Give War A Chance

“War is brewing.” – The Lord of the Rings

Pa Wilder survived mustard gas and pepper spray.  He was a seasoned veteran.

War.  What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

I have a different answer:

Saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Whaaaaat?

Yeah, war, it turns out, is an amazing catalyst for providing lots of life saving technology that has saved far more people than it has killed.  I need to jump in here with this because everyone has their sphincters clenched because it appears we’re on the edge of the Third World War.  Maybe that won’t be so bad.

Hang on, this will all make sense in a moment.

I’m a trained professional.  Or I would be if I were trained.  And if I were getting paid for this.

Give a thief a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a thief a bank and he’ll rob everyone.

But I made a pretty bold statement, and I have the receipts to back it up.  First let’s start with what I’m counting.  I’m not counting as “war” when governments kill their own citizens.  In the 20th century alone (no Fox® required) governments killed an estimated 262 million of their own citizens.

Yeah, that’s an ugly number, and it’s certainly the largest man-made source of involuntary death.  This is also the biggest argument EVER that the Second Amendment is the very best life-saving technology ever conceived by mortal man.

Ever.

War is a different kettle of fish, and it depends on the counting.  One source says the total number of combat deaths since 1800 is around 35 million.  Sure, that’s a lot, and I’d love to have them all over for a nice dinner, but it’s small compared to those killed by their own government.  A broader definition of “war” would put it at 131 million in the twentieth century, but I’d guess that also includes a big overlap of citizens killed by their own government.

I hear that Stalin collected political jokes.  When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.”

Tomato, tomah-to.  Let’s split the difference and say it’s probably 80 million in the twentieth century, or roughly as many people as Joe Biden has allowed to come streaming over the border in the last three years.

But how, John Wilder, you amazing stud, you said you had receipts on how war brought about benefits that exceeded the costs?

War provides an acceleration of humanity, it provides the necessary push and investment into things that help troops do unexpected things on the battlefield.  Like living.  That leads us to penicillin.  It was spurred into development (it had been discovered earlier) in World War II.  Would antibiotics have been lost in a research paper without World War II?  Don’t know – but World War II allowed them to be tested on Allied soldiers.

While we’re on medical, what about smallpox?  Oh, sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but I’ve been told it is far worse than bigpox.  What spurred that innovation?  War.  The Revolutionary War, in fact.

Well, there’s a joke coming back from 2012.  I guess humor ended then.

I know I try to avoid drinking water since mankind developed beer and wine, but water chlorination has saved lots of people who aren’t drinking booze.  Who developed the process to make chlorine gas cheaply so he could gas a bunch of French?  A German guy in World War One.

There are more, but there are hundreds of millions of lives saved in just those three developments.

What else did war provide?

  • Nuclear power – sure, just like OJ’s obituary, someone will say . . . “Oh, and there’s that one other thing” but nuclear power has produced clean power over the globe with, well, a few exceptions.
  • Jet engines – without World War Two, would Steve Miller have ever had someone to take him home?
  • Radar – I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty good at keeping planes from hitting each other.
  • The Internet – how else would we get pictures of cats?
  • GPS – it can guide bombs, or it can take us to a liquor store in an unfamiliar town. Guess which is used more often?

I found a $20 outside of a liquor store.  I decided to do what Jesus would do, so I turned it into wine.

