Benefits of having WWI and WWII?

[Mr Rayon]

Has any good come to European/Western society through experiencing World War I and World War II?

 

If World War I and World War II had not occurred, would the world be a better place now?

 

How has experiencing these wars impacted upon the society in which we have built?

 

Did humanity learn anything from these wars or did it just heighten the demand for nuclear weapons?

 

 

What's your opinion?

[CaptainPanic]

Those wars probably changed everything... and everything includes good and bad things.

Obvious good things are: UN and EU (cooperation between countries prevents more wars), human rights and technological advances.

Obvious bad things are: the horror of the wars, the trauma, the many dead people, the Cold War that followed, the nuclear threat (although arguably that has also kept the peace for several decades).

But there are many many more.

 

I think this thread is extremely broad... and I wonder where this will go.

[Mr Rayon]

I think this thread is extremely broad... and I wonder where this will go.

 

...only God knows. O_o

[Leader Bee]

I would like to cite medicine as my candidate for good things to come from the world wars. Medical advancement is often seen to accelerate in times of war and both the following links explainsome of the reasons why

 

WWI http://www.vlib.us/medical/

WWII http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medicine_and_world_war_two.htm

 

I'd also like to point out that while certain atrocities were carried out by Joseph Mengele; most of what modern medicine knows about the treatment of hypothermia victims comes from the experiments the Nazi's carried out.

 

I could also probably cite dragging Germany out of economic depression after the first world war in preparation for WWII as a benefit but i think that may be subjective.

Edited July 7, 2011 by Leader Bee

[Marat]

This sounds terribly Malthusian, but the fact can't be denied that if there had not been all those deaths in World Wars I and II, the world's overpopulation and environmental stress would today be intolerable.

 

There was not only a boost to medical progress in the war, but also to science and technology, such as in the improved ability to substitute one product for another to compensate for shortages, improvements in rocketry, jet propulsion, submarine and torpedo design, computers, atomic power, etc. International law improved in response to the Holocaust and legal positivism was discredited. Racism became much more unpopular than it was before the war. The troops returning home from World War II insisted on progressive social policies at home, since once the working class has been subjected to lethal threats by the ruling class, they become relatively less tolerant of its economic exploitation.

 

Interestingly, if you look at a map of the German plan for the subdivision of the Russian Empire if Germany had won the First World War and compare it with the current subdivision of the Soviet State into independent republics, you would think that the Kaiser had won rather than lost in 1918. So perhaps some plans simply reflect the deeper economic and world historical patterns which will develop anyway, regardless of how the wars on the surface turn out. Thus in the case of Russia, perhaps it was too large to hold itself together in the face of the greater concentration of economic power to the west of it which did not want a large Russia, so eventually historical forces were bound to fragment and oversized eastern state in the interests of the West.

[JohnB]

This sounds terribly Malthusian, but the fact can't be denied that if there had not been all those deaths in World Wars I and II, the world's overpopulation and environmental stress would today be intolerable.

 

Cite please. Your assertion doesn't make a fact. Western nations suffered the heaviest losses of population yet they have been at under replacement rates for quite some time anyway. African population was relatively uneffected by either war. China lost many people numerically but not as a percentage of population. If the wars hadn't happened I doubt that the global population would be much more, if any, than it is now.

[Marat]

Without bothering to check official statistics, I would guess that total military and civilian casualties of World Wars I and II were about 50,000,000. Even if you assume a very low replacement rate in that population because it was European, it had to have generated a huge progeny by now, three or four generations later, perhaps increasing today's high-energy, high-resource consuming and high-pollution producing population by about 200,000,000.

[JohnB]

Most european and possibly most western nations are below replacement levels and have been for some time. It can just as easily be concluded that without the wars, this point would have been reached sooner which would result in a slightly lower population than today.

 

But the argument itself is illogical. Taken to extremes you could say that if tribe A hadn't wiped out tribe B 10,000 years ago then the earths population would now be vastly higher. Malthus was a moron, propounding his ideas at a time when we knew bugger all about history and archaeology. The simple fact is that populations do not continue to increase willy nilly. They tend to increase to a certain point and then stabilise. Every culture in the history of this planet has done so, why would you expect europe to be different?

[thinker_jeff]

"Benefits" of having WWI and WWII?!

 

For the sake of the people lost everything in these wars, please DO NOT use such word.

[Marat]

I agree that if the population of the world had been increasing earlier then perhaps counterpressures against it would have become manifest sooner so that the world would have responded sensibly by trying to reduce population -- but then again, maybe it wouldn't have. The world's population is much larger now than it was in 1945, so that shows that we have not been dissuaded from reaching our present size, so if the absence of World Wars I and II had caused us to reach our present size significantly sooner, would we have acted to prevent it?

 

If the development of pharmaceuticals had been slowed by the absence of the two world wars, the birth control pill probably wouldn't have been developed any sooner than it actually was in the 1960s, so a major force for restricting population growth would not have been available to address the earlier expansion of population. Also, if the two world wars had not given Third World countries the opportunity to shake free of their self-destroying European colonizers, perhaps the world would have had less empathy for the Third World's population growth and so less would have been done to restrain it. Or would the diminished empathy of a still-colonialist First World have decreased its interventions in the Third World to prevent starvation there and thus decreased population? In short, the puzzle is like Ray Bradbury's famous problem of the time-traveller who steps on a butterfy in the past and sets loose a concatenation of trivial events which result in his future home world being destroyed. As soon as we subtract two world wars from the history of the 20th century, all we can do is guess how all the resulting changes would have interacted.

 

While I agree that there were countless horrible effects of the two world wars (I'm still schmitzing over the loss of Koenigsberg to the Russians of all people, who have the nerve to call the city Kant made famous 'Kaliningrad'!), all wars, as gigantic upheavals, have some good side-effects, even though they are generally negative on balance. E.g., without the American Civil War slavery would have lasted much longer in the South; without the Carthaginian Wars we might have inherited Carthage's tradition of baby-burning rather than the Roman Empire's legal and engineering wisdom; if the Austrian Empire hadn't defeated the Ottoman Empire and occupied Serbia in the 18th century, the famous scientific study of vampirism, published by Ranfft, 'Dass die Toten nicht Schmatzen in den Graebern' would never have appeared, etc.

[DJBruce]

World War I and World War II were incredibly beneficial for the United States in the sense that WWI turned the United States from a nation in debt to the nation people were in debt to, which dramatically shifted the USA's economic standing. WWII basically destroyed the manufacturing capacity of most of those countries in a position to compete with the United States, and so while most of Europe and Asia had to focus on rebuilding American could maintain economic dominance.

 

Outside of the obvious benefits to US WWII certainly help accelerate the pass of most fields of science. Furthermore I would suggest that had WWII not happened Hitler may have been able to continue his horrible plans to completion.

[Marat]

There is some speculation among historians that the war may have accelerated rather than retarded the Holocaust, which only began as a systematic killing of people in 1942, once the plan to force all the Jews to leave Europe by their peaceful transportation to Madagascar became impossible with the Allies' recovery of that island from the Vichy French Nazi sympathizers.

 

War also accustoms everyone to doing terrible things in the name of current political policy, and this both increases public tolerance for violent policies and the leadership's comfort with enacting such policies, given the general desperation of the times with mass starvations, bombing of cities, military combat deaths and injuries, and devastation of disputed territories. In that context, the Holocaust became not some unique horror but just one more horror among many.