one I liked the best:
"War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."
ReplyDeleteAbraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.
Is it wrong and heretical to ask if slavery would have survived had there been no Civil War? I suppose that we will never know and also that it is callous to ask.
DeleteMy guess is that slavery would have had at least another couple of decades. The peculiar institution was not (except in the imagination of its advocates) confined and pushed back on, it was doing its best to expand.
DeleteCould it be argued that without independence slavery would have ended much sooner as the Slavery Abolition Act would have applied?
DeleteSuch a counterfactual argument would be tricky. Does North American slavery remain bounded by the then British holdings--east of the Mississippi and somewhat north of the Gulf? Is the cotton gin invented? If cotton can be economically processed, and it can be shipped economically via the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps there then is a large cotton interest in North America to go with the sugar interest in the West Indies. Is that enough to delay British emancipation?
ReplyDeleteI am so bad at grasping real history and yet counterfactual history always interests me. I think it is because it is fiction, which i relentlessly prefer to facts (I blame a Froebel education)
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