With the ongoing war between US, Israel and Iran I have been thinking about wars a lot.
“War is wrong”. It’s a simple three word sentence. Almost too simple. It sounds like something a child would say. If you go and tell it too someone they would be like “Ok and?”. But for some reason our leaders who run the word don’t have the ability to understand this simple sentence.
When a war happens, both sides suffer. There is no winner. Both sides lose people, money, assets. War is a time of terror for citizens of both sides. Yet the media likes to portray war as being mutually exclusive, one side’s loss is the other’s victory. And people start to take sides, people start cheering for war, for destruction. These are good, moral people who would never harm a fellow human being, brainwashed by the media to cheer for something so harmful.
Ever since I was a child I found the concept of war very strange. A person killing another person is morally wrong by most moral frameworks. Not just morally wrong but one of the worst thing that a person can do. Yet when thousands of soldiers are kill thousands of other soldiers, we have collectively decide to agree that this is normal. Think about it for just a second with the clearest of your mind. HOW IS THAT NORMAL? How is literal murder on a mass systematic way normal just because the soldiers are wearing uniforms. What I hate even more is when these soldiers are reduced to just numbers and statistics by the media and the government. 15000 soldiers died out of 100000 and that’s considered a victory. 15000 lives, 15000 sons, 15000 husbands, 15000 fathers, how is that a victory by any meaningful measure?
Is war inevitable?
Now a lot of people who hear things like this will tell you that war is simply inevitable. They will give you reasons like complex geo-politics, economics, political power etc etc. And these are all valid reasons but it misses a point. These systems that govern war, the institutions, the leaders, the state, they are artificial constructs. There is nothing fundamental about human nature that makes war inevitable. There is nothing stopping these leaders to meet up and say “No more wars”. But these leaders benefit from wars. They don’t face the consequences that normal civilians have to face. They are sitting in a secure villa somewhere, wearing their suits and counting the number of dead soldiers. If it was up to the common people wars would have been a thing of the past because it is that bad and people know it. The emperor has no cloths, everyone just pretends otherwise.
So that’s it.