Re: Japanese Defence Minister: Helicopter & DDG "locked on" by Chinese Frigates' Ra
I admit guilty of "foundationlessness" if that's a understandable word. I really do not have any reason or evidance to support a assertion that a clash between China and western powers are inevitable.
But the question I want to raise is that when are wars reasonable? What sense does systematic mass-murder really make? what purpose do they serve? If you have never lived in this world and is given a-priori knowlege about physical laws and human morality, would you predict something like wars been going on throughout our history? Had wars been really understood by anthropologist? economist? historians? how about psychologist?
War is a mystery. You cannot predict it on a rational basis and I'm not trying to do it.
But doing the opposite is equally unfeasible. I mean predicting peace and inventing unreal reasons for it. There is a recent book which I forgot the title and the author that claims we are living in the most peaceful time in human histroy by ploting the death rate of humans from all violent causes over our histroy. The author concluded that humans are stepping away from violence. That war would be one day be seen as a growing pain of civilization in its infancy, a black dot on human history.
The way I think is that humans are violent by nature. Humans in natural states were killing each other all the time. We don't need a good reason for war, what we need is a good reason for peace and that reason had better be very damn good.
I think the reason that we had peace(largely) is beacuse a very powerful nation (U.S.) and a coalition (NATO) had eastablished a world order that no one outside of them had any real chance to usurp. This equilibrum of intersted and power had arrested the world in an forced armstice that except a few outcast(N.Korea/Iran/Cuba etc), everybody fell in line. It's akin a school or a gang or a society of monkeys really. Once a powerful chief took place, there is an apparence of peace.
But behind this peaceful apparence there is a reality so complex that on one can really understand. In this reality, you would find resentment, envy, ego, perversion, self-uncertainty, vengeance, mob-identity, fantacy, zeal etc. that all rolls into a murderous mass that we call madness. Rationality is simple. Madness is complex. We don't understand madness at all and like to pretend it doesn't exist.
We assume the current order we see is the result of reasonality. What if the reverse is true? that we are only willing to be resonable when there is a clear sense of order. And when that order erode, when it is less certain who is in charge and who will be in charge, we decend into this complex partern of behavior that is madness and all hell break loose.
That's what I see in the ongoing dispute on Diaoyu and SCS. Those disputes were not created yesteryear or the year before that or the year before that. They were created a looooong time ago but they never came to boil. They were the undercurrent beneath the apparence of peace created by a powerful order. Why do they surface now? Had China suddenly become ambitious? China had alway been ambitious. Had Japan suddenly grew tired of its mantra of "peace"? Japan was never about peace. The only difference is that right now, noone bother to hide themsalves anymore, it all comes to the open. This is a sign. A sign that China read and Japan read and rest of school read as well. This sign says: the headmaster is leaving.
