An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

War

Forced labour and war: two aspects of one social system

Witnessing the catastrophe of the Second World War, many intellectuals have expressed their feelings of deep disillusion. Long-time civilization had collapsed before their eyes; the promised humane had been distorted into a cruel inferno.

Yet nothing was new except the killing speed. More than hundred-and-fifty armed conflicts have been registered in the twentieth century CE alone. In 1915 CE, all Armenians living in eastern Turkey – two million people - were deported to the deserts of Mesopotamia. On the road and on arrival they endured abuse, rape, enslaving and killing - only three hundred thousand managed to escape to Russia and survived. A civil war in Ukraine, following forced labour and deportation, lead to dislocation of hundreds of thousands of families, execution of tens of thousands of Kulaks, and eventually to death by starvation of six million people in 1930 CE. In Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia etc. etc., tens of millions were killed by warfare and its horrifying parasite: famine.

Each time the root cause was rivalry for space, for means of production or for any other scarce resource, while the immediate trigger was some calamity, intrusion, frustration or fear. All those conditions are effects of population pressure - but through the desire to win by numbers they also induce renewed population growth and a still higher probability of conflicts.

Careful reading of history reveals that the magnitude of a massacre is proportional to the population surplus, and that the means to achieve the numbers – both technical and ideological - are always found in time. When the world population reaches the expected ten million halfway the twenty first century CE, the mass slaughters we have seen until now will look like small accidents. Hitler was not a devil from hell, but from tradition, and it makes war even more appalling to realize how humanity has been haunted by this pandemic over and over again, while ideologists did everything to convince people that they are helpless against the brutal force of their own madness.

War is not an art or a respectable business. It is just one of the many ways in which humans afflict violence on each other. It stands in line with torture, child abuse and so on, and needs to be eradicated as yet another shameful social plague. Yet war happens because it is planned and prepared, and because society is organised and directed towards it. It is not a pity accident despite all measures taken; it is a well-planned enterprise. It is not an uncontrollable and unpredictable whirlwind killing its victims unexpectedly, it is the launch of a very delicate, studied, tested and adjusted machine of terror and destruction. It is not something started by one or more remote countries; it is the last thing all countries agree upon, no matter how much discordance on all other subjects.

There is a structural connection between forced labour and war: without forced labour, there is no hierarchy possible despising lower ranks as if they are disposable or living waste already, nor would there be orders possible up to suicide. Without the hierarchy of forced labour society, soldiers would not exist, and without industrial population pressure they would be useless.

In ancient and medieval times, as recently in Central Africa and Eastern Europe, soldiers are rewarded in booty. Only in war a man can steal and burn unpunished, and ill-treat victims without any moral restraint, including rape and murder, and even be honoured for it. Only by continuing such brutal crimes the military trade has escaped the confinement of prehistory and persists until today: this is the mark of Cain all soldiers have to bear.

Drugs and alcohol have always been used by armies to enforce their ‘courage’, while many ‘great strategist’ did no more than receive in audience the local frustrated courtiers and demoted executives, listened to their suggestions and accepted their situation maps, order some killing, install regents and tax collectors, and move further each time new grounds were offered to be plundered. If all went well the army grew naturally, as surviving enemies switched sides and chose for the lucrative adventure after their kin was molested and their household destroyed. The victor’s household grew proportionally, supplemented after each battle with fresh gold, treasures and women.

The goal of a military operation is always to overpower, plunder and destroy cities or settlements. Soldiers have their way abusing and killing citizens in the most horrendous way, after which the city is burned down and annihilated. Xenophon has Socrates, the Western champion of morally just thinking, explaining this to Euthydemus:

“Now suppose a man who has been elected general enslaves an unjust and hostile city, shall we say that he acts unjustly?”

“Oh no!”

“We shall say that his actions are just, shall we not?”

“Certainly.”

“And what if he deceives the enemy when at war?”

“That too is just.”

“And if he steals and plunders their goods, will not his actions be just?”

“Certainly” 293

The more gruesome the previous attack, the more efficient other cities’ spirit was broken beforehand. Many cities sent a delegation to the approaching army to surrender and plea for mercy at the risk of their own life: torturing and killing such a delegation was a statement more lucid than any other slaughter. Terror-and-mercy tactics are essential to warfare: when a conqueror feels that terror is sufficient, he might chose for booty unspoiled by fire and bloodstains, and have mercy on the citizens. Mercy - or grace - is the twin brother of terror: they are the two hands of ruthless warrior kings and war gods. As an important attribute of almighty force, it is found in Christianity as God’s Saving Grace, and in Islam as Allah the Merciful.

The sexual needs of soldiers have to be fulfilled. Already in the Bible a rationalization is wrought for the presence of harlots near the military camps of the Children of Israel. Before Jericho was destroyed, Joshua remembered that two spies had stayed with a prostitute called Rahab, who dwelled on the walls of the city:

Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, go into the harlot’s house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her. And the young men that were spies went in, and brought out Rahab, and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had; and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the camp of Israel.294

Saint Augustine thought it necessary to explain that women raped by soldiers remained innocent, even if their body had pleasure of it:

but as not only pain may be inflicted, but lust gratified on the body of another, whenever anything of this latter kind takes place, shame invades even a thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed, - shame, lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some assent of the will.295

Still during the Thirty Years War and even when Yugoslavia collapsed in the twentieth century CE, fighters were payd with the right to rape and plunder. Since 1977 CE, more than six hundred Kenyan women reported to be raped by British soldiers. No complaint was ever investigated, and the victims are still trying to obtain an independent investigation and financial support for raising their mixed-blood children.296 USA Military bases around the world are served by third world prostitutes, if necessary trafficked in from the poorest countries.297

Just War Doctrine and Judged War Doctrine

To start a war does not take months or years, but generations, and follows predictable patterns.

It always starts with a growing shortage of life necessities. Those necessities are primarily food, but include also movement, security, leisure, liberties... The only remedy at any stage, is to improve the balance between population and resources by means of sound and just politics.

At this stage, humanitarian measures like food distribution and refugee camps, however necessary, can slow down the further evolution, but can not divert it. Measures like armed occupation or downright repression might seem to bring respite, but are really rapid shortcuts to the violence that was feared. At this stage the real solution is still easy to carry through.

The next step is defined by the upcoming generation, in two ways: first, parents try to save their own children above the children of others, and will adapt an ideology for this goal. Secondly, when children become adolescents they will apply this ideology unrestricted.

