Yes, this may sound like it shouldn't be on here, but when I was listening to "Sky Pilot" by the Animals, it seemed that it still speaks today.

Plenty of anti-war songs from the past are still applicable today. The methods of war may have changed, but the reasons to oppose wars started by your own government or by a country that is supposed to be your country's friend remain the same.  What's somewhat more surprising is how few new anti-war songs have garnered any sort of mainstream attention.

Some of the biggest protest songs of the past were really more "Anti Draft Songs".  And there were strong Anti-War movements in every conflict, from the Revolution and Civil Wars to WWI and WWII.  But the one that people remember most is probably Vietnam, because it was the first time that these groups had such widespread access to the mass media.

The wars since (Lebanon, Grenada, Gulf War 1, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afganistan, Gulf War II) are simply not as galvanizing for several reasons.

For one, they are not as universally dispised as Vietnam was.  Remember, in 1968 both presedents ran on a peace platform.  While both candidates wanted to get the US out, they simply disagreed on how it was to be done.

Since then, most of the conflicts have simply been to short to get any kind of public uproar going.  Either that, or they were low-level conflicts that never got to be any worse then that of a medium size city police raid.

The current conflicts are only getting such an effect because they are not as universally hated.  There are people who support one of the other conflict (or both) and those who oppose it for various reasons on both sides of the political spectrum.

Not to mention that this time, everybody fighting volunteered to join the military in the first place.  There is no draft, and everybody knew what they were getting into when they raised their right hand.


Plenty of anti-war songs from the past are still applicable today. The methods of war may have changed, but the reasons to oppose wars started by your own government or by a country that is supposed to be your country's friend remain the same. 


OK then, what was the last "Good War" we fought in then?  Somalia, when we were trying to enforce UN sanctions on warring groups of warlords?  Gulf War I, where we were ousting a dictator that took over a smaller neighboring country?  Korea and Vietnam, where we were part of a UN peacekeeping force also trying to prevent a violent takover of another country?  The times we went into Haiti and Lebanon as part of a UN peacekeeping force trying to restore order?

Should we have gotten involved in Tibet when China took them over?  Should we have gotten involved in Cyprus when the Turks and Greeks were slaughtering everybody?  Should we be involved in Darfur right now to stop the ethnic clensing?

Myself, I support all of these conflicts.  I may not agree with how they are carried out, but I agree that the only way to remove a piece of coprolitic scumbag is by force.  That is unless the aforementioned scumbag decides to "turn over a new leaf" and stop trying to harm others for their own political wants or needs.

And to take it a step further, some of our candidates have been making "sabre rattling" noises at countries like Iran and North Korea.  If the next president decides to bomb Iran, should we follow him (or her)?  Or should we start writing protest songs and calling him (or her) a mass murderer?

I would write protest songs myself if there was any serious threat of bombing Iran, and not just because of the effect that it would have over there but also back home.  I don't think that there is a such thing as a good war, and the only two in American history that I would consider necessary evils were the ones in the 1770s and 1860s.  The World Wars were started by other countries and some of those countries were so dangerously belligerent that they had to be stopped. The same was true on a smaller scale for Desert Storm.  There was no real justification for invading Iraq in 2003, nor would there be one for an invasion of Iran or North Korea.  What's the point of removing a scumbag from power without being prepared to fix the political situation that allowed said scumbag to gain and maintain power? 

What's the point of removing a scumbag from power without being prepared to fix the political situation that allowed said scumbag to gain and maintain power? 


But some problems simply can't be fixed.  Short of putting everybody in said country into a "re-education camp", you can't fix a country like Darfur, Somalia, and many others.

Or the current scumbag is only controlling things through sheer terror.  As was the case in 2003-2004, once said scumbag was removed, there was a large backlash against those that supported him.  And a lot of the supporters also attacked, hoping to keep their power.

The only way that will ever happen is if people stop seeing politics as a battlefield, and start to work together for the common good.  But sadly, that will never happen.  Some are simply to cruel, greedy, lazy, or psychotic to care about anything but what they want.

Myself, I always tend to look at the words of a much wiser man then myself, when he said:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

of course, letting the museum get looted while you protected the oil wells, completely dismantling the country's infrastructure, and privatizing the entire iraqi economy in order to hand out billions in no-bid, no-accountability contracts to corporations connected with the republican party didn't help too much in terms of stabilizing iraq either.

heck, if i didn't know better i'd have gotten the impression that stabilizing iraq was never a priority in the first place. but the republicans wouldnt do that, would they? just for fabulous riches and boundless political power? nah, surely not. thankfully the WMDs turned up in iraq so at least we know the bush administration's motives for invading were on the level. if saddam hadn't had all those WMDs who knows what we'd all be thinking right now about why the bush administration spontaneously decided to invade the country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rm38pWsmOA



Cat

I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die - Country Joe and the Fish was a great one

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5btZWbViPA

Fortunate Son by CCR is probably the most universal war song ever written.  It can apply to any war, especially when looking at how the children of the rich don't normally have to fight if they don't want to.

I'm just glad there's no draft anymore.

Or the current scumbag is only controlling things through sheer terror. 

What, Bush?


;)
(if you'd meant Bush, you'd have left out the last "t" in that sentence)


Myself, I always tend to look at the words of a much wiser man then myself, when he said:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

I completely agree with that quote - though the corollary is that going to war is always a judgment, so you *really* need to be able to trust the wisdom of the people making that decision.  Most times.. the overwhelming majority of times, the wise choice of action is not to go to war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IZWvPdA-A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IZWvPdA-A


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyUX6wV1lBQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyUX6wV1lBQ
hey! that's pretty fun! quite clever.

seems to miss a bit of the irony of the original film, though. i'm a huge fan of "patton." came out the year of the cambodia christmas bombings and kent state, if i recall.

truly magnificent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDecLiA_Qbw

Some of the biggest protest songs of the past were really more "Anti Draft Songs". 


