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Should we stop using war as population culling of our young people?

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Gnostic Christian:
Should we stop using war as population culling of our young people?

For most of our Godless history, governments and religions have used war to reduce the population of their unruly men and women. This is understandable for those times, as tribes, governments and religions would have wanted to reduce the overrepresented male numbers, as compared to much fewer female numbers. Population balance, unfortunately, was required.

Ancient tough love from the Gods.

Modern wars seem to be designed to continue that vile policy.

Should we ask our political and oligarchic masters to stop wasting our young people with ancient ways?

If we are not to change our ways, cull the old. We are living too long, and the joys are fewer, as we watch the young be buried before the old. The opposite of what nature wants to see.

Culling the old is the moral thing to do. Our ways of culling the young are not natural.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15449959

Regards
DL

Sigmaleph:
What a vile load of nonsense.

1) War might've had the effect of reducing the male population, but it is rather a stretch to say this was its purpose. People have, unfortunately, always had any number of reasons to kill each other.

2) Modern war is not "a continuation of that policy", the concept is absurd. If claiming our ancestors had the deliberate goal of losing young men is a stretch, claiming it for our contemporaries is just entirely ridiculous. You cannot end war by appealing to politicians to end a policy they are not pursuing.

3) "Culling the old is the moral thing to do"? No. It isn't. There's no moral group of people to "cull", which is to say murder. There is no tradeoff where we need to kill someone so might as well kill the old.

Tolpuddle Martyr:

--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---Should we stop using war as population culling of our young people?
--- End quote ---

Anything starting off with a classic loaded question can't be good?


--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---For most of our Godless history, governments and religions have used war to reduce the population of their unruly men and women. This is understandable for those times, as tribes, governments and religions would have wanted to reduce the overrepresented male numbers, as compared to much fewer female numbers. Population balance, unfortunately, was required.
--- End quote ---

What Godless history? Some Marxist Leninist states might have had "godlessness" as a tangential goal but they never actually achieved it. Most of them did war for plain old-fashioned reasons of self-preservation and/or strategic and economic self-interest. The only one of those states to ever enact a policy aimed at population control was China which went down the much more practical route of family planning. The Soviet Union in contrast gave medals to women who had lots of kids. On the other side of the materialist fence, the "west", including the US and its allies had a lot of wars, even though the reasons for those were sometimes a bit murky (Vietnam, Iraq) they either weren't done to reduce the population or they were really terrible at achieving those ends.


--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---Ancient tough love from the Gods.
--- End quote ---

Dunno what they had to do with it.


--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---Modern wars seem to be designed to continue that vile policy.
--- End quote ---

You mean the wars fought with hypersonic missiles, drone strikes and aerial bombardment? The wars where, when troops are deployed they tend to be crack commandos and other specialist units as opposed to waves of conscripted youth? Sure, not saying gnarly, low tech battles don't take place anymore, but I never heard any of the leaders in conflicts in Sudan, Burma, Rwanda, the Balkans or India/Pakistan say the point of those long, drawn-out, ugly skirmishes was to have less of their own young people. That might be a result, but it's not a motivation.


--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---Should we ask our political and oligarchic masters to stop wasting our young people with ancient ways?
--- End quote ---

Yep, less war is great. Just...don't be our spokesperson. We don't want to give them more reasons to go all war-war on us.


--- Quote from: Gnostic Christian on March 20, 2022, 01:05:53 pm ---If we are not to change our ways, cull the old. We are living too long, and the joys are fewer, as we watch the young be buried before the old. The opposite of what nature wants to see.

Culling the old is the moral thing to do. Our ways of culling the young are not natural.
--- End quote ---

Ah, "culling" the old is exactly what happens in war - it just so happens that the young get plenty "culled" too, that's why war is...bad. It's the killing culling, less of that is good.

But your weird desire to kill the oldies for whatever gnostic diety it is you worship is duly noted!

dpareja:
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.

Tolpuddle Martyr:

--- 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.

--- End quote ---

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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