In the following step, competitors use the growing number of accidents to dehumanize each other, because no warfare can be carried out efficiently if the enemy is regarded as an equal human. To make the imagery of two categories a genuine ideology, one needs to review religion, bias media, amplify or diminish accidental happenings, and recreate all kinds of historical heroism and rights. In a slow process families on both sides turn into dangerous monsters. A peaceful religion or the claim of democracy can not deviate a party from this course of action. On the contrary, such kind of pretensions assist in the dehumanizing of disbelievers, and so demonstrate their dishonesty.

Because the real issue is shortage, it is of no importance along which lines the parties are divided, as long as the other party is large enough to make a difference when chased from the resources, and as long as the own party is strong enough to chase them. Just as the biblical twelve tribes of Israel, most ethnic groups stem from fluky military coalitions. Physical traits are not basic to this process, but are created or stressed by it. Warring tribes used to paint their faces to make the difference, but an occasional trait already present can be even more handy. When resources ran dry on Easter Island, the small population split up in ‘long ears’ and ‘short ears’ to eliminate each other. Nazi scientists, armed with colour charts and measuring devices, spent much effort in search of fitting individuals to make a brand new ancient race. As the war was already going on for years, it seems that not the race needed a war, but that the war needed a race. In Rwanda the population was divided in Tutsis, ‘an ancient race of brave warriors’, and ‘submissive’ Hutus, before the mass killings began. The real issue was not ethnicity, but an exploding population on impoverished grounds.

The final step is the outburst of physical violence, clear and simple: civil war, revolution, genocide, terrorism, classical warfare - it can take all forms, but the aim is never a contest of armed forces, but the elimination of people plain and simple. This is the step at which the world community usually wakes up and, decades too late, tries to stop hostilities.

States can not be excused ever for deliberately heading to war over a long period of economic protectionism, political secrecy, international injustice, propaganda and deficient diplomacy.

An armed conflict with extra-terrestrials is the only imaginable scenario in which the attacked nations are blameless. Since such a threat is as big as the power of imagination, it is the ultimate eldorado for the arms industry and the military, who always chose price tags first, and subsequently invent enemies as required. Dr Carol Rosin, a former executive at Fairchild Industries and once spokeswoman for Werner Von Braun, believes hoaxes about extra-terrestrials are fostered in order to blow up military budgets. The militarization of space has already begun with the US ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’, also known as ‘Star Wars’, at $122 billion and counting, while no workable system is in sight.

Imagine that a native American soothsayer had foreseen the invasion by Europeans, and that the natives had decided to build up a defence. They would have needed central authority; enforce taxes; define probably inappropriate tactics against unimaginable invaders; produce possibly inadequate weaponry, to be abused by the own authority sooner or later. Even if they would have succeeded ever in setting up a kind of force matching the invaders, the outcome would not have been any better.

The arrival of wicked extra-terrestrials is hardly a realistic threat. The arrival of another trigger-happy fool in command of massive weaponry produced to counter such an invasion is a far more likely, and a far more dangerous hazard.

Just wars

The right of a state to go to war has been treated by famous authors like Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Grotius. They all agree on four basic rules, commonly referred to as the Just War Doctrine. The Just War Doctrine is generally accepted today. The first rule says that a state has the duty to defend its citizens; the second rule says that this defence is impossible without (at least the threat of) physical force; the third rule says that to harm innocent people is inevitable and thus acceptable; the fourth rule says that physical force be used within measure.

That only states have the right to start a war can only be inspired by the ancient belief in the semi-divine nature of kings. Scholars have hardly ever criticized this strange inheritance, while all observations point at a different reality. States rise and fall faster than trees. Most states today came out of a war against other states. In such situations the just war doctrine equals the law of the jungle: it is a rightful act to destroy a state and erect yours on its ruins - it is only wrong to lose the contest.

The pre-eminence of the state in the West is as irrational as the authority of religion in the Arab world, or the primacy of the household in the east. Today lethal weapons and ideologies are available everywhere. A few frustrated individuals can get together and call themselves an army, and call upon the Just War Doctrine with the same self decided righteousness as any ephemere state. No state – or any other organization - ever waged war without the announcement of a just cause. The Just War Doctrine, how fancy it might be, is nothing but an excuse for warfare plain and simple.

The Charter of the United Nations attempts to separate just from unjust wars, and tries to create an impartial body like the Security Council to judge conflicts. Unfortunately, this council only handles acute treaths, which make them always twenty or more years behind. Furthermore, an international security council can only be effective after the emergence of a democratic world community, and exactly the emergence of such a democratic world community will make any justification of warfare obsolete.

The first rule of the Just War Doctrine – the obligation of the state to defend its citizens - can only serve as a justification for warfare, if warfare is indeed the best way of defence. But it never was, and most probably never will be. The best security stems from long-time diplomacy, openness and international justice. If leaders ignore those conditions for decades, they should bear responsibility for the catastrophe they made inevitable. The obligation to defend their citizens is rather an excellent argument to hold governments accountable for the prevention of war.

The right of states to use violence is proclaimed for states in general, and is abused without restraint by malicious governments. The obligation however to secure citizens by openness, undermines depraved governments, and strengthens the honourable ones.

The second rule says that the right to defend citizens is meaningless without the option of physical force. This physical force can be defensive, offensive (for example pre-emptive) and even punitive, as defended by the Catholic church:

Catholic philosophy, therefore, concedes to the State the full natural right of war, whether defensive, as in case of another’s attack in force upon it; offensive (more properly, coercive), where it finds it necessary to take the initiative in the application of force; or punitive, in the infliction of punishment for evil done against itself or, in some determined cases, against others. International law views the punitive right of war with suspicion; but, thought it is open to wide abuse, its original existence under the natural law cannot well be disputed.298

If we witness an occasional street fight, we are appalled and complain about the deterioration of society, but when the whole nation goes at war, we support it as if war was a football match. Physical force is in all known societies the least common approach. Neighbours usually don’t fight over their differences, but try to talk or turn to the courts instead. The dreadfulness of warfare puts the duty on all governments to promote national and international prosperity, and to support the dignity of individuals everywhere. We live in a modern world where communication allows us to recognize potential conflicts many years beforehand. Hostile armies no longer pop up out of the blue, but governments often fail to anticipate conflicts with sound politics, and sometimes encourage hatred to win national popularity, or welcome war for potential gain.

The third rule – that it is inherently tolerable to inflict damage to innocent civilians - is certainly the most cynical.

