Pacifism

[John Tuttle]

(09-30-2006 01:33 PM)Guest Wrote:  WWI was very stupid.

Stupid for whom? WWI is often called a "pointless" war, and the causes are often depicted to be the result of some unintentional diplomatic fuck-up (a relic of the Sidney Fay theory of the cause of WWI, which is not used by most modern historians yet still taught widely in primary and secondary education), but whether it had a point or not depends on one's point of view.

Aggressive German foreign policy was the main cause of the war (via the blank check they gave Austria-Hungary), so one can argue that the war was stupid from that point of view - it was a tragic miscalculation on the behalf of the Germans, who had thought that they would be able to defeat France quickly as a part of the Schlieffen Plan, a plan that went sour after the First Battle of the Marne halted their drive towards Paris. However, for the French, whose nation was under direct threat, the war effort was hardly stupid. Or for the British - maintaining the balance of power in Europe was a genuine goal, and a logical one.

I guess my point is that it is often to say that war is without point. One hears hippy-type people say that all the time. In reality, war is a complex thing. Wars are fought for different causes with different goals. Some may be stupid, others may not. I dislike absolute pacifism for this reason - it attempts to simplify a complex subject. I am fine with people who are pacifists for moral reasons, and I am fine with those who think that we should seek to avoid war, but absolute pacifism is not something I politically agree with.