[Dean's World] Dave Price: War, What Is It Good For?

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
War, What Is It Good For?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1197689838.shtml


   Victor Hanson [1]notes a general failure to grasp the obvious among
   punditry and politicians::

     But the miraculous political achievement of postwar Japan or Europe
     was the dividend of a military solution: the destruction of wartime
     fascism and the prevention of its reemergence by vigilant military
     policing.
     ...
     History suggests that democratic states are initially always the
     more eager for engagement than tyrannies that talk only when their
     backs are against the wall or their appetites are for a time sated.
     ...First, it is hard to think of too many democracies that did not
     emerge out of some sort of violence or the threat of such.
     Constitutional systems in Argentina, the Balkans, Germany, Italy,
     Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan â and the United States â
     to name only a few, all followed an armed conflict or at least the
     specter of force. The end of the Cold War â i.e. the defeat of the
     Soviet Union â alone freed Eastern Europe.
     War is not the only catalyst for a new democracy, but there is a
     common enough connection. Anti-democratic forces, both internal and
     external, are usually the more plentiful and they donât like to
     surrender their power unless they are forced to.

   Hanson also notes that only from the view of history, not contemporary
   accounts, will observers be able to determine whether our intervention
   in Iraq was successful.
   What is undeniable is the essential truth of the effort's premise. As
   [2]Rudy Rummel has amply shown, liberal democracy has been the modern
   world's greatest boon, without which most of the other advances we
   enjoy would either not exist or be used to enslave humans rather than
   to benefit them. The effort to spread liberal democracy till no human
   being is denied their sacred right to freedom is a holy war for
   rational empiricists, the highest good that can be achieved in the
   mortal world.
   The path to liberty is difficult, treacherous, and steep but when
   societies reach its heights, the Olympian glory and beauty of human
   freedom unleashed creates wonders unimaginable, unending and
   underappreciated.

References

   1. http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson121407.html
   2. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/