Stop the war!

Thanks for the feedback!

@seththenewb:

Very interesting stuff there Mark. Although Dyer’s credentials lend his thoughts a lot more weight that mine do, I have to disagree with his analysis of what the threshold for a war to be dubbed a ‘world war’. I guess my thinking is that his criteria (based on this short narrative) seems to pretty Euro-Centric in account the 30 year’s war and the Spanish Succession to be a world war. I could be wrong, but I thought both of those wars were pretty much just fought between European powers and confined, for the most part, to Europe itself. 
I know I’m pretty guilty of knowing a LOT more about Western civilization and history than I do about Eastern history/civilization. I’m not trying to dig on him or his work, I just figure that you could apply the label of ‘major power’ to at least the Incan, Aztec, and Chinese empires. I guess it depends on how you define major power though.
[…]
I do however agree that the last four on his list qualify as world wars and I like his theory on treaties reflecting the true balance of power. I never really thought of the time periods between wars in that light before and on the surface it seems to make a lot of sense and in my mind goes a long way towards explaining the cycle of war and peace in Europe.

You make a good point about Dyer’s list being Eurocentric, which is something that hadn’t occurred to me (since I don’t have much familiarity with wars outside the western world).  And I don’t know enough about the first three wars on the list to make an informed judgment about how well they fit the all-the-major-powers-of-the-time criterion.

In his discussion of the fifty-year cycle, Dyer speculates that this amount of time is about how long it takes for the difference between the fixed world power structure defined by major peace treaties and the constantly-evolving actual power structure on the ground to become sufficiently large that it reaches the breaking point.  Dyer’s book (based on a TV series of the same name) was published two years before Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000,” but the argument Dyer makes has some similarity to Kennedy’s.

Kennedy argues that, even when a particular country retains the same level of absolute strength, it may still find itself in a position of decline relative to other countries whose strength happens to be growing.  He identifies the source of that strength as the relationship between economic and military power in any given country, saying that they reinforce each other: economic power (gross national product and foreign trade ) enables you to boost your military power (by buying weapons and enlarging your military forces), and military power returns the favour by helping to protect your economic interests from foreign threats.  A classic example is the synergistic relationship that existed between the Royal Navy and the British merchant marine in the 19th century.  An example closer to home (here on this discussion board) is the fact that, in A&A, income buys units, units fight battles, battles win territories, and territories generate income.

Kennedy states, however, that economic and military strength must be kept properly balanced for the equation to work.  He points to the way in which history’s great powers have tended to get caught in the following trap: when their power declines in either relative or absolute terms, they try to maintain their standing by devoting more and more of their economic resources to the expansion of their military strength, thus upsetting the balance of the equation.  His book came out before the USSR imploded, but as I recall one of the factors which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union was that it bankrupted itself through excessive military spending, along the lines of Kennedy’s theory.

@empireman:

Where I live would be the spot where the war will first start, So I would have the choices of being a slave or a part of a resistance group. I would choose to fight the evil commies.

same here…

@SS:

To bad Dec. 7 is coming early this year.

It’s roughly around the same time as in other years.  :-D

As for me, I suppose that I’m expected to work that day.

@Yahoshua:

Yeah, from what I read in the news last August was that Cpt. Dale Dye checked out, and another military vet was appointed to take his place as  military advisor in Hollywood.

I can’t seem to find the article though. And on second thought I could be wrong, so I went to the website he started www.warriorsinc.com to verify this. I’ll let you know what the response is.

EDIT

The response was received as following:   From: “admin” admin@warriorsinc.com   Absolutely not! He’s alive and well and doing just fine.

(Now proceeding to beat self for being an idiot)./admin@warriorsinc.com

Thank god.  Without him, hollywood war movies would be horribly inaccurate.

When my father was in his early 20s he enlisted into the Army during Vietnam.  He had a college degree, and the powers that be wanted him to become an officer but he declined preffering to go at it as a grunt.  He was newly married, and I had just been born when he made this decision.  He left shortly after and served his country for a year and was honorably discharged.

Sounds nice doesn’t it?  Ok, SPIN OFF

My father had no intrest in the military whatsoever, esp with the war going on.  He was contacted a lot by a recruiter who was trying to warn him that if he did not enlist he would be drafted eventualy.  My father would not join, and he was drafted.  On the day he got his draft notice he went to the recruiter begging him to let him enlist, because the recruiter said if he did enlist… he would not have to go to Vietnam.  The recruiter, knowing his situation being newly married and having a infant son “fudged” the date of my father’s enlistment to show that he had enlisted before he was drafted.  He was stationed in Germany, hating every second of it.  The ONLY reason he decided not to become an officer is because he detested the military so much.  Becoming an officer would have entailed him being in the military longer than what he had to.

My point to this, you can spin the hell out of this kind of thing.  Which is what I think some veterans do, not to mention any names cough cough Kerry Cough Cough (and others).

A derail on the topic, but I feel like saying it anyway.

My father is against the war in a big way, I’m not, and we argue about it some times.  The one argument HE can not use AT ALL is that Bush got preferential (sp?) treatment.  You can’t take the moral high ground after what happened to him.  My grandfather was not a senator, he was a janitor.