Civilians are the weaker part of the enemy, and their agony, once it is acceptable by international law, is always a strong tactical opening. Although terrorism is the most eye-catching expression of those tactics, all armies apply them, and the loudly ventilated indignation towards the killing of civilians at random by the oppsoite party – either terrorists or armies - is hypocrisy from the lips of militarists. Whoever defends war as a solution, accepts willingly the slaughter and impairment of innocent civilians, and will not hesitate to calculate civilians in the strategic game.

Tens of millions of civilians died during the Second World War: the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shocking, not only because of the number of civilian casualties, but because it publicly demonstrated the disgusting nature of ‘the art of war’. Recently the industry and the military have made a lot of publicity about ‘precision bombs’, and claimed that high-technology weapons now reduce damage to civilians to a neglectable level. Yet, when those weapons were deployed over Baghdad during the Second Gulf War, their accuracy turned out to be fifty percent. Lucidly, ‘twin bombardments’ were started to make sure that each target was hit once on the average. Thus it was accepted that one random civilian setting was destroyed with everyone in it, for every ‘precision bomb’ that reached its target (which was possibly civilian too).

The Chinese Tao says: ‘thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes, and lean years follow a great war’. And indeed, the suffering following after the end of a war is always the worse. Families are destroyed; services and dwellings are ravaged; the economy is taken over by scum; people of all ages must live on with both physical and psychical mutilations, by far exceeding those inflicted to the better protected soldiers.

The only predictable outcome of war is the wreck of civilian life for decades or more, and new violence will spring from devastated societies like pus from an open wound.

The fourth rule of the Just War Doctrine – use force within measures of necessity and of proportion – is contrary to the nature of war, and is always claimed but never applied. This rule only provides the Just War Doctrine an aura of moderation and sensibility. Before a war is over, it is impossible to know the measure of necessary force. In the classical theory, a war is even the measurement of those forces.

A police force is usually better armed than occasional wrongdoers, and can use arms with constraint. But armies are blindfolded in this regard, and can not afford to inflict less damage and terror to an enemy than luck and finances allow, or they would deliberately grant their enemy the chance to retaliate.

Fighting parties can not restrict their force wilfully for other than tactical reasons, because they don’t know the balance of strengths with sufficient certainty. But the wish to overcome forces all parties to deploy all power they can afford, with no restriction but tactical calculations.

The Just War Doctrine has never held back an aggressor. It has however offered neatly arranged pretexts to all parties involved in warfare, either right or wrong, from the Roman Emperors to recent dictators. As long as there is no agreed mediator or supervising body which can judge when citizens are endangered and whether war is the only appropriate remedy left, those rights and duties are only pretexts for both rightful and repressive governments. The Just War Doctrine gives an excuse to the wrong and withholds the just, and this insight in its turn will encourage the just to surmount the wrong in malice – all in the name of justice.

When the contenders have taken their positions on the battle field, a few moments away from pulling the trigger, it is too late to start a theoretical discussion to decide which of both has or has no right to shoot. Pacifist should refuse to be dragged in such a fake discussion far beyond the boundaries of ethics, and just let them both fire away. All what can be done then is to deplore another gruesome catastrophe, hitting all sides, and on all sides hurting the weakest more - and that it is too late to stop it.

The real reasonable concern of peace loving people is to timely avoid the dead end conditions under which the dumber part of populations can be persuaded by belligerent propaganda to bring the highest sacrifice.

Judged Wars

If governments and other representative groups really value their people, they should rather adapt a Judged War Doctrine. Both doctrines have for goal the well-being of the population. But a Judged War Doctrine could accomplish what the Just War Doctrine can not.

A Judged War Doctrine should say that when people suffer serious damage, responsibility for this damage should always be checked judicially. It is unacceptable that someone stealing a car is tried, while a whole city can be destroyed without at least considering if anyone is responsible. Why should those in charge not undergo a ludicrously small fraction of the pressure they believe innocent civilians must accept for the sake of the just cause? Is lthe risk of life-emprisonment for someone responsible not a more kind outcome than the risk to die innocent in an explosion? Exactly those who believe they fight just wars, should be willing to come forward and defend their case, and those who had no other choice but war should go free. But the leaders who during past decades have shut off other choices by conducting uneven politics, should be held responsible for the outcome they instigated. The probe into accountabilities spans the hundred years-horizon, and involves long term diplomacy, openness and international justice.

If this way of thinking gets firm ground, warfare will decrease at the benefit of less misery and more economical prosperity. If, for example, colonialism had been carried out with respect and justice towards local populations, and just trade had been used instead of plunder, many conflicts of today would hardly have existed – and the same goes for all civilizations of the past.

Only during the last century emerged a worldwide community with multifaceted historical insight, and only during the last decennium of that century communication networks emerged to spread and strengthen those insights. Half a century ago humanity became aware of its power, for the first time in history, to destroy itself completely. Today we must become aware that we have, for the first time in history, the power to put a definitive end to the madness of violence.

Sociology of war

In an armed conflict there often is a right and a wrong side. Hitler for one was clearly at the wrong side. But history unfolds in a certain direction because certain conditions prevail. On many occasions the catastrophe could have been avoided by the right side as well as by the wrong side, and it is a crime not to prevent a catastrophe when one has the possibility. Even when there is a right and a wrong side, all sides have the responsibility to avoid the blind disaster of war.

A decade before the rise of Hitler, a more humane peace settlement could have made the German population less frustrated, and Hitler might have remained another unknown psychopath. But the cancer of nationalism and militarism had infested the entire West for over a century when the tumour of Nazism burst open. A century before Hitler, the Atlantic civilization could have rejected the pseudo-scientific theory of racism, which was the essential prelude to Nazism. A millennium ago, intolerance could have failed to infest Europe; and ten thousand years ago, forced labour could not have been the response to climatic change, and the planet would not have taken the road to the destruction on which intolerance, racism and Nazism were stepping stones.

Again, the Atlantic civilization is only as an example here. The same type of conditions has lead to tribal warfare and civilization clashes everywhere.

While the globalization of all aspects of human society proceeds, it becomes ever more visible and ever more upsetting that all parties have moments of choice between coexistence and terror. And every individual has some responsibility for the future, if only by speaking up for sensibility. Also this goes for the right side and the for wrong side.

