OPINION
Tani Newton
Is the world on the brink of war? Why are we talking about it as if it was inevitable?
How can it be justified? What is there to fight about?
Historically, war has generally been seen as just if it was in self-defence. An invaded nation can justly fight to repel an invader, just as an individual can justly kill in self-defence or in defence of another.
But the modern world has introduced numerous complications into this simple formula. To begin with, we now have weapons of mass destruction, which kill unarmed civilians, whereas previously only armed combatants were seen as the just targets of war. Not that armies were never guilty of raping and pillaging and all that; I’m not suggesting that human nature is worse now than it was – but the technology has changed and so have the ethics. From time immemorial, men have been exhorted to go to war to protect their homes, their wives and their children. The just and proper target of their aggression was the men attacking them. If women go to war now, and if houses, shops and hospitals are bombed, then what is it all about?
People tell me that we can fight to protect ‘our country’. But what does that mean? If nothing in a country is sacred, why fight to defend it? If anyone can go to war, and if anyone can be attacked, what is being defended? This is the paradox of war: it involves huge forces and yet it is at the same time highly individual. Every soldier is dreaming of his sweetheart and fighting so that she can pick flowers in her garden and he can go home and marry her. Or so that his children can grow up and take over the family farm, or go into a trade or an office and have homes and children of their own. If that’s not what they are fighting for, then what is it all about?
Is it about the balance of power? The world today is tied up in international treaties that are supposed to prevent wars by keeping everyone equally afraid of everyone else. Is it ungrateful to feel that that isn’t working, when we’re talking about world war for the third time in five generations?
And if it is about treaties, and helping our allies and maintaining power balances, then it isn’t about your country anymore, not in any realistic and personal sense. It’s asking a lot to send someone into a living hell to kill or be killed. A soldier, surely, has a right to know what he is fighting for.
He or she. Or they. Or it. There you go again. War is supposed to have an ethical foundation – that it is right for men to kill other men who are attacking them and protect their homes and families. If that is not how war is being waged, then it is just people smashing other people. However sophisticated it may be, it is barbarism: the unrestrained exercise of deadly force for the personal gain of whoever can grab the most. Why anyone would consent to participate in it I struggle to understand. But then we don’t really have a lot of choice these days. We get to put a piece of paper in a ballot box every few years and that means that it is ‘democracy’, and that means that we get to be smashed by whomever we have elected or whomever they decide to fight with.
I know, I’m a girl and girls don’t like violence. However, I think it is fair to say that while boys like fighting for the sake of fighting, boys who have grown up and not just got older prefer to avoid senseless destruction. I pray that some of these will come to the fore before it is too late.