@cystic:

Hey!! i’m biased!!
especially to those offering me candy . . . .

A spark of wisdom!
Will he put it to use?

As this has been posted with the authors permission, i guess that he will have a look at the forum to see how we react.

@El:

Aftermath of War: A Lesson from History
–------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Nick Robertson

…

On May 28, 1453, two of the greatest armies in the world ended an epic 52-day battle on the border of Europe and Asia. On one side the 100,000-man army of Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire and the forces of Islam were attempting to capture one of the world’s greatest cities — Constantinople (now Istanbul). On the other side, behind the supposedly impenetrable walls of the city, were the defensive forces of the west — the 10,000 man force led by Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI.

Well, i think the description here is over-exaggerated. Byzantine was kind of a “vassal” of the Ottomans for about 200 years at that stage. Its empire was the city. The city was historically and culturally great, but the number of citizens has been declining, from plague sweeping over it (AFAIR twice), from being raided by Venetians (who then imposed the “Latin Empire” and looted it thoroughly), and other internal struggles.
The forces of the “west” never were forces of west, they were forces of the east: non-catholic, greek instead of latin etc.

Dragases. The battle for Constantinople is considered one of the greatest and most important confrontations in history.

Constantinople was one of the most vital possessions of the Christian world. The city was the capital of the East Roman — or Byzantine — Empire ever since the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great selected it as his new capital in 324 AD. Constantinople was the gateway between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam.

It was vital as a symbol, and still had some meaning for trade, though Genoa and Venice were more important, using the Mediterranean Sea for trade (while Constntinople was important for land trade).

Though, Constantinople was a “buffer” between teh Latin Christianity and Islam. As long as it stood, the westerners cared not too much (except in the Reconquista (sp?)). After it fell, Islam found its way to the borders with the west.

The city rested by the Bosporus, a watery straight which was the most important artery of international trade. Trade ships from Venice, Genoa, England, France, and much of Europe traveled past Constantinople to the eastern Black Sea ports which connected the European continent to the major trade centers of India and China. The wealth that traveled on this route built the economic power of the Western world — a 15th century version of today’s globalization of trade.

The main shipping trade routes did not go through Constantinople anymore. It once was important for the city, true, but in 1450 it already had changed. It still had importance in the trade with the Black Sea (and thus, with part of the Rus), but it did not control the trade routes, as it did a few hundred years ago. The black eastern sea ports were not important for the trade with India/China after the Varangians had been defeated there, that trade went through Arabia.

As the battle for Constantinople began, the Ottomans unleashed man’s newest weapon, artillery, to breach the city’s massive walls. Shortly after the shocking breakthrough, the Ottomans accomplished what had been deemed impossible for over a millennium — the fall of Constantinople. There was horror and disbelief as the forces of Islam routed the Western army. Panic swept across Europe. The vital trade routes to the East were now under enemy control, and an alien army with strange beliefs threatened to march through Europe.

The “shocking breakthtough” was a small unguarded unclosed door called “Kerkaporta” or “Kerkoporta”. “alien army with strange beliefs”, well this is after the Crusades and Reconquista, the Europeans probably though they knew what would come.
A very emotional writing style all the way up to now, something that i feel inappropiate here.

Was this the end of the Western world? Quite the opposite. What seemed at the moment a knockout punch to Europe ended up causing great change. It literally forced the discovery of a new world.

the conclusion “forced” is discussable: “helped” would be better IMHO.

Constantinople had been Europe’s center for intellectual studies for centuries.

For centuries long past, when it finally fell. It was non-catholic, looted by catholics. Even then, it still had amassed a lot of historic valuable scripts and other things. Most that we know of the Ancient Greek had been saved by them. So, it was not hte center for studies, but a main archive, which the west didn’t care about to visit or use for its own good.

…Many who lived inside the city’s walls devoted their lives to studying and preserving history’s classical past. When the Ottomans conquered the city, many of these intellectuals fled to Italy. This flight from war was directly responsible for the acceleration of one of the most important periods in Europe’s history, the Renaissance.

Correct.

Classic ideas, locked inside the walls of Constantinople for centuries, broke free and spread out across Europe. Isolated city-states began to gradually dissolve. For the first time in history, nation states — like Spain and Portugal — emerged. The Renaissance brought Europe into an age of light after an age of darkness.

Not fully correct: Portugal and Spain (that is Catille and Aragon) existed for about 100 years by then. The Renaissance did not happen in nation states, but in the Italian city states.
I would not support this way of concluding that tghe fall of Byzantine lead to the rise of nation states. Not without further explanation that is.

Since Constantinople’s fall blocked overland trade routes to the spice markets of South and East Asia, the emerging nation states needed new routes to the riches of the East. The Great Age of Exploration began. Brave men such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan circumnavigated the globe to find new routes across vast, unknown oceans. In the process they discovered the world — and many of its secrets, treasures and mysteries.

Notice that above it’s “trade ships”, why Constantinople is important, here it is overland trade routes. Again, memerging nation states are mentioned, which is discussable. The rest is correct to my knowledge.

…

i skipped the rest of that discussion, my only comment: far stretched :)
The only thing in common is the loss of a war. The important (for the west) fled of intellectuals and access to old sources and the change to the commerce system are not present in Iraq.