A video circulating in the cyberspace tries to whip up nationalist sentiment by using the Korean war experience to suggest that “the Philippines can beat China” should any military conflict arise from the recent territorial dispute.
Heard of the axiom “Generals are always prepared to fight the last war”?
Such expression applies to the video. The video has been framed in the assumption that future wars will be waged in the conventional sense and thus the vaunted Filipino mettle will matter.
Well this would not only be a big mistake but is patently myopic.
We are not only in the information age but in the age of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not limited to nuclear warfare (but also to various types of chemical, biological and other evolving warfare such as computer, robotics and etc..).
[As a side note, I will not deal here with the moral issue of whether Filipino lives lost and taxpayer expenditures in the Korean war had been justified or not].
And China has been part of the states armed with substantial nuclear armaments (from Wikipedia.org)
China has also in possession of chemical and biological weapons. I will skip on the military tale of the tape, nevertheless I have shown them here earlier
This simply means that the risks of the employment of these dreadful killing machines or instruments increases once a shooting war have been initiated.
For many, getting social acceptance means to make a big issue out of things they hardly understand.
Political correctness also means stirring up nationalist fervor when they know that someone else will get to do the bloody part of the political violence, whose major beneficiaries will accrue to politicians at society’s expense. Of course this assumes a limited shooting war.
And in case of a full scale war, this will like result to mass destruction of the society (whose families and friends of these agitators will also suffer). Of course these people can’t think through their emotions enough to understand the consequences of their advocacies or are shills for the politicos.
I am reminded by distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee who claimed that people whom have not experienced the horrors of war have the tendency to become provocateurs (or the generational war cycle).
The survivors of a generation that has been of military age during a bout of war will be shy, for the rest of their lives, of bringing a repetition of this tragic experience either upon themselves or upon their children, and... therefore the psychological resistance of any move towards the breaking of a peace ....is likely to be prohibitively strong until a new generation.... has had the time to grow up and to come into power. On the same showing, a bout of war, once precipitated, is likely to persist until the peace-bred generation that has been lightheartedly run into war has been replaced, in its turn, by a war-worn generation.
And it is why agitators of war should get themselves enlisted in the military and request to get assigned in the frontlines so they can practice on what they preach.
[Updated to add: Here is a list of the death toll of 20th century wars, given the capacity of destruction of modern weaponry--assume the worst for the new age warfare]
Of course I am not convinced that the regional territorial controversy has solely been about superficial claims to property or about resources but more about the concealed political agenda such as the advancement of the military industrial complex, and or even perhaps a smoke and mirror encirclement strategy against Russia as China’s regional economic and military policies seem like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The more important way to promote peace and social cooperation is none other than through expanded trade.
As the great Claude Frederic Bastiat once warned
if goods don’t cross borders, armies will
