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I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine from grad school a few months back that dovetails with this "teaching kids about war" issue. Both of us grew up as nerds who liked studying history, and loved studying about militaries. Both of us were that kid reading some book about the ACW or WW2 in middle school. We both thought the military was absolutely awesome and, while war etc was "of course horrible" at around our early 20s we also would have piped up with all the situations in which it was far better to engage in military action to prevent something worse. What we discovered in the course of our conversation was that it was only after we hit our late 20s that the consequences of war really, really began to sink in for us. I think this is just part of getting older and realizing how much poo poo outside of yourself you really care about. When you're 20 the idea of death in war is bad, but you're always thinking of yourself first and foremost and it's really abstract. Once you're in your 30s you start to have the kind of relationships where you realize just how devastating the loss of someone else can be. This friend of mine is a holocaust scholar, for what it's worth. He was kind of amazed that it's only now that the enormity of the suffering involved has really started to sink in, well after he has a loving PhD in the subject. Obviously I don't think that the answer is to shield kids from military history, but I also think that a lot of the full realization of how bad death is is something that really only comes with age. When I was 20 I'd read some article about a dozen people getting killed in a skirmish on some forgotten battlefield and think "eh, that's not too bad." Now I just see a dozen families that have to deal with a staggering loss for generations to come. There isn't any real way around this. gently caress, insert every cliche ever about the young being the ones who have to fight wars.
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Nov 26, 2016 00:06
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What do units that are referred to as armored calvary do exactly? From what I've heard they seem more like skirmishers.
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Nov 26, 2016 00:28
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Stairmaster posted:What do units that are referred to as armored calvary do exactly? From what I've heard they seem more like skirmishers. Ehhh, Roman/Near Asian Cataphracts and I think later the Mamluks were probably the only heavily armored cavalry to do skirmish attacks and it was just as a way to disarray enemy formations before charging.
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Nov 26, 2016 00:37
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I'd like to think the experience of war would dissuade people from starting new ones, but looking back at WWII it doesn't seem like that's the case. Mussolini, Hitler, both lived through some of the worst WWI had to offer, and instead of rejecting war they became obsessed with it. The Russian Civil War didn't make Stalin miserly with human life, and many of the Generals and Admirals dragging Japan into ever widening conflicts for narrow self serving interests were the same ones who would soon throw their lives away in hopeless and futile actions. Mankind just seems impervious to learning lessons from the past,
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Nov 26, 2016 01:08
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This time it'll be different. We've got better tactics and better equipment and better people than they do.
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Nov 26, 2016 01:11
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The generation that started WW2 grew up in a world without antibiotics, and with infant mortality still commonplace; death was still a fact of life in a way it really isn't today. I dunno if specifically Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin would have been much dissuaded growing up in a different era, but I think your average person in the developed world is a lot more miserly with death now than they were back then, at least when it's a death that touches them rather than halfway across the world in the mountains of Afghanistan.
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Nov 26, 2016 01:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Personally, I can super clearly remember the first time I looked at a memorial for a soldier of either Iraq or Afghanistan, (something that I had seen plenty before for any number of wars) and realized that his birthdate was after mine. I was 19 
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Nov 26, 2016 01:35
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CoolCab posted:Personally, I can super clearly remember the first time I looked at a memorial for a soldier of either Iraq or Afghanistan, (something that I had seen plenty before for any number of wars) and realized that his birthdate was after mine. I was 19 I come across pictures of dudes who are now younger than me and look like they should be working a dead rear end job at the local super market, not soon to be dying in Belgium/Northern France.
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Nov 26, 2016 01:42
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If there is one thing that remaining at university for my PhD has taught me its that 19/20 years olds have horribly malformed and underdeveloped opinions on almost everything, i would be amazed were it different for war.
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Nov 26, 2016 02:28
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I'd like to thank this thread for recommending The Wages of Destruction . Just starting to work my way through it and it's already fascinating.
