Saddam to Swing

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

What?

That is because democracies have been around for the past 250 years and that is it. Even then, that statement is false.

And during that 250 years, it's been the undemocracies starting the fights.

Romans were a democracy and the[y] tried to conquer the world.

The Empire began as the Roman Republic fell away. Rome's fighting with the Etruscans is all pretty murky, as records of that era were almost totally lost. No telling who was more of a republic, a democracy, or a whatever, not for sure.

America is a democracy and start shit with every dictator they don't like.

Oh those poor, abused dictators! How sad -- that it's necessary to lift their boots from humanity's collective neck!

The most influential democracies in human history have started numerous wars, I think your logic is a bit off.

I can't think of a single example of this in the last hundred years, and really, in the US case, only fights with Indian tribes (Indian being what Native Americans call other tribes, a usage that may as well be respected) in the century previous. One may cite the Confederate Constitution during 1861-65, I suppose -- but just how completely democratic was it? Slaveholding's still a big smirch.

I understand that history ALWAYS has its "yes, buts."

In the other pan of the balance, we have the not very democratic Serbians capping the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914, we have the not very democratic Japan invading China in 1935 et sequelae, and the never to be mistaken for democratic Falangists taking Spain in 1936 and Nazi Germany's, and Italy's, declaration of war of December 11, 1941.

Examples so large and so generally distributed, pierce, ought really to be given their due.