can war be justified

It could well be.. i did say 'that old chestnut' .. It depends on what you call 'democracy'..

Why do you think it is Bullshit ?....

anything along the lines of

Basically It Depends on the Definition

"Democracy"

If you define democracy as a system of government in which policy is set by unpunished, unrestricted debate among the citizens of a nation and put into action by their elected representatives, then all of the above nations are democratic. On the other hand, if you start narrowing the definitions, then obviously you'll get fewer democracies to work with, so of course you're going to have fewer wars between democracies.

• If you consider slavery and democracy to be mutually exclusive, then no major power was a democracy until the French Revolution, and the United States passed nearly its entire first century without being a proper democracy.
• If you insist that a democracy must be free from all corruption, bribery, vote fraud, cronyism, intimidation and ballot box stuffing, then even a fine old democracy like the United States fails the test more often than we like to admit. The 1960 and 1972 presidential elections, for example, had enough irregularites and questionable activities to make honest civil libertarians wring their hands and worry whether any country can meet the high standards set by political theorists. [n.3]
• If you consider women's sufferage to be an essential component of democracy, then no nation was a democracy until the 20th Century. Switzerland, the poster boy of peaceful democracies, didn't pass this threshhold until 1971 (and at the local level until 1990). France fought two World Wars without being a proper democracy. With this proviso ("women have to count.") in place, you can easily weed out the first 11 controversies in our list.
• If you insist on that tired old bromide that the US (for example) is a republic, not a democracy, then obviously, there's no such thing as an existing democracy, so -- big surprise -- there hasn't been a war between democracies in, like, 2300 years.
• Some democraticians would avoid labelling a nation democratic until after the first peaceful, orderly transfer of power to the opposition following an electoral defeat. I'll admit this makes a certain amount of sense -- until the ruling elite actually steps down, you can't be sure whether the elections are real or just for show -- however, it does significantly trim the number of democracies in the world at any given time.
  • For example, under this rule, the USA didn't become a democracy until 1801, a quarter century after the Declaration of Independence. West Germany didn't become a democracy until 1969, 20 years after the Allied occupation ended (and only 20 years before the emergence of democracy in its East German rival). Mexico has been having regularly scheduled and hotly contested elections for decades, and yet didn't pass this threshold of democracy until a few months ago. Despite the joyous ends to oppressive regimes almost a decade ago -- and a string of regular, contested elections since then -- Russia and South Africa still are not democratic by these standards. [n.8]
• However, rather than wait years or decades for a visible transfer of power, some democraticians prefer to set a temporal milestone at which "unstable" democracies transform into "stable" ones. If constitutional rule of law survives its first awkward years and passes (for example) its third birthday, then how about we just declare it a full adult? This way, we can dismiss any wars it fought in its infancy as growing pains and youthful mistakes made before they learned that democracies are not supposed to do that sort of thing.

I suppose that all these limits and conditions are fine in theory, except for four problems:

1. Everyone forgets the fine print. When a politician declares in his stump speech that democracies don't fight democracies, he usually omits the parenthetical remark that we're only counting "states in which fair competative elections have led to a peaceful handover of power from one head of government to his or her rival" (to quote the small print in Dan Smith's The State of the World Atlas, 6th ed.)
2. The old double standard:
   • Slobodon Milosovic was frequently denounced in his nation's press and challenged in elections by opposition leaders, but he maintained an iron grip on power through vote fraud, private security forces and the judicious application of unregistered cash. His armies fought secret wars. When the voices against him grew too loud, he scurried away like a thief in the night.
   • Dictator, right?
   • The same, however, could be said about Richard Nixon. Why do the irregularities of Milosovic's regime prove that Yugoslavia was a dictatorship, but the irregularities of Nixon's regime prove that in America, "the system works"? (Of course, on the other hand, if we accept that Nixon was dictator rather than a democratic leader, it becomes easier to explain that the 1973 unpleasantness between Chile and the US was not an example of two democracies at war.)
3. Shifting the definitions to fit the theory: Right now, believers in the Democratic Peace Theory count Russia and Ukraine as two of the world many democracies at peace with each other, but if these two countries went to war with each other, the DPTists would suddenly find all the anti-democratic features of these regimes to be extremely significant. In fact, I suspect that even if the United States invaded Canada tomorrow, the DPTists would be able to find some reason to call one or both non-democratic, such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and the irregularities of the 2000 Election.
4. Statistically insignificant sample: As we trim more and more dubious democracies from our list, we certainly make the statement that "democracies don't fight each other" truer, but we also make it a lot less impressive. If there are only 2 functioning democracies in the world (think, for example, the United States and Switzerland, ca. 1855), then peace between them is no big surprise. After all, how many times have two Mormon countries gone to war with one another? Or two nations led by people named Leslie?

"War"


On any given day, as you flip page-by-page through a big city newspaper, you'll see stories from a half dozen wars going on worldwide -- and these are just the wars that produced something newsworthy the day before. Taking into account the wars which have entered a hiatus as one side plans and the other side licks its wounds (along with unofficial cease-fires, disruptive weather, and concealed massacres) we can easily assume another dozen distant wars smoldering out of sight of newspaper's understaffed foreign bureaus.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

I never put THAT much thought into it to be honest.. just 'something to say'..

 

I think war first of all should be fought men to men not killing inosent people were the hell is George W coward big man ordering our soldgers to kill.
second of all the only reASON we are in Iraq is becouse the world is running out of
oil and no one wants to admit tha
its all a big power & greed trip

 

thank you athenam for bringing this forum back to life

 

do i not? thats a rash assumption...

 

i just don't buy that any amount of killing and dying has ever made anyone free.
the one real exception i can see is if genocide really is being stopped or prevented, but all too often even this is used as an excuse and isn't even true. if and when it really is, well of course yes, but otherwise no.

you see the problem is this, the more harm there is floating arround the more likely each and every last one of us is to suffer from it; and the more harm anyone (or, obviously, any several) cause, the more there is floating arround.

that may sound counterintuitive with all of what vested economic interests want you to believe and and what they censor you from observing in corporate controlled media, among which is that honor is never served by vengence either.

i mean what kind of sense does it make to brag about kill ratios if the object is to PREVENT slaughter?

idiology doesn't make people free either. any idiology. and killing for it, never has and never will.

=^^=
.../\...

 

war is a tricky subject


i think the problem stems from alpha males

 

No! not even spiritual war. Because thats simply a battle between existence and non-existence. And if something doesn't exist it simply doesn't exist. Same with everything. people are all one so they should just act like it.