Comments on: After the roflstomp

By: introspect

introspect — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:45:50 +0000

The Germans weren’t really shelled halfway back to the stone age, it’s true, but at the end of the day no one was on the ground to enforce anything. It’s a lot easier to get away with stuff when no one’s looking over your shoulder.

To effect any long term change with force is tantamount to conquest and occupation, which is unacceptable given that it violates sovereignty. The consequence is that today war accomplishes nothing other than blowing stuff up, which I think is something amounting to progress.

I don’t know about some forces becoming more police like. To me, that amounts to a decrease in destructive power, and no one looks to be downgrading.

By: Danny Choo

Danny Choo — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:26:22 +0000

Reminds me to pick up Gundam 00 again – dropped it for a while now.

By: IKnight

IKnight — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:51:00 +0000

Certain European militaries have moved, if not quite in the opposite direction, at least in a different one, becoming heavily-armed police forces ill-suited to war war. When you consider the relatively priveleged and peaceful existence we Western Europeans have lived since World War II, it’s easy to see why.

Your penultimate paragraph reminds me of a long-running debate surrounding the Versailles Treaty (post WWI settlement). IIRC, the argument runs a little like this: said treaty irritated and humiliated Germany by taking away superflous land and nominally forbidding the possession of a military, but it failed to seriously damage the country’s industrial capacity or to put in place a stable political system. The WWI allies should’ve either avoided humiliating Germany altogether, or broken the country up and instituted long-term foreign rule.

I am not well-placed to judge this argument, having abandoned History shortly after encountering it.