  • Satellites – without World War Two, would we have these? Probably not.  And satellites have made weather prediction a pretty trivial thing.  Doesn’t mean the prediction will be any good, but, you know, we can do it faster.
  • Computers – created to calculate firing tables for artillery and to decode German stuff. Again, now we use for pictures of cats.  And porn.
  • Medical imaging, including x-rays and ultrasound – all started with military tech.
  • Medical prosthetics – this is grimmer, but the more things got shot off, the better the tech.
  • Telecommunications technology, including wireless networks – the very first time I used WIFI in a house, the host noted that it was based on tech used in Gulf War I. WIFI?  Yeah, thank a war.
  • Aircraft technology – when you make tens of thousands of aircraft that are used to the maximum extent of their capability, you learn what makes them fall out of the sky. Which is useful.
  • Rocket technology – no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. From Werner von Braun to Elon Musk, I’m raising my glass to the foreigners who get us into space.   Oh, von Braun’s first rockets weren’t aimed at the Moon.
  • Sonar – I don’t fish, so, I guess this is okay. Meh tier.
  • Chemical engineering – this is a really important one – in making all the gases to kill people in World War One and in all the bits and pieces required to make tires without rubber and how to make ammonia to kill yet more people in World War One, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
  • Trauma care – how is it that 35 people are shot in an average Chicago weekend and only eight die? Trauma care.  This stuff was built on lots of combat experience, and thankfully keeps lots of innocent people breathing.
  • Cryptography – the entire field of cryptography is due to war. It’s the backbone of current connections and internet transactions, but started when people wanted to figure out where the Germans were going to be next week.

But when the Vikings used dots and dashes to communicate, it was Norse code.

I’m no longer scared of war.  Sure, it sucks if you or your friends got exploded, but the numbers don’t lie:  war has killed probably between 35 million (low) and 131 million (way high) in the twentieth century.  The advancements from war have probably saved (one estimate I read) five billion people.

War seems to have saved more people than it has killed.  By a huge margin.

So, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him):  “Give war a chance.”

Maybe, but maybe we’re on the eve of creation?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

45 thoughts on “Give War A Chance”

  1. “Remorse Code”

    As Mary Livingston said to Jack Benny, “Old Chinese Proverb says, ‘When a man argues against a woman, he starts with two strikes against him’.”

    Guess we’ll hae improved drone tech after this war. Or maybe Barney Google gets destroyed. I’ll settle for the latter.

    1. Unfortunately, no. All of history shows that brutality works better than almost anything else.

      The point of war is to exterminate, terrify into abject submission, or commit grand theft province.

  3. Regarding the first part of your essay (great banker jokes, BTW), here’s Lilly Tang Williams going up against David Hogg of Douglas High School Shooting fame…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khAWldEPdyA

    Lilly is one red-blooded American…

    https://www.lilytangwilliams.com/congress/

    It’s a little jarring, John, to hear you channeling the Washington Post…

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-the-long-run-wars-make-us-safer-and-richer/2014/04/25/a4207660-c965-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html

    …but it’s undeniable that war and rapid technological progress are intertwined as you note. I would temper this hopeful realization with the phrase “past performance does not guarantee future results”. CNN was using the words “Israel”, “bomb”, “Iran” and “nuclear bunker” all in the same sentence over the weekend. This is not good. It is entirely possible that worldwide death may yet snatch victory from the jaws of worldwide progress. Whether by nuclear fallout or an improved furin cleavage site in the next engineered COVID virus release, who can say?

    Along these lines, I saw Alex Garland’s film Civil War over the weekend. Excellent, highly recommended. Here’s the best and most insightful review I’ve seen.

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/civil-war-movie-liberals-1235873335/

    Go see it for yourself…while it’s still fiction.

    1. Interesting review of Civil War. To me, it says, “This movie is left leaning, but it’s not left-leaning enough (and even acknowledges that other viewpoints may exist), so the Leftists assume it’s right wing.”

      1. I agree with your conclusion but I think there is an even more subtle level to the movie that the reviewer senses with his subconscious but can’t articulate fully. To wit, he writes:

        “The footage you’re about to see may be disturbing.” That content warning was stuck on a loop in the back of my mind as I watched Alex Garland’s latest film, Civil War. As I sat through the credits, I considered what that warning actually suggests…an invitation to look away, to ignore, to pretend that what happened didn’t happen that way. It’s permission to avoid truth and discomfort….Civil War… washes us…in discomfort with no warning, no invitation to look away…”

        He skips over the deeper meaning of what his correct observation implies and instead jumps onward to state ” … no tribe to cling to and tell us what’s right and what’s wrong…we hate not having clearly defined sides to root for or against or media that doesn’t perfectly align with our worldview so we can walk out of the theater confidently knowing we’re a good person.”

