War is more than a hell. It is a crossroad, where choices have to be made, without a way of return. In the war in every moment a decision has to be made and every decision can have catastrophic consequences. In the war you never really know what the outcome of the war will be. In war are no winners only losers. At the end someone will come out victorious, and most probably it will be the most evil and the notorious one ( viz. Gingishan, Atila, Sparta, the early Muslims, but also the more recent Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, etc.). And if it is not enough, also when the ” good” wins the evil, you never now the long term outcome. Lets not forget, war is about gaining political power, and every political power corrupts on the long run. i try to think about cases of political leadership, that ruled for more than a decade and still continued to act out of righteous moral codes.
Yet, sometime a war has to be fought, when the enemies ideology is about your cultural annihilation. This was the case when the Nazism and the Communism implemented policy of cultural annihilation. But war is about doing acts of cruelty and injustice. Many times you can’t spare the innocent, because the innocent of today will be your enemy tomorrow, or because to save them while fighting the enemy would cost to many lives of your own. There are no nice wars, only cruel ones, there is nothing noble in war and in dying on the battlefield. Yet if a war has to be fight, better if you and your soldiers know and believe in the cause of the war. And this ability lost the West after WWII, when it exposed its criminal past. It is relatively easy to endorse faith in the necessity for cruelty among the hungry and the uneducated people, but hard and almost impossible among the full-fed educated ones. And I don’t remember when in the recent history last time the war winners where the well feed armies. Not in Vietnam, not in Algeria, and not even in Afghanistan or Iraq.
From → Geopolitics, History, MENUE
