Wars Update: Myths To Die For

[Valin]

Strategy Page

January 4, 2021:

This is our annual summary of current war zones and an overview of where it is all heading. For several years we have been doing this once a year rather than twice to reflect the decline in the number and severity of wars since the 1990s. After this overview there is the alphabetical list of the war zones and a quick summary of how the local mayhem has been proceeding. Since we have been covering this sort of thing for over twenty years now there are many war zones that have gone quiet. We left most of those in summary, with a note that those wars had gone dormant, and maybe extinct. History shows that dormant is more common than extinct. Forever, or at least multi-century wars, are an ancient tradition.

Overall things are a lot more peaceful than the headlines or Internet chatter would have you believe. Like most major trends, world peace just kind of sneaked up on everyone and a lot of people have not noticed. Thanks to modern tech, mainly ubiquitous access to cell phones and the Internet, any mayhem anywhere on the planet easily becomes another news items for a global audience. The gives the impression of more violence when it is nothing more than unprecedented general access to violence that until recently was never broadcast worldwide and accompanied by video. That gives a false impression that has not been widely acknowledged. Historians, anthropologists and archeologists have found that centuries ago life was a lot more violent and we have long known that life spans were much shorter. This is still the case with surviving tribal and Stone Age cultures.

While there are still a few stone-age cultures left on the planet there are also several more advanced ones that are cursed with a culture of medieval mayhem. These have come to be called failed states and the most active ones, Somalia and Afghanistan, are often in the news. There are still a few imperial powers in the headlines. Most empires disappeared over the last two centuries but several have survived and are trying to bring back the good old days, if you are the emperor and his cronies, of power and glory. Empires are dictatorships because democracy and imperial behavior do not mix. The troublesome empires currently in the news include China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Islamic Caliphate. Turkey, Russia and Iran are technically democracies but for the moment the imperial spirit is ascendant and the main cause of problems with their neighbors.

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