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Nov 26, 2016 02:43
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Squalid posted:I'd like to think the experience of war would dissuade people from starting new ones, but looking back at WWII it doesn't seem like that's the case. Mussolini, Hitler, both lived through some of the worst WWI had to offer, and instead of rejecting war they became obsessed with it. The Russian Civil War didn't make Stalin miserly with human life, and many of the Generals and Admirals dragging Japan into ever widening conflicts for narrow self serving interests were the same ones who would soon throw their lives away in hopeless and futile actions. I'm not sure this is strictly true; all of them did learn stuff. Hitler learned that if you lose, you and everyone you care about will have to suffer for it even if it was someone else's stupid idea (granted, the nuance of this might have escaped him). Mussolini learnt even if you were on the right side, you get screwed over. Stalin learned you need to be in it for the long haul and that a lot of people are going to die and tanks are going to explode winning it, and if you don't your state's existence is on the line. The Japanese were pretty similar when they learnt if you accept external arbitration you won't get what you "earned". They're all terrible lessons, sure, but they're things they took from the war, things that outstrip "Loads of your people are going to die, often horribly", depending on what your values system is. And it's not like nazis, stalinists, or... I don't know what you call people who love the imperial japanese, but them; it's not like they had great values systems. EDIT: And, like, in the same kind of way we now go "But the holocaust is worse", Stalin is thinking "But losing and having an uprising destroy my society is worse".
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Nov 26, 2016 03:08
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If you want to read a blog post where I rant about Amerika Bombers and other bombers, I've written a thing.
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Nov 26, 2016 03:12
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Nebakenezzer posted:If you want to read a blog post where I rant about Amerika Bombers and other bombers, I've written a thing. Is Gay Black Hitler turning into a meme elsewhere? Thought I saw it on some reddit thing a while back. Crazycryodude posted:I've seen Gay Black Hitler spreading. 
Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Nov 26, 2016 |
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Nov 26, 2016 03:46
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Is Gay Black Hitler turning into a meme elsewhere? Thought I saw it on some reddit thing a while back. I've seen Gay Black Hitler spreading. I know I DEFINITELY see it semi-regularly on /r/shitwheraboossay, and I'm pretty sure I've caught it on Imgur once or twice.
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Nov 26, 2016 03:53
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Nebakenezzer posted:If you want to read a blog post where I rant about Amerika Bombers and other bombers, I've written a thing. Derbies are a type of hat, debris is the residue of a riot.
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Nov 26, 2016 04:06
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Obviously you aren't going to the correct riots 
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Nov 26, 2016 04:10
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sullat posted:Derbies are a type of hat, debris is the residue of a riot. I stand by what I wrote fixed, thank you
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Nov 26, 2016 04:55
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Polyakov posted:If there is one thing that
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Nov 26, 2016 08:34
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Hunt11 posted:Then what were you doing when you mentioned the fall of the Soviet Union? Trying to chip at the notion that WW2 must be a completely just war. People can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and they can definitely do some wrong poo poo while pursuing a right cause: One of the millions killed by chinese generals flooding a dam for some temporary tactical gain probably don't really see their army as heroes because they fought the Japanese.
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Nov 26, 2016 08:58
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Nebakenezzer posted:If you want to read a blog post where I rant about Amerika Bombers and other bombers, I've written a thing. Thanks for the Tooze reference, a very interesting book. Ruffled quite a few feathers it seems.
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Nov 26, 2016 09:53
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Great post, Cyrano. I'd add that for me stuff like parents and friends and oneself ageing and getting health problems really has been driving home how fragile we are and what an enormity it is to make a political decision that will get a bunch of perfectly healthy people hosed up. Ten years ago stuff like Käthe Kollwitz's Mother with Dead Son was something I maybe got intellectually, but I didn't feel it and today holy poo poo do I ever.
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Nov 26, 2016 12:08
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SeanBeansShako posted:I come across pictures of dudes who are now younger than me and look like they should be working a dead rear end job at the local super market, not soon to be dying in Belgium/Northern France. Right, and I absolutely get that but there always felt like there was some sort of...distance, somehow? Like that's all History, all something that happened before my time. I've seen plenty of graves with two dates horrifically close together. It stuck with me because that poor kid shared my context; he would have grown up under the same cartoons and video games and politics and the kind of candy bars or soda brands and lived through the Spice Girls and the birth of the internet and September 11th and everything in between and after until he stopped and I didn't. And when I think back on all that's happened in the ten years since I do feel somehow both...privileged and guilty, all at once. And more then a little bit angry.
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Nov 26, 2016 13:41
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CoolCab posted:Right, and I absolutely get that but there always felt like there was some sort of...distance, somehow? Like that's all History, all something that happened before my time. I've seen plenty of graves with two dates horrifically close together. There is that opening scene in the animation visualizing the dead of war in WWII posted a couple of pages back that starts out with tracing the lifelines of famous people through the war. For them the war was just a section of their lives, they got pulled into it, participated in it, survived and lived on, no doubt telling stories and having experiences well after the war. And then it shows the hundreds of thousands of lifelines that just stop at some point during the war. It was incredibly sobering. It's so easy to see the dead of war as essentially NPCs in the great video game of history, where the major players survive and tell and influence the story.
