The New American Century

Jesse Ventura discusses 9/11

The Folly and Wickedness of War

by Laurence M. Vance

“History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” ~ Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” ~ George Santayana (1863–1952)

“What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it” ~ Georg Hegel (1770–1831)

Writing in 1968, the historian Will Durant, in his The Lessons of History, remarked that “in the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.” Unfortunately, the most recent century was the bloodiest on record.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, was one of the most horrendous military campaigns, not only in the twentieth century, but in all of history. As related by Catherine Merridale in Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (Metropolitan Books, 2006):

By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the Red Army had lost 4.5 million men. The carnage was beyond imagination. Eyewitnesses described the battlefields as landscapes of charred steel and ash. The round shapes of lifeless heads caught the late summer light like potatoes turned up from new-broken soil. The prisoners were marched off in their multitudes. Even the Germans did not have the guards, let alone enough barbed wire, to contain the 2.5 million Red Army troops they captured in the first five months. One single campaign, the defense of Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000 killed or missing in a matter of weeks. Almost the entire army of the pre-war years, the troops that shared the panic of those first nights back in June, was dead or captured by the end of 1941. And this process would be repeated as another generation was called up, crammed into uniform, and killed, captured, or wounded beyond recovery.

The folly of war cannot be limited to Germans and Russians; it can also be seen in the actions of Americans. During World War II, the Battle of Peleliu between the United States and Japan was folly on a grand scale. As part of General MacArthur’s strategy to recapture the Philippines, it was thought to be necessary to neutralize the Japanese occupation of the island of Peleliu – 550 miles east of the Philippines. It wasn’t. After 1,794 U.S. Marines died, it was determined that the island had no strategic value.

Rather than being a “good war,” World War II was an unnecessary bloodbath just like most of the previous wars in history.

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