Long-term impacts of no world wars?

Since Star Wars used aeronautical film as a backdrop pattern for the movement of space ships, this aspect of that movie would change. I think Lord of the Rings would be far enough into fantasy that it would change less. In the late forties, Hollywood discovered WW2 movies did not market as well as westerns. Without the world wars, battle-oriented stories would either be set in the past or would involve countries that were lesser developed. In the early 1900's, there was a thought process that the industrialized world had "outgrown" traditional wars, and whether that idea could linger for another century is questionable.
There's also the whole thing of the baddies in Star Wars being Stormtroopers fighting for a rather totalitarian Empire trying to crush liberty and democracy in a bid for intergalactic supremacy.

As for Lord of the Rings, The Fall of Gondolin was written in the barracks in 1917 and there's Mordor, described as "a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume" in the movies and, well, in the books...

"Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds..., as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows...."

Making a connection between that and No Man's Land is a bit of a low-hanging fruit, admittedly, but that particular description is evocative of artillery-scarred and poisoned wastelands riddled with countless bodies.

Though Tolkien did say "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author," it's fair to say that at least some of the imagery may have been inspired by what Tolkien witnessed during the war. And the loss of comrades and friends to all manners of horrific deaths (artillery, gunshot, disease, etc.) would doubtless have left its mark on pretty much any soldier for the rest of their lives. Writers do often search within themselves and use personal experiences to give life to their works, so I'd say that the Lord of the Rings would be pretty different if it even existed without Tolkien going off to war.
 
Without WW1 and the Russian Revolution (at least as we know it), I wonder what impact this would have on the militant communist movement, if they can still rise to power in any countries or not.
it is certainly possible that – since Marxism was spreading to less and less developed parts of Asia – that Communist revolution could have occurred first in China and/or India, since the factors that allowed Mao Zedong to rise to power were already present in pre-World War I China. For its part, India formed its Communist Party at the same time China did, and with Britain not weakened by World Wars it might have taken a more violent ideology like Communism to gain any form of independence.

Barrington Moore argued in his 1966 classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy that the preindustrial social structure of China was favourable to Stalinist revolution in a manner absent from the vast majority of Europe and the Western Hemisphere (Russia and the Balkans being the exceptions). I strongly presume what Moore says would apply to all of Indochina although Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy says nothing even about Vietnam where Communist revolution happened independent of Moscow and Beijing. Thus, Communist revolution only in Asia may be quite plausible, and if it occurred in India as well as China Communism might have been more popular in Tropical World colonies than it was.

In such a situation, it is quite plausible that Europe would have developed a powerful alliance with ultra-conservative Muslim monarchies in the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia formed as the “Third Saudi State” in 1926) and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East. At worst, this could have led to a mujahidin-type war on a much larger scale than Afghanistan, but I am extremely sceptical that would have been the result even if multiple independent Stalinist-type revolutions occurred in China and/or the Tropical World.
 
I am not saying without the war airplanes would develop slower I am just saying with the war development DIDNT slow down. And that spread is not a could indicator of development.
During the war they concentrated on developing WAR planes (fighters and bombers) and development went in that direction. Speed is useless in a war plane if it can’t take a hit or it can’t maneuver or it can’t hold up on the front lines. Vs pre war when speed was the holy grail that everyone was after at all costs.
Conversely after the war speed increased again for two reasons. First once again speed was (for some airplanes) the most important thing and they were designed for top speed at (almost) any cost. See the Gee Bee for example. But the other reason is that during the way they figured out a lot of important things such as what to do and what not to do as far as structure goes and basic aerodynamics and such. In effect the war years started off with the airplane being a temperamental beast that was very specialized and often dangerously limited in other areas. During the war design/development gave us airplanes (usually) that where much more “rounded” in that in general they were easier to maintain, held up better, could take some damage and usually were at least generally fly able by a typical pilot.
After the war the designers still had this knowledge and thus the aircraft were overall better, even the specialized aircraft were usually not so radically strange that they where unflyable or so structurally questionable that the wings folded up in a turn.
The extremes tended to be like the Gee Bee dangerous to fly but not to the level that sees things like the Christmas Bullet.

Without this time to make aircraft more “mature” for lack of a better term you will get a continuation of the very specialized design and will have to learn these lessons the hard way. And while aircraft are falling out of the sky learning this (and killing pilots and flight crews) they will get a bad reputation that will take them a bit of time to overcome, where as when a plane killed its pilot because of bad design during the war no one other then the designers and those imiadiatly involved payed attention. Because a handful of pilots getting killed is hardly noticeable in a war that sees thousands die in a single battle in a single day.
So the development cost of aircraft (in terms of human lives) was paid for and thus hidden by the war. The same way the monetary cost was paid for by governments vs private owners or companies.

So I don’t think that without the war we will see some magical time of aircraft development. The need will not be thier to push push push. The money will not be thier. And what money is thier will want to be “safer”. No airline or even airplane manufacturer can aford the cost of a failed design. And of course every death will be splashed across the papers and will see a bit of the reputation of the airplanes taking a hit.
BS. Removing the war doesn't remove national rivalries, so as soon as one nation develops airliners (and Russia was doing so in 1914), all the others will follow up and try to do better. Speed racers are a matter of personal prestige, airlines and airliners would be a matter of national prestige.
 
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