To be fair, war is actually a lot like gambling, most of the time it is boring sameness run through with a constant low level anxiety and then when something changes it happens abruptly with no warning. The difference is that when the unusual punctuates the boredom and you win in gambling you get money but when the jackpot sounds on the slot machine of war and something unexpected happens it usually means you are about to die.
It isn’t gambling for the rich though, more like the big loud distraction (that happens to kill lots of people) put on to distract everybody else from them robbing us all blind (on both sides of whatever war you can imagine).
Only if the rich people stay out of the game. Unfortunately for them, robbing people for all they're worth results in instability, preventing them from staying out of the game. They get complacent and assume war won't affect them, but because they have no restraint, they create conditions for war at home.
Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.
Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1