Victims

Wars are not between armies. It would make no sense, and bring no benefit, to raise armies with the only purpose to engage in battle with other armies as in a contest of fighting-cocks or wrestlers.299 The primary and final targets of military operations are civil, either as humans to be eliminated or submitted, or as industry and riches to be destroyed or taken over. To devastate civilian infrastructure by eliminating the operating civilians but preserve installations, is a primary goal in warfare. Despite the Geneva Convention of 1949 CE and many deceitful statements, no country in conflict can afford to omit this goal. Singular weapons to serve this purpose - such as fragmentation bombs and neutron bombs - have been ordered by governments on all sides and marketed wherever demand was calling.

To outflank the other army while going for civil goals is an important element of strategy. Only in order to get hold of civilian targets, and not without careful study of alternatives, an army will engage in direct confrontation with the armed force of the enemy. This is plain military logic: since all military academies agree that the enemy must be attacked in its weakest spot, the path to victory always walks over civilian corpses. In this aspect, there is no difference between the right and the wrong party, or between offence and defence. Britain, for instance, did not fight on the wrong side in 1942 CE, and its motives were defensive; yet the Royal Air Force engaged in a total war on German civilians as a plain strategic choice. Troy was not a military camp, but a living city, as were Dresden, Antwerp, London, Hiroshima, Baghdad.

Rich countries fight wars in poor countries. Exception made for an occasional bomb, ‘collateral damage’ is for remote bunglers. Soldiers sent out by rich countries are fierce terminators, not to be hurt themselves. There is an astonishing discrepancy between protection of the soldiers compared to the protection of civilians. A man is mobilized to supposedly protect his family; yet he leaves his unshielded family behind in the line of fire, while he himself is sheltered in fortified hideouts, given a protective outfit, means of communication, armoured transport and sophisticated arms. Invulnerable shields and armour define the warrior, from Homer to the latest military vehicles. Shattered houses, smoking cities and trampled down women and children are his track. A UN report says that

more people are killed and injured by domestic forces than by foreign military intervention. It is important to note that 90 percent of war casualties today are civilians (in contrast to the 90 percent casualties who were military at the beginning of the Twentieth Century - Twentieth Century war has become civilianized rather than civilized).300

In the First World War, the civilian casualties were estimated to match the military, amounting to thirteen million. But those numbers are distorted. Because the industrialization of forced labour and war escalate together, conscription boosted to industrialize the human suicide machine. During the First World War the generals and politicians were never the less surprised by the disastrous power of the industrial methods they had adopted, and they drafted civilian boys in unlimited numbers to be fed to the iron Moloch of modern weaponry.

In the Second World War things were better organised: the civilian casualties amounted to twice the fifteen million on the battlefield. In the Korean War, four million civilians died, three times the number of soldiers. Five million civilians died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, compared to less than one million soldiers altogether. In the one last decade of the twentieth century, more than two million children died in war, a multiple of the number of soldiers killed. Today hundreds of thousands civilians die each year, while the loss of one Western soldier, despite his firm image in movies and television shows, is perceived as a terrible accident.

Governments and other representatives, generals and strategists go into hiding themselves and consider casualties of war unimportant: they never published one book on the subject, while hundreds of glorifying books about the art and bravery of warfare were printed without one chapter, many not even one paragraph or an hint on the number of civilians killed or maimed. It is as if no reference to mortality would be found in a study book on cancer: it is evading a central theme and a major concern. Ever since von Clausewitz books on wars are best-sellers, not because they explain war, but because their stunning absence of human reality feeds escapism. Clearly, their authors seldom come across the killing fields.

Bombings on Iraqi shelters and convoys during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 CE took tens of thousands civilian lives. Colin Powell, the general in charge and a family man with a promising future, answered to a reporter that civil casualties were ‘not really a number I’m terribly interested in’.

Big people

In sociology of war, next to the victims come the settled rank of men and women of distinction: policy-makers, ideologists, industrialists and military leaders. Those categories need to hold war inevitable and justified, even at the cost of lives (not theirs), in order to ensure their status and wealth. Their most important justification is, that in other countries people like themselves express the same justification.

One video-tape shows Bin Laden joking about the death of his own followers in the attack on New York in 2001 CE, because most believed they were on an hijack they could survive. Such appalling images are emblematic for any country where leaders send stupid bunglers into death with the cheap lies that they are valued and respected and, looking down at their agony with a cynic sneer, count their own gain in prestige, power or money.

When a leader decides to go to war, he has assessed how many soldiers and how many civilians will die, and has considered the cause worthy of their sacrifice. Yet they would never give the order to attack if they knew that their selves or their kin would fall victim. It is appalling how again and again people accept political leaders preaching the necessity of war, patriotism and suffering, while the very same leaders disappear in secret hiding places when the heat is on.

It has been suggested that political leaders should prove the sincerity of their tears for the fallen heroes and their eloquent defence of patriotism by donating all salary above the pension of a private soldier’s widow to revalidation clinics. But the widow is in a sense a naïve victim, while it was the leaders’ responsibility to prevent war like any other predictable but avoidable catastrophe. They are at least responsible for neglecting preventive actions in the field of international diplomacy, justice and cooperation. They should not be offered any pension, but should be brought to trial just like the management of an airline company which neglected precautions to prevent a crash.

Ever more industrial branches are involved in the development of ever more sophisticated killing machines. As a result of their trade, common people loose their houses and goods, and are left behind praying for nothing else but to survive in misery. Though weapon industries claim to enhance the security of their fellow citizens, they never hesitated to sell to whatever client would pay the best price, and nobody knows who will be friend or enemy tomorrow.

General Motors and IBM contributed to the equipment of the Nazi German army, and in full cold war the USSR sold components to the US for their nuclear missiles. Like manufacturers of tobacco and breast-implants, weapon manufacturers should be convicted to pay proper compensation for the physical and moral suffering, and the economical damage to civilians and other innocent victims of their merchandise. Unfortunately the opposite happens: GM and IBM both received compensation after their factories in Nazi Germany were bombed by the allied armies.301

Commanders, making speeches in battle dress about self-sacrifice at stand-up receptions and encampments, defending with passion that this specific war is so important that no sacrifice could ever be too big, should voluntarily prove that this sacrifice is not only expected from the lower ranks. They should cut off one of their digits each time one of their soldiers loses his life, as once was customary among mourning natives from the Americas to the Fiji Islands. Of course, in this scenario commanders will have to be replaced every twenty losses. One small finger can hardly be asked too much from people estimating and approving how many of their soldiers will be maimed and killed in the next operation, while those soldiers have placed their trust and hope in them in their greatest hardship. Is it not strange that we can seriously defend that a soldier should be ready to give his life, while we consider it a joke of bad taste that a commander should be ready to give a finger?

