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War: What is it good for?
Friday, May 20th, 2005 by joel| War is a longstanding tradition among human beings. And while many would like to completely do away with it in all forms, it’s obviously a more complicated issue than that.
There are two fundamental myths about war. The first is that it is entirely avoidable. This oversimplifies things terribly. Have there been pointless and completely avoidable wars? Definitely, with the amount of warfare we’ve seen in the thousands of years of human history, I imagine we have racked up an impressive count of needless and avoidable wars. However a great many wars result from a series of smaller conflicts, or a misbalance of power. For this instance, I look no further than the example provided for us in everyone’s favorite war, World War 2. Hitler kept invading countries, and when we tried negotiation, he would agree to all terms, and then continue invading. This sort of bully-ism can be found in countless wars. The fact is that certain leaders will continue to take what they want unless someone stands up to them. The options are to either suffer in silence under their oppression, or to take them out with force. Either way people are going to suffer and die en-masse. The second myth is that war is glorious. This is perpetrated in story and myth and legend all over the place. And it kind of plays on the opposite sentimentality of those that say war is avoidable. There is a certain rugged aggression in human nature that looks at groups of men charging at one another on the battlefield and thrills to the idea of glorious battle for noble ideals and going down in a blaze of glory. That sort of thing. Giving up your life for the protection of a noble idea is certainly commendable when necessary. One could look to the words of Charles Dickens “It is a far, far greater thing I do now than I have ever done before,� or the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no man than this: that he give up his life for another.� So the positive things, the courage, the sacrifice, the honor do exist. But it does not make battle glorious. And for this I need only define the term glorious. It means uplifting. It means granting the deserved honor to a person or ideal. And warfare, even when necessary, does nothing but tear down and destroy. It may protect a person or an ideal, but that is not the same thing as lifting it up. War is an unfortunate result of the human condition. And unless we come up with some sort of cure for THAT, I don’t see it ever disappearing. |
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