Kino's Journey: A Peaceful Land

[Thebestoftherest]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/anime/kinosjourney12.php

I do like how their no heroes there, makes a good anti war story.

[Dargaron]

If the villagers truly believed what the custodian said, the only rational conclusion would be that the *ideal* outcome is that both nations wipe each other out to a one. Just as the few must sacrifice for the many, the present generation would likewise be duty-bound to make the same sacrifice in order to forestall future suffering on all of their descendants. After all, the present population is a finite number: their potential descendants are not. What could be more virtuous than the few sacrificing themselves to absolve an infinitude of any and all suffering?

Of course, the justification is horse-excrement, so none of this mutual genocide is strictly necessary. But only blatant self-interest keeps that from being so.

[Mecha82]

You know as I am far bigger Battletech geek than i am Star Trek geek first thing that came to my mind was Ares Convention from Battletech and how it was taken to use just so that nations of Inner Sphere could continue waging war without risk of losing all remaining technology. Thus rather than ending warfare they chose to limit it instead.

[TGLS]

For whatever reason, I consider this the quintessential episode of Kino's Journey. An endless war that exists for social stability is real easy to remember and explain. The plot (Kino arrives, sees the war, leaves, then meets the populace) is easy to remember.

[Riedquat]

The premise of this seems a bit naive. Wars happen when someone is prepared to go to that length to get something and someone is prepared to go to the same length to stop them, not a substitute for some game with a "you won this time, jolly good show, here's the trophy, same time again next year." If both sides are prepared to accept that then they're prepared not to kill each other anyway.

[Formless One]

I don't fully agree... for one thing, the episode explains that the war was over territory in the mountains, and that has precedent in the real world (India and I believe Pakistan have continued to fight over a maintain range for decades now, but you don't hear about this conflict much in the west). But also, that doesn't account for how war was historically seen, especially in the 19'th century up until world war one. There are well known examples in the American Civil war where people literally went to the battlefields to picnic and watch events unfold like it was a bloody sports match. On one occasion, when the Union soldiers tried to retreat the pro-union picnickers actually tried to block and assault them because they thought they were being cowardly, not thinking that their own lives were in danger because bullets don't discriminate between soldiers and civilians! A lot of wars in that time could have been avoided, except for the fact that people didn't see them as something to be avoided at all costs, they saw them as a legitimate way of not only resolving national conflicts but also something to make young men into Real Men, an attitude that went all the way into the first world war.

Now in that time there was definitely an anti-war movement slowly building steam as people started to realize that modern weapons were making warfare more deadly and less humane, but it took the outright bloodfest of the first world war for that to truly sink into the public consciousness: war has changed, and with that change we cannot afford to go to war all the time like happened in the previous century. With modern machineguns and artillery, picnicking at a battlefield is suicide. And when young men go to war and never return, or return physically or mentally scarred from the sheer noise (or so it was believed before the modern theory of PTSD was formulated), suddenly it doesn't look like such a good way of conditioning young men into masculine icons. The first world war was a wake up call for the nations that the old perception of war was naive, and the second world war tore down the old moral theories of what could justify armed conflict with a new theory that a war of aggression could not be a just war. The development of the nuke also made full scale conflict look truly suicidal for all parties, and thus the only wars that seemed practical were proxy wars and asymmetrical wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Now again, this modern understanding of war has historical precedent. For instance, anyone who has read Sun Tzu's Art of War will know that he espouses a theory that war should only be for the defense of the state and that casualties should be minimized at all cost for both moral and practical reasons; but that's not a western work, and even in Asia where it was written Sun Tzu's moral justifications for war and avoiding war were often disregarded anyway. Plus, it could be misunderstood that casualties on the side of the Other are irrelevant (even though the book makes clear that they are not, as Sun Tzu valued defectors and encouraged turning the enemy's assets into your own). I think that episodes like A Taste of Armageddon and this episode of Kino's Journey are not attempts to strawman the causes of war, but rather are attacks on the theory of Limited War, showing them to be little more than an attempt to undermine our theory of Just War. According to Star Trek and Kino's Journey, aggression is not an innate fact of human behavior, even if it were based on a human instinct which is debatable. Both shows want to highlight that war is a choice, killing is a choice, and limited warfare is a choice to do an immoral thing simply because you feel helpless to change your situation. Kirk chose to take away the means of waging limited warfare, and thus revealed that those who were waging it were not actually helpless to end the war. Kino isn't in a position of power like Kirk (who could nuke the planet below with ease), and so merely calls out immorality when she sees it and is asked her opinion. But her actions still show the difference between someone who kills for a justifiable reason-- self defense-- and someone who kills out of moral cowardice and helplessness.

[Fianna]

Are there no herds of wild animals near these two countries? Why's their showboating war need to involve actual people as the victims?

[J!!]

maybe their leadership are vegans?

[Mecha82]

Possibly they twisted logic is that both sides do attrocities in war towards each other's civilian populace so they made competition about killing innocent people. Basically killing wild animals wouldn't be same as killing innocent people. Makes me think what they ould do after there is no one to kill anymore they sick competition. Maybe they go back to killing each other over that territory between them.

[Riedquat]

I don't fully agree... for one thing, the episode explains that the war was over territory in the mountains, and that has precedent in the real world (India and I believe Pakistan have continued to fight over a maintain range for decades now, but you don't hear about this conflict much in the west). But also, that doesn't account for how war was historically seen, especially in the 19'th century up until world war one. There are well known examples in the American Civil war ...

Not sure that that answers my criticism at all.

Whatever the reasons countries go to war it's still one side being prepared to kill to get what they want, and another side being prepared to kill to stop them. But the same thing can happen on all sorts of scales, but with pretty much the same motivation. An armed robber might kill to rob, and people will be prepared to kill to stop him. But if you get a shootout between robbers and police an alternative of "let's see who can go and kill the most bystanders instead" isn't going to cut it any more than "let's have a game of football to decide whether you'll be arrested or go free." Even if it happens the loser will still resort to violence if they were prepared to do so in the first place rather than just accept the outcome.