Observers

Other important players are intellectuals, reporters and other witnesses. It is in their power either to demonstrate the insanity of war, or to participate in propaganda. The line between both is not always obvious, and many times propaganda for either side is disguised as a protest against war or concern for its sufferers.

During the war against Iraq of 2003 CE, over six hundred news reporters were ‘embedded’ in the US army. If there is one thing of major interest to report from such a position, it can only be that the safest place during wartime is inside the fighting units, not among families in streets or in air-strike shelters.

At the beginning of this war news magazines endlessly depicted US soldiers waving at bunches of children, or quenching exhausted enemy soldiers. Whoever dared to show pictures of the injured and dying civilians of Baghdad was slandered and even murdered: in April 2002 CE U.S. troops opened fire on a Baghdad hotel where 150 journalists were staying, of which two died; at the same time a US air strike on the office of a television network killed one other journalist. On August 2003 CE a cameraman was shot while filming a US tank. Three other journalists were killed in a fire fight near Basra.

In the summer of 2003 CE, British TV channels had a little Iraqi boy sincerely thanking the British people. He was not thankful because they had illegally attacked his country; nor because of the ‘precision bombardments’ that destroyed his home in Baghdad where he was with his family; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his mother was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his father was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his only brother was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ he had lost both his arms beyond his elbows. The reason for his mind-baffling staged gratitude was that he was offered artificial limbs for free, designated by the overly excited presentator as ‘new arms’. Whoever is not sickened by the cynicism of such a performance, is likely to endure the coming decades.

The most important part observers of warfare can play lies in drawing the public’s attention to the fate of the victims, but the fighting parties usually control such information. If compassion towards victims is one-sided, the critique goes not to war itself, but enforces that side’s justification. Whoever deplores only the victims made by one party, lend a hand to the other party in making more victims. The same bias shines through when history is selectively searched for background information. Suddenly just one of the parties has a very old respectable culture, is peaceful by birth and generous by tradition, while the other side is illustrated with dug up events from the past to prove their rude, hostile and violent nature.

The strongest demonstration of the insanity of war is not based on neutrality or on sympathy for the righteous or the underdog, but in provoking compassion, in the most sensitive manner possible, with the suffering victims, and in reminding the audience that nobody is safeguarded from cruelty as long as there exist advocates of war on any site.

Little people

The most blameworthy partaker is the mediocre citizen shouting for war as if it were a rugby match, at his bar, on the streets and in gatherings, colouring his or her ordinary life with another’s misery, talking bold that he would give his blood for his country out of love or out of hate, cheering kinsmen into death with a hot sweating face and foam on his lips, agitated wildly if anyone dares to doubt his righteousness. He has a bumper sticker saying I support our boys or parades with cardboards to invigorate the soldiers up to jeopardy. He thinks ‘if they die, good for me’, and orders another beer or another tea.

But most of all I despise a mother shouting for war: she is the accomplice within the gates, horridly betraying the hope, life and love of which she was the magnificent keeper.

Nothing is sadder than a mother grieving for her child. The enchanting centre of her life turns into a distorted hump of meat; the light of day becomes a black corridor of pain; utmost love becomes a pointless cry in the void.

But sometimes this unbearable agony turns into a cause of hope and a ransom for peace. On a cemetery in Flanders stands a monument, depicting a mother and her husband grieving for their boy, killed with many others during the First World War. It is a self-portrait of Käthe Kollwitz, hacked out of solid granite over many years. Russian mothers protested week after week in Moscow, against their sons being sent to the battlefields in Afghanistan. Belgian mothers and wives of ten soldiers, killed in a peacekeeping mission, accused their officers for negligence. This was before a military court, contrary to the principle of equal justice. One charged officer defended his case with the following memorable words: if we can be brought before court each time soldiers die, it will soon become impossible to fight wars.

Every person that will be killed or mutilated in the next war, from the smallest baby to the oldest man or woman, has a face, a name, a past, expectations. Imagine that a powerful computer would calculate beforehand the identity of the victims of the next war and when, where and how they will be killed or impaired. Television broadcast companies would trace them to sign exclusive stage contracts, and soon popular reality shows would present a mother hugging one of her kids, couples sweating with their hands squeezed together, growing red spots on their whitening skin as the show continues, trying to keep up the brave talk, but some of them falling to pieces in prime time.

Most people believe that the sacrifice of soldiers and civilians should bravely be accepted as an inevitable burden of our nature. Unless those people are only speaking for their neighbour’s family, they must be considered the best suited candidates. An official register should keep the names of the brave who proclaimed that people should be willing to die for their country. Uncontrolled wars can then progressively be substituted by more refined international suicide contests. The country that can offer the most volunteers to be maimed and killed by the other side then wins the dispute. It is like war, but neater organized, and a more civilized spectacle: it could even be made an appealing prime time patriotic ceremony.

Soldiers

Next in sociology of war come the pitiful soldiers, praised with expensive words but living at minimum wages, socially disdained. They are celebrated for skill and courage and then thrown in the flames and disposed when damaged.

When the army of Alexander the Great crossed the Granicus river into the Persian Empire, it was countered by the rage of tribal horseman ‘pressing upon them,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘with loud and warlike outcries.’ Alexander lined up his infantry - a name derived from ‘infant’, child - in front of his own distinguished horsemen, who now only had to chase the infantry onto the enemy’s spear points. When the battle had sufficiently disordered and weakened the enemy, the cavalry did not hesitate to trample down this own infantry to take the booty and the honour.

Hailed as the cunning tactics of a genius, this episode only illustrates another step forward in the growing intensity of warfare. Since the battle of the Granicus, officers have evermore for task to drive the own foot-soldiers in the thick of the battle, remaining brave and safe themselves. The only violence expected from the officers in a modern army is violence towards their own subordinates: officers carry short-range handguns suitable to force or execute their own hesitating troops, when neither bravery nor fear suffice to keep them meek.302

When by accident soldiers come under fire instead of women and children, they naturally fall apart as every normal person under severe risk of either being killed in agony or mutilated for life. One out of ten soldiers under heavy fire wets his pants, one quarter vomits and another quarter loses control over their bowels. The most heard shout is not ‘fire’ but ‘mother’.303

A new illness called ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD for short) has been coined to deal with the severe psychological problems people, soldiers and others, suffer in the aftermath of war. It is meaningful that most of the attention goes to veterans, not to the local population. There exist, for example, many medical articles about PTSD among well protected British and American soldiers, but none whatsoever about PTSD among the millions of unprotected families of Baghdad who had to live through weeks of bombings, followed by ruthless artillery fights in their streets and houses.

