How does your country perceive war?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Originally Posted by Magus

This is precisely where the "necessary evil" argument comes in though, because on the other hand, NAZIS.

Thanks for summing up the exact view I'm railing against.

[BitVyper]

Basically the allies were only better in that they performed their more heinous evils in countries that no one cared about.

Or perpetrated them against people who weren't as white.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

And they were worse in that allied victory fucked us up and we're still recovering! It's a sad state of affairs when you are retroactively rooting for the nazis

[shiney]

I don't know if forced subjugation and genocide is preferable in this instance, Smarms. The Allied victory was jacked up, but I think the world would be a different place if based on German rule of then, instead of how Germany has evolved to its present-day state. It would be nice if the Allies hadn't basically raked Africa et al over the coals, but it did seem likely that Hitler and his would have done the same based on their treatment of the citizens of, oh, every other country.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The Nazi regime was incredibly unstable- it was being held together by the war and even then just barely. It would have collapsed pretty much instantely after the war (and probably before final victory)- this would have lead to global disintergration of power structures and worldwide revolution- most likely led by the extensive socialist and anarchist groups who were collected in the 40s and obliterated by the war.
Instead what we got was an entrenchment of the global elite and their systems, a belief that these systems were correct and just and good and an immense backlash against radical groups which we still haven't recovered from.
The Allied victory entrenched our overlords who we are rallying against today.
A nazi victory would have destroyed these overlords then destroyed themselves because the Nazi regime was held together by chewing gum and glue. Nazi victory wouldn't mean world speaks german, hitler on our money.

[Osterbaum]

But it would mean no Captain America!

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I don't like Captain America! We can replace him in the Avengers with Doctor Strange. Vast improvement.


E: They may have been Nazis but at least they weren't fucking Mensheviks.

[Magus]

I fail to see why the German empire, if victorious, would have collapsed into a bunch of smaller socialist/anarchist regimes as opposed to a bunch of smaller fascist regimes, though. I mean, shit, FDR almost declared martial rule in the '30s (well, maybe that's not so surprising...). He literally had two versions of a speech, one where he would suspend democracy and the one he actually delivered.

[Osterbaum]

So yeah, I guess my nation views war as something unpleasant but possibly necessary to DEFEND OUR HOMELAND. No one here would ever go starting any wars, but most would defend the country if attacked. Conscription and all, it does shape society to a degree.

[Amake]

Sweden sees war as the stuff of history books and the sign of an immature country. I see war as people killing each other for lies. Not just that our leaders tell us lies to get us to fight each other, though that's certainly a problem. And not just that people kill each other because what they think is true doesn't agree with that they think the other guy thinks is true, though that's certainly sad.

But at the heart there's this fundamentally broken world, made up of conflicting images from contrary viewpoints. I figured this out in Russia in 1996, where we were told on national television that an American missile had hit a nuclear plant and obliterated large parts of I think it was Kosovo.

I predicted western media wouldn't tell the same story, which you may have noticed it didn't. Yes, this bit of maybe-accidental-maybe-not nuclear warfare probably didn't happen, but the point is that based on someone's political allegiances, a lot of people thought that it happened, and a lot of people thought it didn't. Wars enhance these kind of discrepancies to the extreme, and people die and people kill for the sake of these falsehoods. These lies.

This offends me. It's of course my Autism-related dysfunctions speaking, but I can't stand when someone doesn't know things that someone else knows. I literally cannot function if I'm confronted with such a thing as conflicting knowledge in people. It takes creative ignorance on my part to deal with it unless I can manage some reconciliatory information exchange, as it were.

PS. Here's two tips:
1. If you're writing a lengthy post, make sure to copy it before posting in case something happens.
2. In case something does happen and the page doesn't load, don't panic and do something silly like copying the url in your efforts to get it to load before you've made sure to paste your post somewhere.