Is War Inevitable?
In mankind’s long history, peace has been ephemeral. The amount of time that peaceful existence has lasted and war has been totally absent, is miniscule on the time line. War must be considered as a conflict of violence between states or political communities. Individual aggression expressed as crime, or fighting and so on does not constitute war properly defined. Man is an aggressive animal. Is violence mankind’s natural inclination? Do we live for it, and do we thrive on it? In the Book of Proverbs: “only fools insist on quarreling.” Is this genetic? Environmental? Do we learn individual aggression? Or both? Do we, as a state made up of men, learn war as well? In his book, The Prince, Macchiavelli pronounces that peace is only “a breathing time” to be used to prepare for war by making plans and new contrivances. War between states is inevitable it appears.
Philosophers instruct us that man and the state are different. Man is moral while the state is not. The state exists for itself. The state must perpetuate itself under any and all circumstances. Whatever the action that it may take, it is necessary for its survival. It cannot afford to be moral and expect to exist. War is simply a political method like diplomacy. Diplomacy is merely a policy of peaceful war, where the state tries to gain ascendancy without violence. War is the violent settlement of disagreement between two or more political communities made up of men who also happen to have aggressive tendencies. War is about power and supremacy in controlling the other. Man, on the other hand, is moral and can make choices.
The state functions on the theory of realism. Contemporary political realism is a doctrine that charges that the state has no imperative to be moral. It must exist. It must do all that is necessary to exist. Diplomacy and war are just two facets of the same stone. Like political realism, “all is fair in love and war” for the state. There is no place for moral concepts like justice in affairs of state. We might explain the barbarism of WW I and II from such a statement. Hiroshima and death marches or the firebombing of Dresden, the Holocaust and concentration camps on all sides immediately come to mind. But human aggression also must be blamed in part for the widespread carnage produced by the various states in the name of continued existence.
War is inevitable because it is a tool of modern society through which states guarantee their continuation. Man adds to this by his own innate aggression, which in times of war for survival may rocket out of control.
May 8th, 2009 at 1:42 am
War, and violence for that matter, are human reactions to ignorance. Ignorance is a force that can never be fully eradicated from any species, so therefore war is something that can never be fully removed from a non-ascended species. Those who deny this fact are simply in denial of their own species’s shortcomings, if you cannot accept the human race as a whole, than you cannot accept the human race at all.
We as humans must accept this negative aspect of our species, and learn from what it does to our people. We cannot dwell on the prejudices of the past nor the hatred of today, we must ALL accept what has been and what now is as reality, so that we can ALL move on to the next step together. If you want to cling to hate, whether it’s expressing your own hate, or trying to point out the hate in others, then you will never be able to move beyond that ignorance.
People, go hit up a website that has uncensored videos of murders and deaths and executions, and you will see something very interesting when you peer into the empty skull of a dead human being. We all look different on the outside, but we’re all exactly the same on the inside. White bones, red blood, and pink flesh beneath our skin of whichever color.
Until we humans as a species can move beyond our petty and trivial differences, we will always be faced with hatred and war. You can either choose to live with it, or you can choose to move past it.
The choice is yours, no one can tell you how you should think or feel, and no one has the right to.