The British Ministry of defence stated in the Parliament:

Figures from the 1991 Gulf War revealed that 20 per cent of returning servicemen and women from that conflict were diagnosed with psychological problems, including depression, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, anxiety disorders and alcohol and substance abuse. Figures also show that there is a prevalence of between 12 and 14 per cent of PTSD in soldiers who had fought in the last Gulf conflict.304

Also in Britain charity organizations declare that:

one in four homeless people are former members of the armed services. Thousands live rough or in sheltered accommodation. Many abuse drugs and alcohol. Returning armed services personnel often end up on the streets or with severe mental health problems. In a survey by the homeless charity Crisis of ex-service people staying in hostels and attending day centres in Central London, some 41 per cent were found to have spent time in prison.305

Around 650 Argentines were killed in the Falklands war, while more than 300 veterans committed suicide.306 A British veteran association claims that more veterans committed suicide after the war than the 250 that died in combat. A co-founder of the association, who lost a leg in the Falklands, stated to the BBC:

we have lost an average of 10 veterans per year since the conflict ended. That makes 200 veterans who have committed suicide and that is bound to be a conservative estimate. I am almost certain there will be dozens more that we do not know about and the figure is likely to be more than 255. 307

This number was indeed conservative: the Mental Health Foundation confirmed 329 cases. The same pattern is found in figures of the British Ministry of defense regarding the Gulf war, during which 24 soldiers died, while 107 committed suicide afterwards.308

Few people regard all this as an argument against warfare as such. It is rather an opportunity for the growing welfare branch to raise the budget. After the successful conditioning of soldiers to kill without hesitation, psychologists promise that, given the necessary funding, they will also make them feel good about it afterwards.

All this is rarely brought to the attention of brave soldiers learning the ‘art of war'. Higher officers are ignorant or deem it beneficial to keep such things silent. For instance Carl von Clausewitz, a nineteenth century author still highly esteemed in military and political circles today, draws a light-hearted picture of a battlefield, pointing at the flying bullets while wandering around, almost as a taxonomist observing butterflies passing by:

Let us accompany the novice to the battlefield. As we approach, the thunder of the cannon becoming plainer and plainer is soon followed by the howling of shot, which attracts the attention of the inexperienced. Balls begin to strike the ground close to us, before and behind. We hasten to the hill where stands the General and his numerous Staff. Here the close striking of the cannon balls and the bursting of shells is so frequent that the seriousness of life makes itself visible through the youthful picture of imagination. Suddenly some one known to us falls—a shell makes its way into the crowd and causes some involuntary movements; we begin to feel that we are no longer perfectly at ease and collected, even the bravest is at least to some degree confused. Now, a step further into the battle which is raging before us like a scene in a theatre, we get to the nearest General of Division; here ball follows ball, and the noise of our own guns increases the confusion. From the General of Division to the Brigadier. He a man of acknowledged bravery, keeps carefully behind a rising ground, a house, or a tree—a sure sign of increasing danger. [..] It is true that habit soon blunts such impressions; in half-an-hour we begin to be more or less indifferent to all that is going on around us …309

Despite the cool bravery depicted here, generals never install their quarter on the spot where shells and cannonballs fall most frequently. The habit of officers to call the battle a ‘theatre’ gives a better indication of their preferred position. While the battle is raging ‘before us like a scene in a theatre’ Clausewitz worries about emotions of the inexperienced, but not about injuries. Yet the ‘experienced’ soldier in this citation would, statistically speaking, be dead or maimed before he had the time to gather much experience. And if after half-an-hour he paid no attention to the cannon balls any more, as Von Clausewitz fantasises, he really did not stand a chance. Clearly this exceedingly appreciated work is nothing but a dangerous fabrication by a ghastly impostor.

More than ninety-five percent of the soldiers in any army are ‘normal’ people, ready to join the party and turn into waste by the faintest conditioning technique, while suicidal lunatics, sadists, the socially disturbed, neurotics and sexual perverts flourish in military structures, waiting for their chance in the anarchy of military operations.

But all soldiers share one conviction: it is not their decision who they kill, nor when, how or why. They can afflict the most horrendous pain to the innocent and fragile without considering or even knowing, because they do not think, their brain is proudly superfluous. They submit to orders or, occasionally, to instincts in order to let off steam. And in this whole impressive process, they perform the incredible tour de force of feeling blameless.

Another useful asset of soldiers is the particular form of cowardice called conformism. Isolated groups can influence individuals in their ranks to give in, even up to suicide. First those individuals are sacrificed who already were suicidal, disturbed or psychotic, and then each fatality adds to the pressure exerted on the next. Depending on the outcome of the conflict those people will be remembered as heroes or fools. Many surviving suicide-bombers or kamikaze pilots declared that they did not really act out of free will, but that the psychological pressure from their environment had left no choice but to play their part as expected.

The more ‘uniform’ a community, the stronger this conformist pressure becomes - that is why uniforms are so important. Armed forces are often isolated from normal society, while the pressure is still reinforced by naïve families and cheering patriots from the outside world. Pilots of one Japanese airbase summoned for suicide missions were given a form with the choice of volunteering ‘eager’ or ‘very eager’. All chose ‘eager’.

Practice of war and practice of peace

Non-violence is trying to achieve without violence what was pursued in a violent way before.

Non-violence has been the subject of farfetched theories, mostly put together by opponents to prove that it is antisocial to chose not to pound someone on the head. Most people who take part in none-violent action have a rather practical agenda: they use what seems the best suited way to put right a wrong. To them the question has nothing to do with moral purity or religious commands, nor with vegetarianism or ball-games.

For the majority of people who applied non-violence it is not metaphysics, but a course of action chosen as the best suited way to counter the problems at hand. The largest part of humanity has benefited from non-violent tactics during the twentieth century CE, and history might well have forgotten to put on record earlier events of the same nature. Deprived groups emancipated more and stronger by the exercise of non-violent action than ever before by violent resurrections or warfare. Examples are the emancipation of workers by means of unions, the liberation of women by persistent civil actions, the emancipation of homosexuals now on the way, the emancipation of Afro-Americans, the movements for freedom in Colonial India, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the USSR and the liberation of its satellites, changes in China etc.…

Non-violence regularly surpasses and corrects official institutions as a driving force towards direct democracy and modernity. It is inconsistent to praise democracy and at the same defile non-violence. It is remarkable that as a rule those populations which followed the strategy of non-violence reached progress and modernity, while regions that were drawn into armed conflicts ended up in endless outbursts of genocides, ravaged families and devastating poverty.

