Comment by Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov:
"The good weather is over - and it hurts inside us, and it hurts inside us": I have a faint memory from childhood that there was a similar pop song. Although it talks about autumn and rain, it seems to me like some kind of small meta-anthem about the end of “happy Europe“. Because with the Russian quasi-imperial invasion of Ukraine, the good times ended for Europe, which had not seen a military conflict for 80 years except for the Yugoslav wars.
People get used to the good life and do not particularly appreciate it
By the way, as we know from Epicurus, when the cultural time is relatively cloudless (as in the early Hellenistic era, when it was the time of Alexander the Great's monstrous expansion, but life in the Greek hinterland was relatively good), people quickly get used to it and do not particularly appreciate it. Of course, Epicurus himself opposes Epictetus' stoicism and even fatalism (sooner or later, we will suffer), walking back and forth like some quarrelsome old woman and shouting "get ready", while at the same time warning with malicious pleasure that all this is a kind of lull and will not last very long. He himself has been somewhat unfairly remembered in human memory as a man of pleasure, while in fact he produced a doctrine according to which we should simply avoid suffering - if we can develop in ourselves a kind of mentality that would not be shaken by epityuchia, i.e. by fateful misfortunes.
Especially in Europe, this semi-Epicurean line continued for quite a long time - to the point where, generation after generation, we somehow forgot and turned our backs on great misfortunes, as well as great poverty. And the lessons of the two world wars were supposedly learned, but here we are faced with a completely new global narrative according to which Europe must arm itself, i.e. somehow become the newest player in the military race - because one of Trump's trump cards is to remove the NATO shield from France and Germany. (We in Bulgaria tend to trudge after events. And we are the luckiest nation in general, because we have not had a single soldier killed, if we don't count the heroes of Karbala.)
But the bigger question is: why eternal wars and a military complex? Because war is marketable (justified by the market). It has long been a product of two things - economic (the military industry itself cannot do without hot wars) and political (the basis for the existence of both authoritarian regimes like Putin's, and supposedly liberal ones - such as the military export of a sham democracy from the USA). Oops, there is a third, communicational - war, declared or not, is the best political PR on local soil. Look at Erdogan's Turkey, despite the current protests - one big foundation there has always (at least for 50 years) been the undeclared war against the Kurds.
War is the biggest possible business after drugs
All this, of course, I did not invent, but can be traced (in the case of the USA) to Thomas Schelling, Nobel laureate in economics. He was the first, back in the 1960s, to say that war is the biggest possible business after drugs. And he explained it simply, through economic competition – today it seems that all analysts are his “children”. His two most important books that I have read – “Strategy And Arms Control” and “Strategy Of Conflict” have brought us something magnificent, namely nuclear deterrence. That is, the tacit agreement that the two main (and already 6, May) nuclear powers know very well that the nuclear explosion itself will wipe out life on Earth.
But here is the big “but“: no one has ever understood and will never understand that there will be no conventional wars like the one in Ukraine. And that their true meaning is expansion, i.e. expansion not only of influence, but above all of business. Schelling himself, after his wonderful observation, was ashamed as Lyndon Johnson's advisor on Vietnam, because he did not foresee the impossibility of a good outcome specifically from this war. (Which, by the way, gave birth to the greatest ironic slogan – – “give Vietnam back to the Irish“.)
It would be stupid to explain to you why the very dawn of humanity is marked mostly by wars. At its most rudimentary level, this begins immediately after the primary division of labor, when hunters realize they are not gatherers and it occurs to them to kidnap the cows and rape the women of the neighboring human nest (or vice versa).
Compromise as an important tool
I have even read James Fearon's “Rationalist Explanation For War“. This is the man who asks himself why compromise has become a tool; and from there, what economic compromise is Putin ready for, because he is not an idiot and understands that the new imperial expansion must be financed somehow. Should we worry? No. No one in Russia thinks about us for a moment, nor does it actually finance parties. Today's Russia does not finance any parties – for them Bulgaria is no more than Latvia. But the lying around, in which we do not take a position against the Russian invasion, is over.
I will only remind you that in the most terrible conflicts - the First World War more or less provoked the Second. And the current fragile status quo is actually a huge economic war, the more important one. Because of this, the wars themselves - Ukraine, Gaza, Mali - have become a “bargaining model of war”, i.e. this is de facto international politics.
And since I mentioned Epicurus, who distinguishes dynamic from static pleasure - the Third World War is approaching, therefore: dynamic pleasure, as much as you can! Yes, the good times are over, and the poet and magnificent lyricist Bogomil Gudev did not even foresee how right he was.