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Comment by Pica_soO | Hacker News Reader

I do no longer think that people actually learn from history. They do so if they percieve to gain a advantage from that, but the advantage of something "normal" like peace and prosperity in europe, is only visible in hindsight.

I think, people must be vaccinated against radicalism, again and again, by experiencing the outcomes for themselves.

If you are discriminated and robbed in your favorite online game, for no other reason then who you are or your name- without any success when appealing to the "state", you begin to understand what it is like to have been a jew in europe.

Another difficult fact remains- only the prosperity of the past and the nuclear weapons kept these dark tides at bay.

The politics, the memorials and the activism did & do nothing.

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> If you are discriminated and robbed in your favorite online game, for no other reason then who you are or your name- without any success when appealing to the "state", you begin to understand what it is like to have been a jew in europe.

What you are describing is frustration about one’s presumed entitlement with regards to a hobby.

The world is not just and no government is perfect, learning that in a video game seems like a nice, soft way to learn an important lesson.

It is not similar to trying to live in a country that has a policy of trying to exterminate you. One could not log out of Nazi germany or simply get a new hobby, Jewish people struggled to get food & resources for their families without getting disappeared to a death camp.

I hope you're wrong. Truly, redicliously incorrect. I fear you're right, or at least that you need to have a family member who was hurt by war to appreciate peace. I think the world's current swerve towards extremeism might be caused by the WW2 generation passing away and their children moving into retirement. Maybe in just one more generation we'll have all forgotten the horror and be ready for round 3.

Well if that’s true the learning curve will be so steep as to resemble a cliff. I’m not usually a nuclear war alarmist, given that all players stand to lose, but which country capable of world war will lose gracefully without nuking someone? China? Russia? The USA? UK? It’s a bit long in the tooth, but I think Einstein was right.

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Something I find interesting about WW1 was that it was preceded by a long period of general peace. During that period, we had been in the steep part of the industrial revolution's S-curve. Modern nation states had been solidifying their centralized power. The world was globalized and war was unthinkable.

Once war broke out, the participating governments seemed shocked at their new found power to wage total war, through their industrial economies, their rapidly expanding populations, and their amplified political power.

If such an unthinkable war were to break out today, our knowledge of our destructive capability is 70 years out of date. Who knows what atrocities we might accomplish.

War wasn't that unthinkable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War

They already feature such typical WW1 elements like machine guns, barbed wire, and frontal assaults on entrenched enemy positions (with the associated carnage).

Something on the scale of WW1 was considered unthinkable by many even so. And they had good reasons to believe it, because if you looked at the numbers, it simply didn't make sense - even in the best case, the material gains for the victors would be dwarfed by economic losses, mostly because of how involved international trade was between all the potential opponents.

There was a book, published 5 yeas before WW1, that argued that exact point. It wasn't obscure, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

These days, I hear very similar points - "China doesn't need a war with US, because US is its biggest export market", or, say, "Europe doesn't need a war with Russia, because it depends on Russian gas"...

This sort of out-of-date knowledge of war fighting capabilities is what led to millions of men dying in trenches in WW1.

Consider, for instance, that over fifty million artillery rounds were fired during the Battle of the Somme alone. That’s a level of warfare unprecedented at the time - it required an industrial economy just to produce that much ordnance, not to mention a railways to move them to the front.

No one prior to ww1 would have conceived of warfare on that scale. Now, just imagine what kind of warfare we’re capable of today, that we haven’t even thought of yet?

I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but that is a terrible way to say it. On the face of it, no experience you have in an online game comes close to being rounded up and shot in the neck, or sent to a KZ/VZ. Not. Even. Close. It belittles the nightmare of Nazi Germany to compare the lives of people slated for extermination with the experience of having a bad time playing a game. I would strongly urge you to find a better way to express what I think you were trying to say about marginalization and discrimination in a way that doesn’t make a mockery of your own point.

> I think, people must be vaccinated against radicalism, again and again, by experiencing the outcomes for themselves.

but then they'll have autism.

seriously though - our grandfathers' tragedies are just political fodder at this point and that's extremely sad. the proud nationalists think that their nations somehow won the war, when in truth they just lost a bit less than nazi germany. in case of Poland, turns out that being on the victorious side didn't really matter much, except perhaps that the goverment can now say that we won the war and thus now we, the grandchildren, deserve more than them, their grandchildren.

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