Benefits of wars

[slimjim]

Were there any real benefits from the two great wars of the last century. Ok, the second one removed a tyrant but overall, they both seemed to lead to even more worldwide divisions and uneven balances of power. I can think of a few small benefits like advances in airplane technology, creation of the welfare state (indirectly, and was that really a good thing?) and the opening up of jobs to women. But were there any other?

[spiff]

Not sure pal. It has been said that war benefits innovation,and to an extent that has always been the case.However,in todays world there can be no such thing as a "war"-it's more of a technological military build up of information gathering.Bit off your actual question there. sorry. One "benefit" of WW2 was finding out the limits of human endurance in cold/wet situations. These experiment were conducted by the Nazi's. In NO WAY do i condone this,but it has to be said that the allied powers had no qualms at all about applying these results for the benefit of "downed" pilots.

[treaclefight]

i understood we needed to have wars to avoid having mountains of obsolete weapons, in much the same way the eu had butter mountains etc. thats the benefit then, you dont have to live next to warehouses of last years bombs. And then there's beauty, the wide, open, unforgettable streets of paris....deliberate act of war against ones own people, get the tanks in nice n quick next time they revolt. my more sensible answer is that once a war is history rather than present day, i cannot see how you can identify the good or the bad that it has done. the world has been shaped by war, it is what it is as a result of human conflicts with each other and with nature (which will take me into a monlogue on art, so i'll shut up). :-)

[IndieSinger]

Forgive me if I'm taking your question too literally, but some towns have benefited by being bombed flat - they were built up nice and new and sparkling almost from scratch. This didn't always happen, granted, they were often built up quickly and shoddily and we're paying the price now.

[sylvday]

I think that it is rather unhelpful to couple the two world wars together in this way. Most people accept that WW1 could have fairly easily been avoided, and that it resulted in a ghastly waste of human life; it is difficult to see that it led to any material benefits to the winners or losers, especially as the way Germany was treated in the Versaille Peace Treaty is generally regarded as having aided the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. However, with regard to WW2, once Hitler was in power, it is hard to see how war could have been avoided unless the Allies had allowed Germany to occupy the whole of Europe, to initiate and complete the Holocaust etc etc. It seems to me that stopping that from happening was an immeasurable benefit, that should not be belittled. (Incidentally, you mention that WW2 led to divisions; but remember that it also led almost directly to the formation of what is now the European Union.)

[woofgang]

...and is this a benefit???

[sylvday]

Yes, Woofgang, many of us - some hundreds of millions throughout Europe, in fact - do see the EU as a hugely "good thing".

[sylvday]

Sorry about the quotation marks above - just a senior moment!

[darth vader]

There arebenefits to war but my answers in no way condone war itself (i am a pacifist) and some reasons highlight the complete absurdity of war itself

it has been considered that (world) war is a good way to control population and extremists have often considered the effect of global nuclear war as a way of reducing a rapidly overcrowding planet. (It has been rumoured that the USA have a think-tank which considers this as a viable possibility). Other benefits: enemployment decreases (this is not always true - there was mass unemployment after WW2) as employable population is reduced. Housing and other buildings are replaced. Arms manufacturing is boosted, also munitions and supplies and anything to do with logisitics of war (food, equipment, boots, cig rations, you get my drift). Dealing specifically with WW1 - not a lot really, watch blackadder goes forth for an ironic but surprisingly accurate opinion of what a waste of human life the 1st world war really was. WW2 - rocket technology and ICBM advancement, airplane technology advancement, WMD (bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima)

[darth vader]

for WW1 add tank invented. for WW2 add submarine (u-boat) invented

[firefly]

Not true, they were invented before the twentieth century began.

[thekraut]

it's not only war itself, it's already the fear of it that boosts certain technologies. best example in my opinion is the internet. it startet off as a military network to insure communication in case of massive nuclear strikes. in general, war is pumping funds into areas you would initially consider completely worthless, thus accelerating technical developments like supersonic flights and not to forget man's best friend, the 2000 lb cluster bomb

[sarah123]

One that is always trotted out is that because women did men's jobs during WW1 that it strengthened the case for giving them the vote. Not sure how true this is because it was only women over 30, women over 21 got the vote in 1928.

[thekraut]

Not in Switzerland, though...

[JohnPPotts]

The UN was created directly as a response to World War II (and the failiure of the League of Nations set up after World War I) which many people consider a good thing: more contentiously, the "Bretton Woods" institutions - the World Bank, IMF and GATT (now WTO - World Trade Organisation) - were also the product of World War II (in order to prevent the sort of economic disaster that helped Hitler rise to power).

[darth vader]

firefly i trust you're responding to me? true and not true - it's a bit like saying babbage invented the computer, when in reality the first computers were invented in the 50's. the tank and submarine were in existence as a theory/concept but wasn't until the 1st and 2nd WW that they were developed properly as technologies.

[darth vader]

perhaps i should have use "developed" and not "invented"

[thekraut]

Vader, I'm still not sure if the development of more efficient weapons can really be called a benefit. and all the economical benefits you stated on wed. were just temporary ones. at least for germany the pre-war boom (motorways and stuff for WWII) were the cause for the post-war inflation. But maybe thats only true if you lose the war. For the US you are probably right, as the production of all the weapons they produced for their allies boosted their economy.

[darth vader]

which kinda backs up my statement that the reasons highlight the absurdity of war. The only benefit of war is to the undertaker's business trade :-(

[superloopie]

It's a sad fact that war is an inevitible by-product of human society, but if no-one had challenged the rise of Nazism, for example, then who knows how extensive the consequences might be. Surely that's no 'small benefit'? It's hard to strike a balance though - I don't believe in 'poking our noses' into the affairs of other cultures especially when our understanding of those cultures is inadequate, but at the same time, some regimes appear to be quite clearly 'wrong' (again, think WW2 Nazism). A tough one isn't it.

[babthrower]

It pretty well destroyed the class system. When the war came, men were called up and women and older men had lots of jobs for the first time in many years. They made a lot more money and had more personal freedom than they would have had as domestic servants. After the war well-off people complained about the 'servant problem' - people just wouldn't work long hours for low wages and submit to interference with their personal lives. So the old lifestyle was never the same. Only the very well off could live as before. Then came reforms in education, and that was the last straw. Or so some of my English friends tell me, and they say it was all due to the second world war.