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War Is Hell: Difference between revisions
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And finally, we live in an era where even ordinary people can write poems. Past societies tended to disdain slaves along with "the common folk" and only recorded the way they lived in general terms. War has probably always been nasty for poor people: When armies are small and aristocratic, the noblemen trample all over your fields, ruining your crops; when they're large, you have to leave your farm or shop, potentially leaving your family without support, to pick up a spear and some pathetic armor and join the army, or perhaps get in the galleys and row, or [[Made a Slave]]...and still, armies trample all over your crops, except when they steal them. These opinions would not be found very often in pre-modern writings, [[Written by the Winners|because the people who held them neither knew how to write nor knew anyone who did and would care to listen]]; today, these stories get picked up fast.
This doesn't necessarily discredit war or render it obsolete. If anything, this trope has helped promote justifications of conflict along the lines of it being either a "[[Necessarily Evil]]" or an undesirable, last-ditch option when more peaceful means fail. In addition, [[Irony|paradoxically and in one of the most confounding ironies known to man]], it's been argued that war in some sense ''has'' been [http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-the-long-run-wars-make-us-safer-and-richer/2014/04/25/a4207660-c965-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html good for something]: namely helping make larger, stable and more peaceful societies possible while reducing the risk of violence over time, and thus ''less'' war.
May overlap with, but not to be confused with, [[Hell Is War]]. Contrast [[War Is Glorious]], which is not mutually exclusive with '''War Is Hell''', especially when the audience [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|gets a kick out of seeing people kill each other, no matter how ugly or condemning the work is]]. See also [[Armies Are Evil]] (highly negative takes on the military),
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