In the SST forum, users are free to discuss philosophy, music, art, religion, sock colour, whatever. It's a haven from the madness of Bulldrek; alternately intellectual and mundane, this is where the controversy takes place.
If you haven't already gone out and bought/borrowed a copy of A History of Warfare by John Keegan, then Go. Now. This is an excellent book that conveys more about human nature and human history than simply what the title implies. It's very rare that I find anyone that I agree completely with, but Keegan could be writing and arguing my own thoughts on the "nature" of war and its place in society, both past and present, and he has a wealth of historical and detail knowledge that I lack.
History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons of both history and and of reportage to a special and separate category of 'otherness' which invalidates our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all.
In short, it is at the cultural level that Clausewitz's answer to his question, What is war?, is defective...Clausewitz was a man of his times, a child of the Enlightenment, a contemporary of the German Romantics, an intellectual, a practical reformer, a man of action, a critic of his society and a passionate believer in the necessity for it to change. He was a keen observer of the present and a devotee of the future. Where he failed was in seeing how deeply rooted he was in his own past, the past of the professional officer class of a centralized European state. Had his mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension - and it was already a very sophisticated min indeed - he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.
