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orld War One was a fearfully
trying time.
Interestingly, the pacifists among us are finding the four
year-long recognition of that disturbing and pointless societal conflict
equally trying, but for different and yet similarly damning reasons.
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| World War One was meant to be the war that ended all wars - that was most certainly the case for millions of people, but not the world, rather it was just the beginning of damnable fearful times. |
Not for a second is the commitment and bravery of those
involved in that war questioned, but it seems fatefully futile that thousands
of young Australians travelled to places they had never heard of and died in
droves.
Long has our desire to fight and the causes of war troubled
me and almost without exception the initial disputation that escalated to
become war, bringing death a destruction of unimagined extremes, can be traced
to the intellectual and emotional immaturity of just a few people.
Subsequently, most any philosophical thoughts about war and
its causes interest me and these notes by U.S. scientist and author, Peter
Turchin, caught my eye. He said: “This is not to argue that wars are good. I
hope that the humanity will eventually evolve to the point where we can abolish
wars and all the misery they cause. But when we do it, we will still need an
engine of creative destruction to prevent runaway accumulation of power and
wealth by the few, and to weed out dysfunctional societies that lost their ability
to cooperate.”
Much can be read into Turchin’s observations, but it is the
final observation - dysfunctional
societies that lost their ability to cooperate – which was bad enough 100
years ago, but is now even worse as democracies are now becoming oligarchies in
which inequality prevails and societal dysfunction is afoot.
Some see Shiva as the God of destruction whose task is to
clear away the old to make room for the new.
One commentator says, “The present culture of war does
neither. Rather is maintains a paradigm of continual struggle for control
amongst the power elite that leaves in its wake nothing but death and
destruction.
“The so-called value of war as an expression of creative
destruction is to ignore the pain of the mother who, standing among the rubble
of her former home, holding the lifeless body of her youngest child in her
arms, the disillusionment of the soldier who returns to an empty future,
crippled in mind or body.”
‘War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” he writes,
quoting the song.
So considering that, it is time we stopped remembering,
recognizing and celebrating what was, and spending untold millions of dollars
building myths from events we should never have been a part of and turned our
gaze toward today, tomorrow and to our children’s, their children’s future
without war..
It has been our addiction to growth, answered through our
exploitation of fossil fuels that has enriched the world’s elites, worsened
inequality and entrenched societal dysfunction making war a constant recurrence.
