War Solves Nothing...or Does It?

“During the Cold War…many among the intelligentsia began repeating the old notion that war “solves nothing,” an echo from the 1930s, where the futility of war was proclaimed, among others, by Neville Chamberlain, who said that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing”—and who was in turn simply echoing what many among the intelligentsia were saying in his day. But like so much that has been said by the intelligentsia upon so many subjects, the notion that “war solves nothing” had less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed, which in turn had much to do with the exaltation of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches of Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today. There have of course been futile wars in which all the nations on both sides ended up far worse off than before—the First World War being a classic example. But no one would make the blanket statement that medical science “solves nothing” because many people die despite treatment and some die because of wrong treatment or even from the remote risks of vaccinations. In short, mundane specifics are more salient in evaluating any particular war than are the sweeping, abstract, and dramatic pronouncements so often indulged in by the intelligentsia.”

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society