Karma for pointing that out.

Speaking of which, my favorite Vietnam-era protest song was the Bob Seger (under the name of "The Beach Bums"), Ballad of the Yellow Beret.

I oppose the reinstatement of the draft for two reasons.  First, because it implies that a citizen's body does not belong to the citizen, but rather, that it belongs to the state, which is a concept incompatible with that "life/liberty/pursuit-of-happiness" stuff upon which the country was founded, and second, because I believe that in any conflict of sufficient intensity to cause Congress to seriously consider reinstating the draft, "human wave" attacks from large conscript armies are likely to fare very poorly against small volunteer armies whose force is multiplied by high technology.  Such a war is likely to be over before a draft could be instituted; thus, a draft is unnecessary.  Popular opposition to Vietnam wasn't opposition to the war in Vietnam, it was opposition to the fact that the government was willing to send men with guns to the houses of its citizens, and force those citizens to fight that war, under pain of imprisonment. 

And having said that, I still love that Seger track. 

My ideal vision of future wars is what the Air Force is doing with drones.  Troops sit in comfy air-conditioned cabins, flying drones, and play something like Ender's Game.  Even a civilian couch potato like me would be tempted to sign up for that, and that's even being aware that the drone pilots have their own unique issues related to combat stress.  Make it comfortable and safe enough, and there'd be a never-ending supply of volunteers.  Against a sufficiently-advanced opponent, warfare could end up being conducted as a cross between a real-time-strategy game and a MMORPG. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW7mbK5cuaA&NR=1

My ideal vision of future wars is what the Air Force is doing with drones.  Troops sit in comfy air-conditioned cabins, flying drones, and play something like Ender's Game.  Even a civilian couch potato like me would be tempted to sign up for that, and that's even being aware that the drone pilots have their own unique issues related to combat stress.  Make it comfortable and safe enough, and there'd be a never-ending supply of volunteers.  Against a sufficiently-advanced opponent, warfare could end up being conducted as a cross between a real-time-strategy game and a MMORPG.
 


  Disputes between nations shall be settled by rock-paper-scissors.  Or thumb wrestling...

  Faith No More did an anti-war song, System of a Down likes to take shots at the gubment, &ect...

 
  I'm opposed to the draft, too.  If people don't want to voluntarily fight the government's war, then they are sending the government a message that that war should not be fought.  The idea that Americans are happily sending their children to Iraq to settle a religious feud that is five times as old as America and which none of them could even describe coherently is repulsive.  To start drafting children who don't want to join in this psychotic effort would be criminal... :)

 

My ideal vision of future wars is what the Air Force is doing with drones.  Troops sit in comfy air-conditioned cabins, flying drones, and play something like Ender's Game.  Even a civilian couch potato like me would be tempted to sign up for that, and that's even being aware that the drone pilots have their own unique issues related to combat stress.  Make it comfortable and safe enough, and there'd be a never-ending supply of volunteers.  Against a sufficiently-advanced opponent, warfare could end up being conducted as a cross between a real-time-strategy game and a MMORPG. 


Actually, i pray that such a thing never happens.  War has to be so horrible, that it becomes the last resort.  By making war nice and saitary, you remove a major restriction from conducting it in the first place.

If you have ever watched the original Star Trek series, check out an eipsode called "A Taste Of Armageddon".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

Two planets had decided to remove what they saw as the "eils of war", by conducting a simulated war.  One would annouce they were launching a nuke at a city, and a computer would figure out the number of people killed by the simulated nuke.  They would then tell the people "killed" to go to execution chambers.

And while "Enders Game" made it look at nice and sterile, don't forget the people actually in the ships that had to go out and fight and die.  The story concentrated on Ender, but hardly any mention was made of the people actually doing the real fighting.

What made Ender's Game different is that unlike the Air Force, (deleted spoiler).  I'd suspect that if Ender's Game became reality in that particular sense, the AF would have a psychological problem on their hands that would dwarf that of even their current drone pilots.


If you have ever watched the original Star Trek series, check out an eipsode called "A Taste Of Armageddon".


Yep, one of my favorites.  And Kirk was right -- although in the case we're talking about now, there's plenty of horror for the folks on the receiving end of the bombs.  Two similarly-equipped opponents duking it out with drones would end up in one of two scenarios:

1) Strategic attacks on civilian targets - the civilians on the receiving end would, after massive overkill, eventually cease to support the war, and the (civiliian/politician) commanders of the losing side would be required to order their drone pilots to return to base.

2) Drone-vs-drone engagements - all-drone battlefields become wastelands of robotic wreckage, but then you've got the Air Force's other problem:  drones are a great way to fight a war, but no substitute for boots on the ground. 

There's a third possibility - after the skies have been conquered by one side, the use of drones as substitutes for boots on the ground.  People in the land "occupied" by the drones who submit to the occupation remain physically unharmed, but they have to deal with the mental stresses that comes with the fact that every few weeks, they hear a story about someone standing a few yards away from them who just dropped dead because his face matched that of a troublemaker in some database... (At the moment, I'm imagining a fleet of dirigibles equipped with self-aiming .50 cal sniper rifles, giant zoom lenses, and all hooked into a face recognition system.) 

I'm not sure whether that would work as a means of social control, or whether it would (a'la Battle of Britain) just steel the civilians' resolve more than it would break it.  The V-1 and V-2 were essentially untargeted weapons.  If mostly (there's always going to be some room for error) "bad guys" got zotted by the Eye in the Sky, the civilian population underneath the Eyes might grudgingly tolerate it.