        I think this perfectly describes leftist thinking and the reviewer doesn’t even recognize his own blindspot. Leftists by definition have to avoid truth and discomfort to hold to their beliefs (men can be women, EVs will save the planet and socialism will save everybody) while surrendering their own personal judgement to that of the collective they need to protect them.

        OF COURSE leftists are gonna be uncomfortable with a film that thrusts the harsh reality of how such a world would be right into their face and forces them to process it as an individual instead of as part of a mob…

        1. “no tribe to cling to and tell us what’s right and what’s wrong…we hate not having clearly defined sides to root for or against”

          That’s another scary thing to a Leftist, the realization that their world view simply isn’t competitive against those who do have a tribe with clear views of Right/ Wrong, Us/Them. Which is why Leftism was injected into our nation like a virus to weaken us in the first place, but that is a different rant.

  4. WIFI really has its roots in WW2. Hedy Lamarr (yes, the actress) developed the technology for spread spectrum wireless communications as a way to keep the Germans from being able to intercept and unscramble Allied comms.

    1. The Anti-Gun Nuts are wrong.
      Guns are more commonly used Defensively by the average person.
      Guns are more commonly used Offensively by the State.
      Therefore, the 2nd Amendment protects the average person’s right not to be killed by the State.

      1. I’m shocked that nobody correceted you. It was developed by Hedley Lamarr in Rock Ridge. Way out west. accessible by the Guv. Wm. J. LePetomaine Highway. Toll 5¢.

        BTW, tried a migration to my new MacBook Air. Utter failure. So, have to use both. UGH.

  5. I could argue wars might have accelerated the pace of some inventions, although they would have been invented anyway. The downside though? Especially for the two World Wars, Europe was gutted demographically. Millions of Whites killed, many in the prime of their lives. The aftermath might be even worse, half a century of Eastern Europe and Russia (plus China) trapped under communism. Meanwhile Western Europe lost the will to live last century and the mass immigration we are seeing now is a direct result of those wars. Sure we have cool technology now but that won’t last much longer as demographics shift across the West.

    War is inevitable but in most cases the negatives far outweigh the positives.

    2. World War I cost the UK their empire, and plunged the world into chaos twice. But was that really the cause of Western Europe’s issues?

  6. One does not simply vote out of Clown World.
    War is sometimes the least bad solution. Remember, the Gordian knot was solved by the stroke of a sword.

  7. Just imagine what sort of Wakandan-level miracle innovation awaits us on the other side of that impending nuclear war, courtesy of the LGBTQ++ trans-furry genii diversifying us into tomorrow.

    Flying cars? Interstellar travel? Pshaw! We’ll have sticks! And stones! And smoky fires on which to grill rival tribe members when the last can of irradiated Kirkland tuna fish is fought over and consumed. The past ain’t got nothin’ on what is to come.

  8. You never used radar? Most people have a radar range above their stove or on their countertop.
    sam

  9. Loved the article but disagree with the meme about women in charge not causing more wars. My wife and daughter both tell me that they hate working with (or for) other women because they are very catty and backstabbing in a group setting. You don’t see this sort of on again, off again hatred between guys like you do with girls. Anyway, global politics is just workplace politics with bigger weapons to use for the backstabbing.

