Perhaps you "feel" it, but can't quite put your finger on it. That's because you we never taught in your young education how wars of conquest were created. Probably never read about what happened to the conquered people in the war. You were "taught" just how wonderful the victor is and how beneficent they are. So you probably have an incomplete cerebral foundation to work from on why such horrible things ever happened. That's not your fault, it's how selective propaganda works and everybody does it! These days Edward Bernays would be proud. He just convinced women to smoke cigarettes - a piker by today's standards. But yet a founding member of the psychological warfare pioneers who studied just what to say and how to say it convincingly to dupe the unsuspecting to achieve profitable result$. What a guy, Cornell should be proud of the contribution their alum has made to society.
Lets deconstruct a couple notable wars:
WW2 was in large part motivated by a drive to secure resources. Never hear about that? Well it's true. Both Germany and Japan were trying to solve access to vital raw materials but alas, nobody wanted to negotiate a competitive position. Read: It's mine and you can't have it at any price! What was "it" - they were things like certain minerals, energy - mostly oil or both. Japan eventually invaded SE Asia and the Dutch Indies to get rubber, oil and some other resources. Germany, well the Caucasus had that irresistible oil patch and Ukraine had, and still has some of the best agricultural fields in the World. Anything sound familiar to today's headlines? Ever read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent? I recommend it.
Not just a European fixation... Chile and Bolivia had a spat over nutrient rich coastal lands and don't forget - possibly you never knew, nitrate deposits and guano harvested from the Atacama Desert. Yep, failure to reach a compromise led to "just try it" with misery to ensue. Such was the War of the Pacific.
Looking towards today's bubbling caldrons of unrest - The Persian Gulf War lit off when Iraq and Kuwait had a difference of opinion on the ethics of horizontal drilling - more precisely on the profits to be made thereby. You know generally, the rest of the story. How the two warring nations got to that point may never be revealed, but again, I digress, that's a whole other post.
Too numerous to mention are the European exploits of the era from the mid 1400's to the late 1800's. All the cool kids in Europe wanted a subjugated summer home where they could talk the locals into mining gold, silver, diamonds, yummy crops and of course drilling for oil and later on stuff like mining uranium and cobalt. The vestiges of this projection of imperial power sanitized as "colonialism" are still simmering although now defined by other words usually chosen by mother ship.
It isn't hard to foresee future dust-ups over fresh water, rare Earth minerals and of course cheap energy of any kind. "I want it, too bad for you." is a common thought process on this planet that we seem to trot out over and over again.
Incredibly, deadly force, coercion and color revolutions seem to be the favorite methods of acquiring stuff that isn't theirs. So tit for tat policies are popping up constantly probing for a crack in the armor to take advantage of. You have the stuff but I can refine it... etc. Meh, that at least may open the door to fair trade and civil negotiations. Oddly, Asia seems to have won the mineral lottery with regard to REEs, Cobalt, Lithium and even Nickel. Lucky I suppose. But watch out! World history is replete with envious and underhanded interlopers who want your stuff without being nice about it. LOL, the jails are full of 'em.
That's just the tippy top of a mountain of "I want it, gimme or else -" bloviating statements we have read about lately - nothing new, just a sad reminder of how little we have evolved as a population. What seems to drive it all is an insatiable need to GROW wealth to feed the crazy economic systems we have that need to churn money to produce profits AND deliver monetary growth on "investments". Well this hive mind cannot visualize the inevitable collision of finite resources with infinite growth. There isn't an answer to economic liking so the fact is to be ignored that promises made yesterday are eventually not possible to keep. Virtually all wealth generation systems depend on appreciation either through interest rates, scarcity driving price or complexity (when nothing else works) complexity by the way just drives cost increases in a pretty thin veil of perceived value for money. Thinly veiled because complexity also drives obsolescence, reduced reliability and waste - good for the balance sheet, but bad for you. Not a good way to consume our once and done depleting resources. Rather we need high reliability, long product life and ease of repair. But those attainable attributes all degrade the efficiency of the wealth generation machine. So they won't happen, and don't happen, not yet anyway. Physics will see that gets corrected sooner rather than later. Physics is a harsh teacher who will not go away even for those who refuse to understand.
We know the World is said to be far more complicated - at least that's the cover story we all read about and what the universities all profess. Simply put, a gang of influential folks convinces themselves that their ideas are much superior to yours and your stuff is better off in their hand$. Then if and only if (iff) the locals can be stirred up into a frenzy of anger against some objectified and properly demonized foe, we have all the necessary ingredients to put the main dish into the oven for cooking. Thanks to the international cadre of chefs in the kitchen who you never nominated and shall remain nameless. But just like that gift that you received with a tag that says "EBH" Everybody Helped... the feast of famine and horror can be made ready for the serving. Iff.
Lessons learned? We know how this works, but the levers that commit the plans to action are never in your hands. You, by design, don't have agency but will be expected to own it. You do have a voice - it wouldn't hurt to use it so we might learn at long last to get along with each other and to solve our challenges with mutual collaboration, not by good old fashioned exploitation and oppression.
Think that could happen? Perhaps that is an after dinner discussion for this planet.
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