After re-reviewing what I learned in history class as a kid, I began to rethink the true causes of war. Let’s look at a few cases:
- American Revolution: Was fought over independence, freedom, and taxes (representation).
- American Civil War: The south would lose major source of income if slaves were freed.
- WW2: Germany’s high debt and desperation for gold.
- WW1: Global land-grab, following a relatively small (assassination of Archduke Ferdinand)
For example, anti-semetism is often blamed as the cause of the Holocaust, however, when you realize that Jews as a whole were better off while the rest of the Germans were struggling, it is really an economic issue. David Cesnari said
“Another thing that separates the Nazis apart from other people who dislike Jews is that the Nazis believed that the Jews had acquired vast power, and that they had used this power in a malign way. It was the power of the Jews that had led to the Bolshevik revolution, it was the power of the Jews that had led to revolution in Germany, had stabbed the German Army in the back and had brought down Imperial Germany. In the Nazis’ world vision not only were the Jews a force for evil, a Manichean, demonic force for evil, but they had vast power, they had their hands on the levers of power. They had to be eliminated, they had to be deprived of that power, they had to be broken and then destroyed. To the Nazis the entire course of world history vindicated that interpretation of Jewish power.”
Technically, the Holocaust was not caused by the right-leaning population. It was caused by a bad government (a tyrannical one), a fact few people seem to get today; and that leads us to consider the #1 non-natural cause of death, or we might say war, in the last 100-200 years: democide. Democide, a word that is not even in my spell-checker, which means death cause by a citizen’s own govt.—if I can take a quick detour for a moment on the most needed history lesson update in modern schools, it’s democide: Almost 300 million people eliminated by their own government, and the Holocaust was just one event, yet few of us know of more. And if you think we are more civilized today, 76 million of these were killed post WW2, mostly in Communist countries. This is according to professor Rudolph Rummel.
You will see the economic underpinnings of many of these cases. which has killed 6x as many people at the hand of their own govt, compared to all wars. you will find that economic ideology seemed to be at the center of the majority of it, ranging from 21M – 70M killed in communist countries striving to achieve Marxist/communistic ideologies, or control over the people. The Russians and Chinese were essentially fighting an economic system, fighting for “equality,” but also ensuring their own increase in power. The Holodomir is just one of many examples where the Communist govt stole food from the Ukrainian farmers to feed everyone else why the farmers died. In all cases of democide, they were tyrannical, which may be the greater lesson, and future caution, here.
Whether a nation is fighting another nation, or their own population, the fight over money and power is really a core driver of most wars. Blaming their actions on ideology (e.g. Communism, Fascism, ethic, and religious purposes) tends to just be a cover, or excuse, for their real reasons.
Here are several other wars fought over money, including the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as China’s regular dispute over the oil of the South Seas.
U.S. Civil War Possibility
I often cite Gallup and Pew because they do fairly reliable, non-partisan studies. Similarly, if a picture is worth 1000 words, then read this:
If I were to group these people, I would say it is:
- Liberals vs conservatives
- Urban vs Rural
- Rich vs Poor (although this is difficult to prove due to many variables)
The Polarization is not Limited to Political Parties
“The Big Sort” is a well known book by journalist Bill Bishop, written in 2004. It proposes that ideological divisions are increasingly occurring at the state, county, zip code, and neighborhood levels. It is summarized by this statement:
“The result is a country that has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live a few miles away. How this came to be, and its dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking work. “
Even if you do not read the book, the reviews are educational.
Urban vs Rural: Modern American Secession & State Geographical Redistribution Attempts
Just last week I heard that Most of Oregon is trying to become part of Idaho instead. Earlier this year it was Catalonia
The urban vs rural divide is the clearest divide in American politics today. The city dwellers do not share the values or income levels, and therefore taxes, of the rural residents. In some ways it reminds me of rural America’s revolution from urban Britain over 200 years ago, and the North from the South in the Civil War.
This leads me to believe that in the future, further redistributions of lands and/or secession are actually possible, but unlikely to come in peaceful times.
Here is a list of significant (meaning not a couple of people) secession attempts or threats in the past few years.
The Myth of Peace
See, the reality is, there is no single governing system, nor system of laws, that will make everyone happy all of the time because people do not simply homogenize ideologically over time (diversity), and you simply cannot make rules to please everyone. SImultaneously, you always have people trying to impose their ideas on to others (force), and people are beyond any mesure, unreliable as their behavior constantly changes to changing environments.
With the need for autonomy, shifting power over time, an increasingly powerful populous (e.g. people can read, print, and publish books) and/or govt, it can be concluded that the desire to create new, independent, and sovereign nations will always exist, and generally a common way to achieve that is through conflict. It is even possible that the end of the nation state is on the horizon, but that is difficult to say whether that is useful/risky or not, meaning there is safety in numbers, but when those large groups break down, there is much larger disaster awaiting. This describes my systems-scale-conflict-theory.
In a nutshell, the larger the system (political, economic, etc…), the longer between periods of chaos, but the larger the chaos is when chaos occurs. When WW3 hits, the world will crash harder and more people will die than in any previous war, just like we saw on WW1 and 2 as globalization was ramping up.