Only if the rich people stay out of the game. Unfortunately for them, robbing people for all they're worth results in instability, preventing them from staying out of the game. They get complacent and assume war won't affect them, but because they have no restraint, they create conditions for war at home.

[–] dumpsterlid 3 points 5 months ago

Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.

Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1

https://theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war