Pacifism (Split from "Top 10 Armies of Today")

money will always need to be spent on military hardware, unless everyone can sit down and say "hey lets live peacefully" then there will always be a threat and if nessecary alot of money will be spent to end the fight alot quicker and i have no problem with that

 

well then i start to sit down and live peacefully
but will you join me ?

 

I think putting food in people is more important than putting bullets in people.

6 million people die a year because of hunger and 10's of millions more suffer from chronic malnutrion , I think money would be better spend helping to cure diseases or develop poor countries and to give under privilaged people aid.

 

so would i but if there is a threat what would you rather have,(hypothetical and exagerated) feed someone you've never met or be invaded and loose all your freedoms

 

but can you see major powers doing that?
other countries will always see rivals as threats and in the unforeseeable future no one will sit down and organise complete world peace. anyway there still might be another hitler out there

 

It's a nice ideal, except that if there's just one human being in 6 billion who doesn't agree with your sitting down and living peacefully then there will be nothing but trouble. If world peace lasts for an entire generation before some evil person thinks outside the box, then we may all end up as slaves... That is why pacifism is really a very dangerous ideal.

I split this topic from the Top Ten Armies thread because it seemed rather irrelevant and is bound to gather some reactions.

 

You need soldiers to protect the those, who give the poor n´ helpless people food and other stuff.

 

alot of the charity that goes to the african countries gets mis-distrubuted by their goverments who are often very corrupt

 

Yeah, I´ve heard. These goverments can not provide the protection, because they are all selfish. Clans and their struggle for power is an enemy like "no food", so we have to neutralise them to help african´s people.

Regards,
Che.

 

which then destoys peace for a while
does the phrase if you want peace, prepare for war ring a bell?

 

dave wrote:

Indeed it does.

Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
Favius Vegetius Renatus 390 B.C.E.

As true today as then.

 

Yeah but in many countries military spending is too high and out of control , like who needs to spend 1.5 trillion on the military anyways ? , that is grossly to high , I"m saying cutiing the military budget by 1% can save probably millions of lives.

 

yeah did you know that with one day of the iraqi fredom campain so much money is waisted that you can provide food for whole africa for one month
imagine its almost two and a half years that would means plenty of food for africa over decades
that really drives me mad :angry:

 

What does senselessly ending each others lives do ? , The military dosen't need a lot of this money.

Theres Pros and Cons to having peace now
1.nobody loses loved ones, no after affects of war
2.if everyones disarmed one guy can rearm and attempt to take over surrounding countries
3.money will be put into disease control, foreign and internal aid
4.i suppose if one group is being surpressed by another group , theres little chance of getting rid of the "bad" group

 

But having the west just giving Africa money or food obviously doesn't help. The area needs to be stable, so that the people can develop long-term farming and businesses instead of what they do when their income and existence isn't certain. Then they need to be taught and guaranteed safety to develop their own food production. Right now, with the political instability of the area, what is really going on is that Western aid is sustaining a population that cannot sustain itself, so that we're really only creating a greater need for aid.

 

Western aid is helping , theres nothing that can be done to improve crops in the area and theres no where for these people to go , so the only thing you can do is give them aid , they'd help if they could but what can they do ? majority of them are to weak to work , and they have no options.

Putting money into agricultural options could improve soil durability in drier climates , um they could genetically inhance foods to make them bigger(many universities have successfully done it) , faster more efficent water deneitrification.

 

The world tried mutual partial disarmament back in the 1920s. It did not happen, because nobody trusted anybody else. The only country that did disarm after WW1 was Germany, and they had no choice. One of the more powerful arguments Hitler used to back up the re-armament of Germany was that nobody else had honoured their disarming treaty commitments, so why should Germany?

Yes, Not having a military would be lovely. But then, so would not needing a police force, or having no hunger, no poverty, no discrimination... or Utopia, in other words.

Which, as we have discussed on here, is just not an option with humans being what they are.

 

You got that right, Ricky! Unfortunately, humanity will never learn, a sad fact of life.

 

Unfortunately the pacifists never learn either
We are breeding a new crop of them just as we had in the 20's and 30's.
Pacifism and weakness invite aggression. You can decry the money spent on arms and defense and dream of creating a new world without guns and mean people and it will change nothing about the real world.

Until the fundamentals of human nature change:

Igitur qui desiderat pacem, pareparet bellum. - Vegitius
(if you want peace, prepare for war)

 

I am not a pacifist and share your view that they are nothing more than dreamers. However I disagree with Vegetius' phrase. Most people on this earth want peace or prefer it over war; according to Vegetius all these people should prepare for war? If there are that many weapons and soldiers in the world then all it takes is a leader with a different agenda than "armed peace" to trigger a global war.

Peace, debate and international cooperation should be the prefferable and primary ways of countries to deal with each other; however, the army should not be discarded because our very human nature means it will inevitably be needed at some point. This is not the same as "if you want peace prepare for war".