“Nothing much has changed”: 5,000 years of war, illustrated

[n2doc]

As a teenager growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s, design legend Seymour Chwast was struck by an 1918 essay by leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne called War is the Health of the State, a polemic against World War I. The essay, which Chwast says “showed that nations need wars to keep the economy going,” made an indelible impact on his life. “There must be another way to solve economic problems,” he recalls thinking at the time.

Chwast would go on to co-found Push Pin Studios with Edward Sorel, and Milton Glaser (designer of the I ? NY logo), which made a name for itself with its influential branding and commercial work in the 1960s and 1970s. But over the course of nearly 70 years, the Bronx-born graphic designer also used his drawing pen to wrestle with the theme of armed combat. In the process, Chwast, now 84, created a stockpile of anti-war posters, illustrations, infographics and even a handmade book that he self-published when he was 21—all rendered with characteristic wit in his expressive illustration style.



On April 26, Chwast will launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise $94,000 to print a new book on the subject, titled Seymour Chwast at War with War: An Illustrated Timeline of 5,000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks.

Anchored by 35 new pen-and-ink drawings and woodcuts, Chwast packs his lifelong interest in political conflicts into one continuous historical timeline, capturing five millennia of bloody combat, starting from 3300 BC. “The reason for a timeline was for me to show that through the years, nothing much has changed,” he explains. “You have the British fighting the French, fighting the Russians…then the countries change… Ultimately, these wars mean nothing but a way for kings and presidents to gain more power for themselves and sacrifice the troops.”

more

http://qz.com/664800/nothing-much-has-changed-5000-years-of-war-illustrated/

[malaise]

1. You mean

invest people's sons

Off to the greatest page

Rec

[abelenkpe]

2. So many believe WWII

Was responsible for the US economy improving and not FDRs policies or the New Deal. Makes it easier to deal away the New Deal.

[zentrum]

6. The point that's

…..always missed in this argument is that the war involved massive government investment and employed millions. All that could have happened without war, but the war effort was the only way the Repug congress would allow such a huge investment from the government.

Could have all gone into research, manufacturing, infrastructure, education.

Depression/recession always demands big government investment, not austerity.The War had to be fought because of Hitler but it was the same as government driven employment and manufacturing would have been.

[tecelote]

3. WAR IS PROFITABLE!

If there is profit to be had, America will have it.

Ethics and morals be damned.

[Octafish]

4. War is a Racket.'' -- Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War (1) a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

[Igel]

7. One of the earliest inhabited sites investigated by archeologists is

in N. Syria/S. Turkey. It dates back nearly 10k years, at the dawn of agriculture: The first good evidence of herds and evidence of intentionally sowing founder crops like emmer wheat or chickpeas.

The dominant archeological artifact found at the site, the earliest "city" excavated, is clay balls of a certain size. There are house foundations, wall foundations, the usual pieces of clay and carved rock. But numerically, those clay balls rule.

They were used in slings, the early man's mobile artillery unit.

Presumably by either herders whose lands were taken over by farmers--that seems unlikely, given that nomadic pastoralists typically don't form large groups--or a non-farmer pastoral-based village which suddenly realized that non-farming + slings entitled them to grain and pulse when they needed it. I guess it's possible that there was a large nomadic clan; such things have existed and might have been common.


Note that in a lot of early Mediterranean societies--nobody knows about this one, whether this holds--grain and such were the property of the state, with state-sponsored food preparers who were given rations. It kept in-house cooking to a minimum and gave the government a lot of authority. It gave towns authority over those rural bumpkins who might not realize how interdependent they "actually" were. Very seldom is a really strong government commensurate with transparency and democracy for very long. Perhaps 30 years, perhaps 50, perhaps 100.

[Auggie]

5. Already a legend, Seymour Chwast becomes even more so