War has more benefit than harm

On loss of life, Pro's contention is that the population was restored, so all's fine and dandy! Well, if he read my point more carefully, he would have noticed that I spurned this sort of numbers evaluation from the outset. The mentality that we can reduce human lives to numbers and "recover" what we lose is the epitome of dehumanization. One human is replaced by another, just like we can always build new homes. Except that a human being is not a home. A human being has a personality, an identity all their own. To say that more children being born into the world thereafter and recovering the population is to treat those lives as interchangeable, a homogenized set of DNA with little to no purpose. By making this argument, Pro is essentially conceding not only that war does this, but that recovery from war expands upon this practice of dehumanization. But overall, this point is just absurd. Restoration of a population is not better than population growth. Pro can't just argue that the harms disappeared as a result of the population reaching its former apex when it could have been significantly higher by that point. Pro drops my second point entirely. This will factor into my rebuttal on his case, since this is essentially a massive turn on a major contention of his. Pro also drops my third contention. By doing so, and by acquiescing to the burdens I've elucidated in the round, Pro now has a mighty steep mountain to climb. So before I get into his points, let's reevaluate those burdens. Remember what I said in the first round, that he has to turn opinion. This isn't possible with a solely correlative argument. The reality that war is sometimes accompanied by beneficial outcomes doesn't mean that war was responsible for those outcomes. It is part of Pro's burden of proof to show a causative link between war and its benefits. But aside from that, he must also show that the benefits outweigh the harms. Therefore, it is not enough to, as he put it, show that "every war Is beneficial in one way or another. " He has to show that it is net positive, not just that it has some benefits. I will argue in this rebuttal that he has met neither of these burdens. He talks about relieving social tensions. First, this is an assertion without anything in the way of support. Second, it's blatantly illogical. The way to relieve tensions is to kill countless numbers of people? That tends to produce enmity, which leads to a cycle of violence. As I showed in my third contention, war creates this cycle. As such, each war begets a new war by riling up emotions and creating a strong desire for revenge. Third, I don't see why war is necessary. Pro essentially asserts that it must occur, but many civilizations throughout the history of the planet didn't go to war with one another despite tensions. Diplomacy, changes in trade relations, and international cooperation are very effective means for preventing conflict in the absence of war. Fourth, even if war is a certainty, that doesn't make it net beneficial. If it's a certain harm, then Pro is doing himself no favors with this point. He talks about the spread of technology, and how agriculture and domesticated animals have benefited conquered cultures in the long run. First, Pro provides absolutely no analysis as to how war specifically made this possible. He says that Europeans came to America and brought crops. This didn't require that they then go to war with the Native Americans, wiping out the vast majority of their population and culture in the process of passing on that knowledge. Second, this is much more easily and much more beneficially accomplished by establishing trade relations, something that doesn't require any conflict at all. Third, Pro even admits that the harms the Europeans brought through conflict were substantial, again only stating that this is balanced by their future prospering. I refer back to my points regarding dehumanization, as this is the same basic point. Pro essentially states that, since Christians benefited from the exchange, we should write off all the harms done to the Muslim and Jewish peoples as a result of those Crusades. It's not enough for Pro to prove that one side benefited marginally from a given conflict " he has to prove that the net outcome (that means both sides) was beneficial. In this case, one side benefited somewhat from something they could have received without war, losing untold numbers of people in the process (so, at best, a small win), while the other suffered egregiously without any benefit whatsoever. Pro talks about spreading culture. First off, this is something that's accomplished by migration and emigration to a much more beneficial extent. These things don't require war. Second, the type of spread Pro is discussing here is a forced one, meaning the subjugation of the ideas of one culture to another. This doesn't diversify ideas " if anything, it reduces that diversity by forcing various cultures to think like the imperialistic one that's conquering them. Third, simply spreading culture doesn't yield the benefits he talks about. That culture has to be integrated into the general community, treated with some measure of equality, and regarded with some interest. War does nothing of the sort, instead providing impetus to spurn these ideas and subjugate them to the national will. This, again, homogenizes attitudes, reducing diversity on a national scale. The idea of an "extreme jump" in technology is discussed, but this is no better warranted. First, these advancements most certainly don't require warfare. The impetus to pursue machines of war certainly increases, but Pro never adequately explains why the production of those specific items benefits the population at large. He tries to create a link between that advancement and industrialization in general, but simply doesn't get there. All of the increase in steel, fuel, building material and transportation services that occur under warfare are accounted for simply in the costs for continued warfare, and Pro never shows that these increases actually benefited the wider society directly. Second, these increases are net harmful. They did vast amounts of environmental damage, depleted necessary resources for a war effort rather than for domestic benefits, and went to the express purpose of killing tens of millions in WWII. Third, my second contention is a direct turn on this entire point. All of that money " the millions, billions and trillions spent in war efforts " could have been spent on education, medicine, infrastructure, civil services, imports, or anything within the common good. Any of these would have been more net beneficial. Every single aircraft, tank, ship, gun, round of ammunition and uniform, only made necessary by the presence of war, all things listed in Con's link, is a loss to domestic benefits. That's not to mention that the lives lost could all have played significant roles in expanding their individual economies, ballooning the resources that they would have had available. Lastly, he establishes that influenza is a thing of the past because of WWI. First, influenza is most certainly not cured. We have a vaccine that's only effective some of the time because the surface proteins continually mutate. As a result, it is still a big problem today. Second, the vaccine didn't come out until 1945. Third, war did not make it possible. Medical research did. Fourth, blood transfusions and new sterilizing techniques didn't result from WWI. In fact, the efforts by many scientists to create new and more destructive weapons likely held back much of this research. These became available as a result of pandemics generally being a problem, not due to the inordinate death toll of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in particular. I'll hand the debate back to Pro.