I've been reading a book about the religious wars of the reformation,
and another about the Medici. It's hard to see those Medici wars, the
ones that your pal The Prince was involved in, as moral wars, except
inasmuch as the local families saw it as their moral right to rule
Florence or Milan or Rome. There was no concern for the betterment of
the peasants of course. I suppose the aristocracy and the merchants of
the winning side were better off than those of the losing side, but it
wasn't like anybody thought one set of aristocrats or merchants was
morally better than any other, it was just ours vs theirs.
And they had a lot of mercenary armies, and those guys, you know, they
would change sides at the drop of a coin. And they had foreign armies,
French and Spanish, and the Holy Roman emperor dropped down one time to
sack Rome, but I think that was based on religion. The French and the
Spanish, being so far from home, and not knowing Milan from Florence,
and there for dubious reasons, tended to switch sides as much as the
mercenaries. It was just like a big free for all. In the brief periods
between the wars the city states prospered, but then were done in by the
wars. Overall they probably would have been better off without them.
The religious wars were I suppose moral wars because both sides thought
that there was only one way to worship god and everybody should do it
their way. You know as a young lad attending the Elsdon Methodist
Church, I always thought of the protestants as the good guys in this
war, because wasn't that mean old catholic church corrupt and
intolerant? Well yes it was, but those protestants, especially those
Calvinists, were pretty damn mean themselves. If you got in trouble
with the catholic church you could maybe buy or talk your way out of it,
but if you got in trouble with the Calvinists you were a dead man. It
was kind of like the catholics were the mafia and the protestants were
the taliban.
These are the wars that those new atheists who are at war with all
religions (have you heard of them?) most often cite as what is bad about
religion, namely how many people died in wars about it, but myself I
think that if people don't have religion to fight over they will find
something else. And sure enough this one was fought with a lot of
mercenary armies, and there were all kinds of foreign countries involved
on this side or that, and not above changing sides when that seemed to
offer a better deal.
I think when we talk about war, we are mostly talking about the wars
since, say around the revolutionary war, and of course the big example
is WW 2, it was the tidiest of wars with nobody changing sides unless
they were conquered, and with clearly delineated bad guys and good guys,
basically because Hitler was so awful and the Japanese did that
terrible crap in China. I think we take this war as an example of wars,
but it was really a war unlike other wars.
And I think the examples of Europe and Japan are extraordinary. Europe
had nations that had been around for awhile and had a strong idea of
themselves. And the Japanese would go whichever way the emperor did. I
guess Vietnam has held together pretty well as a nation, but the middle
east, forget about it. And of course everybody hates us, and the only
way we can make anybody there do what we want them to do is pay them
money or put a gun to the back of their head.
Well it's easy to be against war. Unless a war is going on in your country, then you are a traitor.
I guess a lot of people see it as a way of getting things done. I think
we have had this discussion before, those who want to settle something
for good, and those who want to muddle through. I think the example we
used was a car with an oil problem.
What do you think about the four kinds of people, who see life as, a
pleasure cruise, a war, a quest, or a mountain climb? I wonder if we
have done this before.
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