alt Hacker News> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda
Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.
Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.
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I for one am happy the US is not being as hypocritical as to call its military department the Department of Defense anymore. The US has initiated or participated directly in many, many wars since the UN was founded, and none of them were in self defense - no country on Earth would be foolish enough to attack the US (arguably, Al-Kaeda did it, but they're not a country and Afghanistan was essentially scapegoated). Yet, we have a long list of conflicts the US either started outright, or entered on its own volition for reasons that just can't be called self-defense by any sane person: Korea (1950), Vietnam (1960s and 1970s), Libya (1980s), Iraq and Balkans (1990s), Afghanistan (2000s), Syria + Iraq + Libya (2010s) and now Iran. Not to mention the many CIA-led regime changes it instigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
The millions of deaths are still happening, they just aren't our boys so we were all cool with it.