By Barnes Mawrie
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal” John Steinbeck
Pope Francis in his message to the world on International Day of Prayer for peace on 27th October, said that “war is a defeat for all.” How true this is, for what we witness in every war is not only collateral damages and waste of human lives, but it is a “potentiality for the next war.” History tells us that at the end of World War I, in the treaty of Versailles, Germany was extremely humiliated as the Germans were defeated by the Allies. This was a national humiliation which paved the way for a radical patriotism.
Thus, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933 they fed on this patriotic sentiment and they easily got the unconditional support of all Germans. Emboldened by such national support, Hitler went on to invade Poland which finally led to the start of World War II in 1939. The war ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis in 1945 and the creation of the United Nations Organization (UNO). History has shown that even the UNO was not able to curb human greed and ambition and consequently we have seen bloody conflicts and genocides in different parts of the world. To name a few, we have the Korean Peninsula War from 1950 to 1953, the infamous Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975, the Indo-China war in 1962, the two Indo-Pakistan wars of 1962 and 1971, the genocide in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 where thousands were murdered and 1.2 million people were displaced, the Afghan War led by US from 2001 to 2021; the invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, the Crimea war between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 and the latest Russia invasion of Ukraine started in 2022 and the Israel-Hamas war that started on 7th October this year and which is still raging on. In all these wars and conflicts there is one common factor and that is “death and destruction.”
It is a matter of shame that we humans call ourselves “rational beings” when all the while we do irrational things. Is war not an irrational behaviour? Think of the loss in terms of lives and money that every war entails. In World War I the money spent by warring parties amounted to over $208 billion and the lives lost stood at 2o million. The cost of World War II was a whopping $4 trillion and the lives lost was between 75-80 million (that is 3% of the then world’s population). After these wars trillion of dollars had to be spent for the rebuilding of infrastructures. In other words, humans build and destroy and then rebuild again and that is undoubtedly an “irrational” behaviour.
Think of the financial expense in defence. The US budget for defence in 2023 is $1686 billion, China’s defence budget for the same year is $224 billion, Russia’s defence budget stands at $109 billion while in India the defence budget has risen to $73.8 billion. Just imagine if such investment were made in poverty alleviation, no one would be poor on this planet. President Dwight D. Eisenhower has rightly remarked “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” Yet these amounts continue to be spent in manufacturing weapons of destruction which humans use in exterminating each other which implies that we create tools for self-destruction.
The craze for possession of nuclear weapons which some countries like the US, Russia, China, Iran or India, vie with each other is evidently the most potential threat to human survival. The so called MAD (mutually assured destruction) which is a military and national security policy of nuclear power countries, is veritably a “mad” concept. Is this not another example of how “irrational” we humans are? The manner we wage war on our own planet by exploiting its resources in the most destructive way and polluting the environment, is being realized today as the cause for global warming and climate change and the effects of these are being perceived as a threat to the survival of all living beings. This is what we call digging the ground beneath our feet and it is another proof of human irrationality.
The two major conflicts that we are witnessing today, in Ukraine and Gaza, are proof that we human beings are “self-destructive” by nature. The extent of destruction that we see in both these places defies every kind of “rational” thinking. To conclude this argument let me cite three persons – Plato who said “only the dead have seen the end of war,” Bertrand Russel said “war does not determine who is right, but who is left” and the notorious war-monger Adolf Hitler who said “If you win, you need not have to explain…If you lose, you should not be there to explain!” Humorous but true, these sayings only verify that “human beings are the most irrational of rational beings.”
(The writer can be contacted at [email protected])