Overview. Our concern here is with the issues and flashpoints leading to world wars, conflict, ongoing violent unrest. For illustrative battlefield sites, stories and photos, and places where events occurred that changed lives substantially over large areas, see World Wars I and II, Sites.

Other sites: Some of our sites look at our drives to impose and violate. Our fear of difference, insistence on forcing belief and ways of life, the human obsession with inflicting pain for enforcement or deterrence of something. And our inability to control our addiction to those drives, see Romania Road Ways, post on violence in countries' histories, not just Romania. See also the Prague child diarist from WWII, Petr Ginz, Places and Legacy, the post on sensitizing ourselves to violence. Then turn to Gypsies, Roma, examining the almost universal targeting of a multi-faceted group that wants to exist on its own, with its difference, doing what it needs to do to survive and out of prying view if possible. There is almost always a target group. What purpose does that serve within us.

Others of our sites look at how these drives, to impose and violate, are manipulated by people to serve political, historical and religious agendas. This is largely through shaping public perception through sales and rhetorical techniques that have been, for a long time, part of the Public Relations (PR), advertis ing and propaganda worlds. See Joy of Equivocating: Sales Techniques.

See also the sales techniques laid out by our own government in 1937 - summarized at Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda Critic site. Move around that site, to the home page, the detailed list of sales techniques.

Most of the photos in our sites come from our Europe Road Ways no-tour car trips, but we have additional photos here as well.

Labels - useful only for general, objective efforts at analysis, thinking, figuring. Misused as subjective weapons, or for any individual.

OUR SITE HERE:

Why bother with more photos and comments, when there is much out there already on wars. The personal side.

Learning for us takes involvement. All the senses. And what is more important to survival than heading off war. Books and film alone are not as useful for us as going there. We went to many places where battles were won and lost. We passed our hands over the actual war rolls, saw the headstones, spoke the names. We examined the exhibit photos, maps, the places. In some places, we heard the speeches, listened to Churchill, Hitler, anyone in any war. Some of those are available on the internet. How did they motivate their people, to such heights, or depths.

And we believe we found a dance, sometimes to the death, among these multiple partners:

Governments and Leaders; and the kinds of people they foster; and who foster in turn the governments. What kinds of governments dance with what kinds of leaders, and what kinds of people foster them: Governments take all forms: common good, dictatorships, militarist, democracies, empires. What choices were made by whom to spawn each type. What kind of marketing was needed to result in the form of government. How and why did people go along. Which governments really aim for the common good, whatever ideological forms and combinations that may require from time to time, and which use words as lures.

People - no firm lines or labels work for any individual. Here are focus characteristics, however, as discussed further at Hello, Fodder, Hello, Buyer - seeing how we lead ourselves deeper into conflict by consumer distractions, and absorbing sales talk; and at The Joy of Equivocating - how fear, uncertainty and doubt can be used to manipulate and sell ideologies and products; sell a certainty, or equivocate long enough, true or not. These are nothing new. What is new is the lack of attention paid. From elementary school on up.

The characteristics of groups here are elements we have in common, that then are more or less in each individual.

The extractor who takes; the "citizens" who balance (usually exhausted); the consumer-lifestylers who seek no interruption; the visionaries; and the fodder - the powerless, used, often kept that way for the purposes of others, usually seeking to rise up, often stomped. See Gypsies, Roma, for example. Or immigrants today, the "illegal" ones, still in flux. Or soldiers. See World Wars I and II, Places, Verdun post, the Mutiny of 1917. Sheep to the slaughter..

We also find "regular" individuals who lived then. These include Petr Ginz, who wrote a diary as a child in Prague 1941-1942; this child was forced into the fodder roles of the time. "Zoli," a novel about a gifted Gypsy poet, inspired by the real person Bronislawa Wajs, see Gypsies, Roma. We found different heads of state, whose visions and endgames clashed and detonated; failed and successful military planners; soldiers, and what happened to the people at home. There are the heroic, the oblivious, the takers and givers, and seekers. How do wars come about, and perpetuate.

Meet some of them as soldiers and the people at home, and some bits about the military planners (they didn't do enough in vital areas, points out the series), in the PBS series, "The War," by Ken Burns and Lynne Novick, see www.pbs.org/thewar/.

Why study war - the long view.

There must be a way to learn from history - to affect in a positive way the wars in progress, others looming, others feared. What are we as people doing to foster in our leaders peaceful alternatives. And if there is no such alternative, who decides, with what information, and backup. Citizens ask questions, demand accountability; consumers either buy it or walk away. There is a range, gray areas. Why and how did past efforts to avert wars fail. How did past wars start, what was their course, what was said to justify them, were those things true, what happened, who was motivated by what. And people: what roles did they accept, or take on.

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Concern: A consumer society is wide open to betrayal. Leaders know how to market. Mobilizing people takes wits, energy, rigid compartmentalizing of people and ideas, fogging and money. Governments can do all of that. There are endless variations of verbal and numerical gymnastics. It is up to regular folks to decide when and if it is fair game for anyone to cherry-pick, shape and spin information in order to persuade. Is there a time and place when spinning is not just free speech, but a betrayal of trust: to actively obstruct individuals from being able to make their own real choices, by withholding facts, misrepresenting, and forcing absolutes - in religion, politics, any area where some seek control over others.

Welcome, and we hope you are pleased with what you may learn from the photos, and comments and links at the sites offered.