    As far as actual datapoints, a few leaders off the top of my head are Thatcher who did a good job overall, but did get the UK into the Falklands conflict ….. Angela Merkel who didn’t start a conflict but still destroyed the country via immigration and bad policy (which had a worse effect than any war), Jacinda Ahern (sp?) who was similar to Merkel in destroying the country albeit by different means, and then the hot young leader in Finland who had no idea what she was doing (and was apparently constantly partying and cucking her husband/boyfriend while in office). She hasn’t quite gotten Finland into conflict with Russia, but certainly pushing them down that path. There are some good governors but also governors like Hobbs and Hochul who are evil and have all but declared war on their own citizenry. As with men, it isn’t really the female that is the problem, but whether they are liberal.

  10. I think the French invented canned food so that their soldiers could freeze to death in Russia.

  12. “I hear that Stalin collected political jokes. When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.””

    https://ibb.co/L5wwBDw

    bonus Stalin humor:

    https://ibb.co/VJT3XrX

    ===

    You missed the most important invention, that was spurred by the threat of war if not actual war: the Haber–Bosch process.

    Nitrogen was the limiting factor in producing ammonia, which was needed for production of smokeless powder and explosives. Germany had almost no access to raw sources such as bat guano, so it pushed for alternatives to be found. Hence the H-B process.

    Besides being used in explosives, it is also used to make fertilizer. It is estimated that about 42% of births since it’s invention in 1910 are due to the H-B process increasing agricultural yields. Most of that increase is in India, China, and Africa, so maybe we should keep a lid on the benefits of our future advances.

  13. In college I had this wacky feminist professor, which back then was somewhat of a rarity. Most were just normal feminists, not the blue hair-problem glasses sort.

    She was going on about men causing wars, and saw I was smirking, so she asked me what I had to contribute. I said, “I completely agree with you that men being in charge leads to so many wars. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if women had been in charge from the beginning of time, we’d only have had one war in all of history. It would have started in the Stone Age, and would still be going on today, with no one remembering what had started it.”

    Whole class including women laughed their asses off. Prof looked angry, and I was told by other faculty to never take a class with her again as she held a permanent grudge against me for pointing out women hold grudges permanently. Ironic, don’t you think?

  15. And there’s a direct link between modernity (invented by european males) and the fact that europeans NEVER stop warring on each other. The ONLY 45=yr period of no wars between 1648-1992? When NATO and the Warsaw Pact were facing off. As soon as the Pact dissolved, what happened? European began killing each other again… Faster innovation during war + always at-war = modernity.

    1. I’d add that a lot of that was due to warring in a “civilized” way that didn’t wreck industry or kill undue numbers of producers. This goes back to the Church’s push for “Peace of God/ Truce of God” back in the Middle Ages, but reached it’s final form post Treaty of Westphalia.
      Other places also had lots of wars, but they tended to be total wars of destruction (and cannibalism if African) rather than the cockfights of pre-20th century Euro wars.

    2. There’s a reason the Prussians were militaristic – they were right on the highway between East and West.

  16. I recognize the “gulag” meme quote. It is from a book called “Alexander Dolgun’s story: An American in the Gulag”. The actual text is:

    “It would have been bad for morale if the guards discovered that we were human beings and that most of us were serving our sentences for modest offences or for no offense at all. Solzhenitsyn, who was in a camp in Ekibastuz, recounts a conversation between a guard and a prisoner.

    ‘What is your sentence?’
    ‘Twenty-five years.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘Nothing, I did nothing at all.’
    ‘You are lying prisoner; the sentence for nothing at all is ten years.’

    To an outsider this seems like a joke, it was not a joke. The guards believed that the correct sentence for people like us, when we had done nothing at all, was ten years. They were wrong, of course. Twenty-five, five, and five was more common.”

      1. Fear? No! That’s justice. Transgenerational justice. We lived like that for millennia, forced to cower in our ghettoes, never knowing when ignorant, violent, bigoted subhumans would viciously attack us for no reason at all. Never for any reason. All we could do was pray. Which at least comes naturally to us, unlike you G-dless savages.

        So maybe now you will know what it feels like. Only we are merciful. All your so-called “suffering” is not worth one minute of Our centuries of torment.

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