Militarists often claim credit for enabling non-violent protest: it is exactly to defend this freedom of speech, they state, that we need a strong military. Modern history shows that it is exactly the other way around: unarmed citizens could effectively prevail over the military in the USSR and China, where the massive Western arsenal was simply incapable to accomplish the same. And when arms are deployed to establish freedom, as in the Iraq war started in 2003, we see only suffering, destruction and despair.

Non-violence is effective mostly in the civil sphere. Pacifism on the other hand - the belief that peace can and should be reached by peaceful means – has mostly to do with international relations. People taking a pacifist viewpoint can be advocates of non-violence, or not. Like non-violence, pacifism is no metaphysics or morals, but a reasonable judgement and a practical strategy.

Pacifism has been defended by many, if not most, famous thinkers of the last centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau dreamt of a European federation of nations, which would forever ban warfare from the continent: ’never did the mind of man conceive a scheme nobler, more beautiful, or more useful than that of a lasting peace between all the peoples of Europe’. This dream seemed naïve in his time, but became reality two centuries later, in the twentieth century. Europe has forever proven that dreams of what never was do not have to remain unachieved forever, and that dreams do not necessarily lead to catastrophes.

Immanuel Kant, surpassing Rousseau, defended that a worldwide federation of states is the appropriate political vehicle towards everlasting world peace. This idea also evolved from an unrealistic dream to a feasible, though yet uncompleted project in our times, when first the League of Nations was set up, then went down in the violence of WW I, and rose again as the United Nations.

Famous thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey – people who lived through times of war, and none of them weird freaks or religious fanatics - defended the making of international treaties, not after, but before wars, in order to ban them forever. In 1955 Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell published their well-known pacifist manifesto:

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

The ‘we’ from this manifesto is a new global human cosciousness. This consciousness is essential to pacifism. Every state or party thinks at certain moments – usually shortly before a war – to be an exception to the human condition in terms of morals and power. But in our age of communication and media it is increasingly difficult not to feel as one world, one humanity and one responsibility. Pacifism today looks at the problem of warfare from a global viewpoint. While our planet is shrinking and no replacement is in sight, we must search for ways, not to love or even like, but to bear one another.

Albert Einstein actively participated in the League of Nations and other pacifist organizations, and Bertrand Russell was imprisoned for leading demonstrations for nuclear disarmament in London, when he was already ninety years of age.

Not long ago every European nation maintained armies to defend itself against its neighbours. The dream of Rousseau was first derided and eventually realized, without all the gruesome consequences that traditionalists predicted to come from - what they call utopian - pacifism. Today we must strive for an equal understanding on a global scale.

It is easy to oppose militarism, but what if an evil enemy, armed to the teeth, crosses your border? What if your country, what if democracy and liberties are under immediate danger? Every anti-militarist will have to explain his position regarding, for example, the issue of genocide, an issue that in the minds of Europeans is utterly embodied in the Nazi plans to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. It needs to be explained how to deal with a professional machinery arresting, deporting and destroying millions of unarmed citizens, if no army is around to defend them. To bluntly abolish the only forces able to halt such major crime, must be considered a major crime itself.

But what to think if the only force able to halt this crime is also the only force able to perform it? Genocides are not necessarily acts of war. At a certain scale however they are impossible without a military ideology and structure (below that scale, they are a civil police matter.)

It is impossible to know which army will eventually do the right thing, and which will do wrong. Inventors of tradition will tell that the ‘own’ people, government, army is and always was right by nature. But after one, ten or fifty years, a society feeling well protected can become a democracy won by fanatics, a dictatorship supported by generals, or any other nightmare of politics. Citizens, feeling safe today, can become threatened by their own soldiers overnight. After all, up to a certain moment many German Socialists, Russian Jews and Yugoslavian Muslims supported and trusted ‘their’ armed forces.

If an army will engage in genocide, it is wrong to keep it. If an army will protect against genocide, it is wrong to stop it. Unfortunately, we cannot tell which is which - but if there would be no armies nor militarist ideologies, we would not be threatened by the first, and will not need the second. The Nazis killed six million Jews before the allied forces could stop the massacre. It was the same in Anatolia, Iraq, Israel, Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Every time the killing was performed by armies erected with international consent, while their victims had once trusted them and had financed them with their taxes. All armies deployed for destruction were put up for the good cause, but when used for the wrong cause they always had enough head-start to create a disaster before even countered. Often military counteractions, despite all efforts made to keep armed forces ready, does not happen at all or turns out to be a disaster in its own right. But the holocaust would not even have started, and six million Jews, gypsies and homosexuals would have lived, if Europe had been free of armies altogether.

In order to further pacifism, it needs to be investigated why there is a threat of war in some places and why in other places the mere idea of war seems absurd. What are for instance the causes – behind the historical incidents – of warfare in Ireland, Afghanistan and Uganda, which are absent today in Denmark, Jordan and South-Africa? Under which circumstances does the pressure for war augment and eventually breaks?

Elements that reduce the hazard of war are: the balance of population and resources; open borders to people, products and information; education to open-mindedness and basic human rights for individuals; cutback of arms and army expenses. Leaders of nations who have not done everything within their power regarding those issues, both in their own country and in the international field, have a responsibility in the next war - even if their country is attacked first.

Militarism

Militarism holds that for a number of problems the best solution is military intervention, and considers war a useful and respectable art. For most militarists, war is even a supreme kind of solution: because it supposedly solves what nothing else could solve, the military is a skill above all other skills.

Militarism necessarily considers the own society to be of a different nature, and thinks that the own government and the own armed forces will forever be thoughtful towards their own citizens.

In the militarist viewpoint there is no global humanity in the style of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. There is only one good nation surrounded by forces that are either hostile or unreliable. Because there will always be aggressors around, the own nation will always need a stronger army than other, at best untrustworthy states. Treaties are useless: your country can better make them and break them before the aggressor does. This is a self-fulfilling prediction, because it instigates countries to outbid each other and fire up the arms race. Militarists regard the timely search for peaceful solutions as a message of weakness towards potential (but never distant) aggressors, and in this manner implicitly chose for war. They always go to war with the sound of drums, never humbly apologizing towards the own citizens and soldiers because they forsook their duty to timely avoid another primitive massacre, unafraid of being called to justice like those who caused less suffering and damage.