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Nov 26, 2016 15:29
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CoolCab posted:Right, and I absolutely get that but there always felt like there was some sort of...distance, somehow? Like that's all History, all something that happened before my time. I've seen plenty of graves with two dates horrifically close together. Basically when working through the regimental archives I see glimpses of their personal lives and information. With some very old records I know their ages, names, where they were recruited and where they were from (hits harder when they are local lads rather than some poor Coilier from Wales) and their profession hell even then religion as well as their possible deaths. The photographs and personal items are the most sad. Their widows and relatives send them to the museum and they are archived under their names. A lot of the WW1 stuff is clearly what they had lying in their kit at the front or on their person .It adds an extra layer sadness that a century on almost nobody apart from a handful of living people now know them whether they lived or died.
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Nov 26, 2016 16:26
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I have an older friend who was in Afghanistan, only got to shoot at someone once and told me that bullets hitting an LAV sounds like rain at first. Great guy, a better person that me, etc., but I remember inadvertedly getting the jump on him by when entering the offise - I shoulder check the door - and for a moment I saw him turn in his chair towards me, raising hands in defense and his scared face. That's a really loving sad memory for me. A few years ago I argued with a friend that living through war wouldn't be bad, I mean, I'd live, but I wouldn't say that now, after years of MilHist and Cold WR threads, /his/ thread on 4chan, war webm threads... War excites some part of me, but yeah, please, no more war. On the other hand, Lithuania is one of those countries that might be called to be sacrificed to Russia in Appeasement 2.0, which makes me less excited about peace in our time. Nobody saw any improvements in life after Russians "liberated" them and we still remembered how it ended the last time Western nations gave us away.
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Nov 26, 2016 16:40
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JcDent posted:I have an older friend who was in Afghanistan, only got to shoot at someone once and told me that bullets hitting an LAV sounds like rain at first. When was this, the 80s or the 00s?
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Nov 26, 2016 16:56
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No LAVs in USSR! To be less of an rear end, yeah, he was in the new one. Dunno when exactly or where.
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Nov 26, 2016 17:46
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Didn't someone make a really detailed post about how mechanical fire computers on battleships worked? I'm trying to find it...
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Nov 26, 2016 17:47
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Saint Celestine posted:Didn't someone make a really detailed post about how mechanical fire computers on battleships worked? I'm trying to find it... If you mean this, then it's this. There was a bit of discussion, but I don't remember any particular post. Mostly people marveling at how someone could sit down with a slide rule, send some patterns off to a machine shop, and a motion-compensating fire control computer comes out at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
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Nov 26, 2016 17:50
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It is tremendously difficult to express for want of a better word a pro-war, or justification of war opinion without either sounding like you are preaching or not taking peoples pain seriously, but im going to give it a go. Wars almost never tend to be fought unless a country is directly threatened, there are not many wars that were fought to defend the helpless but instead only to defend ourselves. I can only off the top of my head think of 3 or 4 wars where i would say the major contributing factor in their fighting was the protection of those that cant protect themselves, that being WW2, Korea and Gulf 1, along with the interventions in the Balkans after the fall of the soviet union and arguably US involvement in Iran-Iraq also counts (there are lots of small military actions I'm not mentioning but). (My experience does not go back to much before 1900). War is nasty as hell, especially if you are fighting it on behalf of somebody else, you see the families of the dead close up but what you don't see but do exist are the families of the people who were saved from life under Hitler, Kim Jong Sung/Il/Un and Saddam Hussein. The countries that we (speaking in terms of the west) defended were not ideal societies in many ways, but i think it is fair to say that in concrete terms the entire population of those countries are better off than if we had not gotten involved, these wars had a lot of people dieing but ultimately they were right to fight. If the countries who are able to oppose in any way the spread of oppression sit back and do not i think that its the ultimate incarnation of gently caress you got mine, we in the west are safe, people like Putin are never going to be marching up Regent street, but i could very easily see little green men popping up in Vilnius, Riga or Talinn, and then that's pretty much that for the people that live there, they have had the same rights that we have a good confidence that we will always have, we have a responsibility to try and help to defend their rights, because if Russia really decides it wants to take over then there isn't much that (to take an example) the Baltic republics could do to stop them without our help, certainly not without things getting very bloody messy. If we let our fear of war stop us from taking any action then we are culpable in people being stripped of their rights or even their lives if we could have acted and chose not to. The ugliness and costs of war are something to be taken extremely seriously, people who are affected by having to fight the war should be appropriately cared for, and War should not be embarked on frivolously or without a considerable quantity of thought, the motivation has to be right, we also have to accept that motivations will never be completely perfect. You can hate war and indeed people should, but you must accept that there is a point where the consequences of not fighting are worse than those of fighting, i think that people should inherently mistrust anyone that declares absolutes, anyone who says we should never fight or should always fight is wrong, I believe we are never going to escape war entirely as a species so we must make sure that when we fight it we are doing so for the right reasons, it is possible in an effort to not glorify war that you get too wrapped up in its costs without really looking at the good things that have come from wars that were fought. E: Saint Celestine posted:Didn't someone make a really detailed post about how mechanical fire computers on battleships worked? I'm trying to find it... I did a post about the maths behind the problem that an MFC solves if thats what you were thinking of. But that video Hogmartin linked is great about the actual operations of the mechanisms. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Nov 26, 2016 |
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Nov 26, 2016 17:52
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^^ Do you remember where said post? \/ Thanks! Saint Celestine fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Nov 26, 2016 |
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Nov 26, 2016 18:08
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Click on the empty quote of my own post in that post and it should take you there.
