That's like saying that American blacks benefitted from slavery because it produced the blues, which led to modern rock and indeed all popular music.

Silver linings of horrible events do not make those events worthwhile. If we could have prevented WWII, we should have.

I don't know Thucy. Isn't it more like saying that for the American blacks to be liberated from slavery, a war was necessary? What if there would have been a UN these days that would have sent a peace-keeping mission to the US?

American blacks certainly did benefit from slavery for without it none of them would exist. You could easily argue the blacks in the past of the alternate non slavery reality would have been better off, and it is possible (though by no means certain) that blacks in the present of that reality would have been better off, but even so if you had the power to end this reality and replace it with the alternative would it be morally ok to do so?

Your Dutch MP, Redhouse, seems to make the dangerous assumption that the good guys will win these wars. Even without that assumption WWII didn't exactly convince the likes of Britain, France, the US and the Soviets that wars was a bad thing. At best it convinced them that wars are best as far away from home as possible.

@Oct -- Bravo....someone brave enough to grasp reality. The black ancestors who were sold in to slavery -- a truly horrible thing -- have offspring that enjoy a (relatively speaking) comfortable life in the US as opposed to potential violence, squalor, disease and conflict that much of Africa suffers.

This by **no means** justifies slavery...or war (strongly debatable)...but to deny the *pragmatic* argument that a positive outcome was the result is to be disingenuous.

obibump

Octavious - I know you can easily make that argument that modern American blacks benefitted from their ancestors' enslavement.

But my entire point is that even so much as contemplating making such an argument is morally unthinkable, at least if you are making the argument as a way of justifying the actions of the slavers. There is no world where that would fly. Which is why redhouse's former MP is completely wrongheaded. It's the same thing - just because something good came out of an atrocity doesn't mean you should be glad the atrocity happened.

Ceteris paribus, it is better to avoid a harm of magnitude X than to pursue a gain of the same magnitude. There is something eminently unwelcome about harm, it is even less welcome than happiness.

Indeed there is a neurological/evolutionary reason for this - we have a predisposition to have an easier time recognizing and focusing on negative events - the parts of your brain that deal with revulsion reflexes are instantaneous - they even bypass your conscious brain. Ever see a horror movie? That's what's going on when you jump back in horror at the man in the mirror before you even really have a chance to think anything about it one way or another.

There is no analogue of that for positive events. It takes you a bit to recognize that you like something and are attracted to it. This tendency runs the gamut of human thought life - it is ultimately the reason that being a pessimist is so easy. We are wired to appreciate harm and threats more than even equivalent benefits and opportunities.

For this reason, our moral system is based on avoiding harm.

To argue that harm of the worst kind - war - is justifiable for things so ephemeral as a political institution is moral nonsense.

The only moral justification for war is self-defense.

I thought it was more akin to the forest fire argument, myself. in nature you get forest fires quite regularly which have the benefit of removing deadwood and the old, dominant trees from the system allowing new life to flourish. Then humans come along and decide 'fire is bad', and put them out whenever they start. As such the deadwood is never cleared, and the old, dominant trees that stifle new life continue to be dominant and continue to stifle.

@Thucy, you're drawing a different conclusion from what he's saying than I am.

"at least if you are making the argument as a way of justifying the actions of the slavers."

>That's not *at all* what Boekesteijn does when he makes his argument, not even in the slightest. He's not *defending* African warlords' deeds, finding them just as deplorable as you and I do. What he's saying is that *regardless how horrible these deeds are, we should not interfere with them because they make part of the continent's history*.

"just because something good came out of an atrocity doesn't mean you should be glad the atrocity happened."

He's not passing any kind of judgment like that, saying he's "glad" it happened when it did. No such emotion befits the situation. If he'd see such a war happen on the news I'd guess he's not enjoying himself, it's just that he feels that however painful, apparently it had to happen.

Also, I want to steer away from slavery a bit and go back to the original thread topic which was about war. Slavery implies shipping people from one continent to the next and already implies some sort of interference in the affair of another continent.

A lot of the time the UN intervention to stop a war does more harm than good in the long term. If one side unambiguously wins then the issue is settled and things can go on, but with the UN keeping the two sides apart then each side holds out a hope for victory, which draws the conflict out and deepens each side's resentment of the other.

It's a tough thing to argue since stopping wars looks so unambiguously good and undoubtedly is in the short term, but is it realyl better to have these issues fester for decades rather than have them be settled in a war that would take a few years at the very tops? Is it really better that Cyprus has a UN zone dividing the island rather than that the Turks jsut sacked Nicosia in the 1970s and made the two states a reality? Is it better that Bosnia has a ridiculous but united government based on armistice lines rather than the Serbs successfully having their own state? Maybe it is, but it isn't easy to say it is for sure.

Some of the African 3rd world countries that have wars turn out to be more like genocides. That is entirely unacceptable. The loss of any people group, their history, and their unique worldview is a tragedy and should be prevented at any cost, even if that means breaking the Prime Directive (we have that, right?). Few of the African wars the MP speaks to are wars in the historically European sense. One of the reasons the slave trade was so effective is that African tribes would go conquer a neighbor and sell that neighbor into slavery - not their own people as some racist neo-confederates would have you believe. In this case, that is different from European wars (at least since the Greeks) in that the European nations have (with few exception) not sought to completely destroy cultures and lifestyles. Conquered states become just that: conquered states. African third world countries have a history of the elimination of the enemy, even if that doesn't mean outright killing their bodies. I may be misremembering, but I think one of the strong cultural elements in many of these societies is the "x is still alive so long as s/he is remembered." This element would change the approach to war to something a bit foreign to Europeans (no pun intended).

So I was going through the threads, and apparently Invictus and dubmdell made interesting contributions here, thanks guys.

Here's another interesting case for the diplomatic community.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2217273/Al-Qaeda-head-urges-Holy-War-anti-Islam-film--stops-short-claiming-responsibility-Libyan-embassy-attack.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Should we avoid this war at any cost, or is it - given the military superiority of the west - an interesting opportunity to provoke this one and just fight it out with any muslim group stupid enough to go to war over this video?

>Scarlett Popcorn

@redhouse

Interesting question, my friend. Best I've seen on here in a while.

I'm somehow skeptical that a few more "bush wars" will help the brave people of Africa more than the last few have, although I definitely understand the point Boekesteijn was trying to make as you represented it.

Nonetheless, I can only make an analogy from babysitting young kids (age 6-12). If I see two males that are mad at each other and a fight is brewing, I will actually let them fight for a minute, long enough for one of them to gain dominance over the other. If you interrupt the fight before this happens, they will go back to fighting later. But if you let them fight for a minute, they will understand which guy is tougher and then they will end up as friends afterwards.

@Al Swearengen,

Thanks Al, that's very nice of you. Interesting message as well, a tat disturbing at the same time but I like it...