[thechat] Didn't we already have a cold war?

[isaac]

> Ugh. So we want a missle shield.
> So the Russians are gonna multiple-warhead their stuff.
> Maybe abandoning those treaties wasn't so smart, Mr. Bush.
> Ick. I don't want to worry about war with russia, I'd rather just have
> to worry about domestic and international terrorism. /Both/ I don't
> need.


quotes are from an obvious source (not all necessarily my own beliefs, but
interesting nonetheless):

there are the low, the middle, and the high. the goals of the high are to
stay there. the goals of the middle are to take the positions of the high.
the goals of the low (if they can surpass the grind of their lives) are to
create a society without distinctions of class.

"The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the
spectacular machine without raising the general standard of living."

people without produce starve. starving people often lack the energy to
attain a deserved position.

"It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to
destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting, and are not
divided any genuine ideological difference."

when the united states continues/restarts the arms race, those countries who
cannot follow (and maintain funds to lift/continue the standard of living of
their occupants) struggle.

"It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no
decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going
well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist -- and
so we have been confronted with the war on poverty, the war on crime, the
war against drugs, the war against international terrorism, etc. etc."


it frustrates me that countries feel so pressured to spend huge amounts on
the military. are NZ cutting their military spending because they assume
that AU would naturally come to their aid when required?






the entire chapter quoted from:

Chapter 3: War is Peace
War is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the
early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims
between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material
cause for fighting, and are not divided any genuine ideological difference.
This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing
attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the
contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and
such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of
whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend
even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they
are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a
physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly
trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting,
when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the
average person can only guess at, or around the military bases which guard
strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centers of civilization war means
no more than a continuous shortage of consumer goods, and the occasional
crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in
fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already
present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted
upon.

The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the
spectacular machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever
since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the
surplus of consumer goods has been latent in industrial society. At present,
when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of
destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1945, and
still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a
future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient -- a
glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete --
was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and
technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to
assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was
fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,
always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been
developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.

 From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to
all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a
great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used
deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease
could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being
used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by
producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the
machine did raise the living standards of the average human being greatly
over a period of about 50 years at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an
all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some
sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which
everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a
bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed an automobile or even an
airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality
would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would
confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in
which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be
evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged
elite. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if
leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human
beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would
learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would
sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and
they would sweep it away. In the long run, hierarchical society was only
possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. The problem was thus how to
keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of
the world. Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in
practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but
accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would
be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples
and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by
producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this
would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a
hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the
masses, whose attitude is unimportant as long as they are kept steadily at
work, but the morale of the elite itself. Even the humblest bureaucrat is
expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he or she should be a credulous and
ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and
orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he or she should have
the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the
war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it
does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed
is that a state of war should exist -- and so we have been confronted with
the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war against drugs, the war against
international terrorism, etc. etc.

Modern war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is
merely an imposture and a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling
groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest
and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one
another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they
are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling
group against its own subjects, and the object of war is not to make or
prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of global society
intact. The effect would be much the same if the world's ruling classes,
instead of (pretending to be) fighting one another, should agree to live in
perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case
each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the
sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent
would be the same as a permanent war. This is the inner meaning of the
slogan WAR IS PEACE.

(http://www.notbored.org/goldstein.html)