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Nov 26, 2016 18:10
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I am so sick of having to read the same crap from people trying to defend the Japanese internment. Why the gently caress is the immediate reaction for these idiots is to wail about POW camps and beheadings as if anybody living in San Francisco was moonlighting in the IJA?
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Nov 26, 2016 18:25
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I am so sick of having to read the same crap from people trying to defend the Japanese internment. Why the gently caress is the immediate reaction for these idiots is to wail about POW camps and beheadings as if anybody living in San Francisco was moonlighting in the IJA? George H Bush posted:"I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are...
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Nov 26, 2016 18:35
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Tias posted:Trying to chip at the notion that WW2 must be a completely just war. People can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and they can definitely do some wrong poo poo while pursuing a right cause: One of the millions killed by chinese generals flooding a dam for some temporary tactical gain probably don't really see their army as heroes because they fought the Japanese. Nobody is arguing that the Allies didn't do horrible things to win the war. It is just that what the Axis powers were doing, and would have done if they had won was so much worse.
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Nov 26, 2016 18:44
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I am so sick of having to read the same crap from people trying to defend the Japanese internment. Why the gently caress is the immediate reaction for these idiots is to wail about POW camps and beheadings as if anybody living in San Francisco was moonlighting in the IJA? There WERE Japanese Fifth Columns like the Shindo Renmei in Brazil but they were not a threat that warranted such drastic measures.
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Nov 26, 2016 18:47
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This is pretty cool: WWI footage of the Battle of the Somme, superimposed over footage of the same places today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuz0BA3-_P0
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Nov 26, 2016 19:00
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Koramei posted:The generation that started WW2 grew up in a world without antibiotics, and with infant mortality still commonplace; death was still a fact of life in a way it really isn't today. I dunno if specifically Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin would have been much dissuaded growing up in a different era, but I think your average person in the developed world is a lot more miserly with death now than they were back then, at least when it's a death that touches them rather than halfway across the world in the mountains of Afghanistan. The equivalent today is all-volunteer militaries who are predominately drawn from the poorer echelons of society, meaning that nowadays most people aren't directly affected by the decision to go to war overseas and therefore are not so opposed to it. Look at the people who still want to go into Syria and Iran even after the lessons we have llearned from Iraq and Afghanistan. The USA has fought 7 wars since the end of the Cold War, there's no way that would have been possible with a conscript military.
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Nov 26, 2016 19:20
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I'd say there's a slight difference between not apologizing and praising and holding up internment as a model for future programs.
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Nov 26, 2016 19:21
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I agree with the sentiment that it's dangerous to take either extreme position on war, but disagree that Korea and the Gulf were fought to save people who couldn't save themselves - even if that's what those wars became that half way through. Korea was in no way fought to save the country from a dictatorship, but to arrest the spread of an ideology - and then resulted in a pretty hosed up military dictatorship regardless. Did we fight in the gulf to save the Kurds? Or the Iraqis? Or the Iranians? If so we made a piss poor job of doing any of it - and then left saddam in place until NATO countries could come up with a flimsy excuse to finally take him out. It is fairly hard (I can't think of one really, even if ww2 was nominally fought to "Save Poland") to find a war fought for altruistic reasons - though I agree the alternative of not fighting can often end up worse. But again - we only know post-war. Those resisting and those encouraging war have no idea what the consequences may be either way, even decades after the fact.
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Nov 26, 2016 19:34
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