Thursday, September 03, 2015
Easy question, hard question
Convective thought.
Obviously we don't learn anything from history. But if we try to imagine a peculiar alternate world where we do learn from history, the best learning exercise would be a question that never gets asked.
In sane times we did ask one easy question about wars. We asked this during WW2 and got the correct answer.
Easy question: Who started it? If I started a war against you, I'm the guilty party and I deserve to be obliterated. If you started a war against me, I need to obliterate you.
WW2 was fought on this basis.
Since WW2 we've never asked any questions at all. We just attack everyone except Israel and Saudi, and we pretend to be puzzled and offended when the attacked countries try to defend themselves. We deserve to be obliterated.
Even in comparatively sane times, we didn't ask a harder question that could lead to real learning.
Hard question: Who DIDN'T start a war? Who grabbed the wheel? Who hit the EMERGENCY STOP button? Who saved millions of lives that were automatically "scheduled" for death?
There are undoubtedly several good answers. One that comes to mind from my limited factual knowledge is Eisenhower in 1956. The defense establishment wanted us to attack Russia because Russia was treating its occupied countries harshly. We were also treating our occupied countries harshly, but that's OK because everything we do is OK by definition.
Ike said no, thus saving lots of lives.
Another would be Stanislav Petrov in 1983, who chose not to fire off Russia's ICBMs in response to a real-looking computer failure.
These are the people we can learn from.
Labels: Alternate universe
¶ 6:27 PM