The militarist ideology spreads like weapons. Propaganda here inspires speech writers over there, just like arms trade blindly follows demand across borders. Patriotic heroism in American movies is dubbed and displayed around the world.

From the nineteenth century through WW II and beyond the Atlantic world cherished racism, militarism and colonialism; the looting campaigns of Alexander were represented as Indogerman civilization missions of a genius, and the Germanic peoples were represented as the only true civilization builders. This was the vision that Adolf Hitler learned at school from teachers esteemed by his society.

Militarism claims to secure peace more than pacifism, because either the own military strength will discourage aggressors or, if deemed necessary, destroy him fast and foul. Few ideas have been tried and failed so many times throughout history. Every one of a hundred or so empires of the past has tried to create peace by means of deterrence or submission, but every peace ever jubilantly declared by the military, at the cost of much suffering and exhaustion, collapsed after a few decennia at most, and gave way to new brutalities – if brutalities ever had stopped at all. The violent world today, and European history, demonstrates this succession of failures of militarism.

The wars that will devastate our children and grandchildren are concocted today, by means of birth encouraging, border sealing, armament, discrimination and injustice. Warfare is never imposed, out of the blue, on innocent nations by wicked adversaries. There is hardly ever a war that could not have been avoided a few decades earlier.

The essence of modernity is the value of every individual. Nothing is as much in contradiction with this notion as to sacrifice, simply for his or her own benefit, the life of a fellow human. And this is exactly the appalling essence of militarism: leaders sacrificing their followers; mothers sacrificing their children; men and women sacrificing their lovers, friends and brothers, cleaning their conscience afterwards with a sentimental remembrance ceremony. Even if war would be less lethal than crime and disaster, it would remain the most repulsive, because only in warfare a whole society consciously decides to sacrifice their own kin and find pride in it. And the injured soldier on the battle field, calling for compassion, is the same person who pompously marched with the war-horses a few days earlier.

Armament

One country building up an arsenal gives strong arguments to rivalling countries to do the same: the own army is the best advocate for armies in other countries. We build the armies of our opponents as we build our own, and as we maintain our army, we maintain the armies of our enemies. American citizens for example must remember how Iraq and Afghanistan were empowered by their own governments not long before they turned this power against their sponsors.

A very actual example is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 CE. At the time of the treaty only a few powerful countries - the USA, the UK, France, Russia and China - possessed nuclear arms, while the others lacked the financial means to bring in position a matching counterforce. The treaty says that on the one hand non-nuclear countries would not acquire nuclear arms, while on the other hand all countries would work towards nuclear disarmament:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.310

This disarmament clause was immediately forgotten by the powerful countries, who took the treaty for a mere sanctioning of their military predominance. Friendly states (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey) secretly received nuclear arms from the USA, and ducked out of the treaty by harbouring them under US control. Non-nuclear states either did not sign the treaty or tried to duck out by secretly buying or developing nuclear weapons (India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Ukraine and unknown others.)

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has become a missed opportunity, because of two main reasons. The first reason is that no broad and efficient control, and thus no confidence, is possible when borders remain sealed. The other reason is that the powerful countries failed to close down their nuclear arsenal when it was the safest moment in history to do so. When they had the opportunity to ease the fear of non-nuclear states, they spread unnecessary anxiety by clinging on to their arsenal. Likewise, the most frustrated non-nuclear countries tried to gather expensive but ridicule weapons compared to the actual armament of greater powers.

No frustrated group has ever refrained from attacking because the adversary was too well armed. On the contrary, frustrated communities are the most tempted to fight, while their frustration indicates that they are the lesser armed party. The futility of military armament becomes evident as wars are usually started – even started over - by the weaker party.311

The party that started a war often proved not to be the strongest, and the stronger proved not to have deterred the adversary of attacking. Wars often start merely because two armies existed and feared to be taken by betrayal. Once the war was started, the armed forces of the world were incapable to end it, and when it came to an end by exhaustion, both societies were worse off in costs, suffering and economic decline.

In 1956 CE, elections were to be held in the whole of Vietnam.312 There was no doubt that the votes would favour Ho Chi Minh. The US, fearing that this outcome would lead to the expansion of the Chinese military presence in South-East Asia, opposed the elections and imposed a friendly government. In this way the mere existence of two heavy armed world-powers caused the Vietnam War. Millions of civilians and soldiers were slaughtered, but Vietnam ended after twenty years right where it would have been if the elections of 1956 CE had taken place.

In 1990 CE Iraq invaded Iran. After the Iranian Shiite revolution of 1979 CE, Saddam Hussein feared that the Shiites in Iraq might provoke an Iranian military invasion. Following this logic, it seemed better to act while the enemy was still in revolutionary turmoil. The result was eight years of war, in which one million people were slaughtered and the regional economy lost over a billion dollars. Economic progress was abruptly halted, and the only result was that the life conditions of both populations went down. Territories, the power balance etc. remained as before. Various authors have ascribed the cause of this tragedy to a disagreement about a few small islands in the Persian Gulf, or even to the millennia old rivalry between Persia and Mesopotamia. But the real cause was simply the fear, at both sides, for the opponent’s army.

In 1991 CE, Ethiopia, troubled by the upcoming military force of its neighbour, supported resurgences in Somalia, and a civil war plunged the latter in the darkest anarchy. Somalia decomposed and the population was delivered to numerous bands of military thug. In the wake of those events the United Nations sent armed forces. This was the first UN intervention in a national conflict ever, something inconceivable during the Cold War era. The intervention ended in 1995 CE without achieving any of its goals. Ten years later Somalia was still a poor country ruled by mobs of armed bandits. This tragedy also started just because two competing countries felt threatened by each others armies.

If armed forces are really an efficient and legitimate means of peace, it is unjust that its benefits are restricted to states only, while there is so much peace needed in the world. We must then accept and even promote that minorities everywhere get armies of their own, because they are entitled to peace as any other group of people, even that every association has the democratic right to erect its armed force. Then we must wish well equipped armies to the Northern Irish Catholics, the Spanish Basks, the French Corsicans, various Islamists, the Montana Militias or whoever wants one and can afford it - just to make peace flourish everywhere.

If on the other hand armies are prehistoric habits existing only because of coincidences like the formation of state boundaries, and are not a source of peace but of mad cruelty towards the own population as well as other’s, they should be removed as urgently as unexploded land mines.