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Should we stop using war as population culling of our young people?
dpareja:
--- Quote from: Tolpuddle Martyr on March 26, 2022, 07:40:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: dpareja on March 23, 2022, 01:39:30 pm ---Governments don't willingly sacrifice their own youth, since it leads to long-term demographic decline. As I've seen it observed, the casualties suffered by Russia in WWI and then the USSR in WWII among men around the ages of 18-25 have led to reverberating effects, whereby there is a marked decrease in birthrates every 20-25 years, since those young men who died in war didn't have children, and since those children never existed, the children they would have had a few decades down the road don't exist, and so on.
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I'm not sure if that's necessarily true, especially in pre drone times, the very act of war presupposed some casualties on your own side. Of course a particular dominant class or caste may not view it as necessarily sacrificing their own youth but those of the lower classes. Even if the children of lower classes are viewed primarily as assets to be used there's still some sacrifice involved. As you said, those men won't be able to father children or be productive in other ways if they're dead.
Sacrifice isn't the point of war, I think it's more of a cost/benefit equation where the probable sacrifices are seen as an investment in a greater reward. In the case of the Soviet Union that greater reward was continued existence.
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True, but looking at WWII, you had, on the Axis side (Japan and Germany particularly) countries assuming that their wars would be short and victorious so that they could get down to the business of dominating East Asia or murdering Jews, Romani, homosexuals and many other groups respectively.
On the Allied side, you had countries that were being attacked, and so the cost of fighting back, in terms of number of lives lost, was almost certainly lower than the cost of not fighting back. (This was especially true for the Soviet Union since Hitler had made no secret of his desire to subjugate Slavs, whom he viewed as sub-human.)
Germany and Japan undoubtedly expected some casualties, though not as many as they ultimately suffered, while for the Allied powers, their wartime casualties were taken in the interest of not taking even more upon being defeated.
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