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Anything can provoke war. Abundance of rare resources would rather make wars less likely than lack of resources and fighting over them.
by jakozaur 11y ago
Anything can provoke war.
Abundance of rare resources would rather make wars less likely than lack of resources and fighting over them.
- bcook 11y agoWhich country/organization has this so-called abundance? Do they freely share it out of the goodness of their heart?
- jakozaur 11y agoTo your point, there were many wars with gold/oil being the main motive. However, I hardly can remember any wars where coal resources was the main motive. Both are fossil fuels, but one is more precious than the other.
- bcook 11y agoI am very likely biased by my love of the sci-fi (dystopia) genre... :) Regardless, if there is something of worth, people will kill to have it.
- throwaway049 11y agoI think the threat to coal supplies from Poland was a significant factor (but not main motive) in Britain declaring war with Germany in 1939, but I can't find a reference to back this up.
- daemin 11y agoWell the Silesian region was a major (coal) mining centre in Poland, both before and after the war.
- arethuza 11y agoI've never heard that mentioned as a factor in the events leading up to WW2 and this graph suggests that the UK didn't even start importing coal in any quantities until the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:UK_Coal_Production.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_King...
- adrianN 11y agoUnless one group of people has an abundance of everything, I'd guess they would want to trade the stuff they have abundantly for something that they don't have. Generally, both parties in a trade gain something from it, no goodness of heart needed.
- bcook 11y agoSo, let's make an obvious analogy to the %1 and the 99% in our current capitalist world... it's working out fairly, yeah?
- lmm 11y agoWars are much rarer in/between wealthier countries than in/between poorer countries.
- kirykl 11y agoThe wealthier countries just use war by proxy
- jcranmer 11y agoSmall comfort to the victims of WWI, where enlightened individual would have told you just months before the war started that war between great powers just wasn't going to happen because they were too economically intertwined, the outcomes too unimaginably deadly, etc. The deadliest conflicts, in fact, do seem to be those that involve the two wealthiest great powers in a region who have far more to lose in war than they have to gain. Wealth may make wars rarer, but they make them far more deadly.
- lmm 11y agoStatistically wars have got less and less deadly. The most intense parts of WWI had something like 25% casualty rates, compared with 60% is typical for tribal warfare.