Why must everything be a war? We have wars on drugs, terror, the middle class, poverty, corruption, science, just to name a few. Of course real war involves a real and substantial loss of life. The United States has been involved in eight foreign wars that have killed a little more than one million Americans and wounded another million and a half.
Real war involves a specific enemy one can force to surrender or one may surrender to, depending. That’s what we had in the first Iraq war. It’s possible to have a war on drug users or on drug providers, but not on drugs. Terror is a method, not a person or persons. The middle class is a vague term at best. Corruption is simply a description of a lack of ethics and science is not a person or group of persons but a noun describing the systematic study of the physical world.
Still, it’s become fashionable to depict many endeavors, both positive and negative, as wars.
Many of these have been going on for years without much progress. President Johnson declared war on poverty 40 years ago. Poverty is still with us. We spend 20 billion dollars a year in an unsuccessful war on drugs.
Real war has been with our species for a very long time. Peace has been rare. Even the famous Pax Romana lasted just 207 years.
In 1970, during the protests about the war in Vietnam Edwin Starr recorded a protest song, “War,” the chorus of which begins, “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
But Starr was not the first American in recent times to make that observation. In 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had toured the battlefields of France during World War I said, “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” It’s fair to say that in spite of this he gave his own life in World War II.
On Armistice Day in 1948 General Omar Bradley, one of the principal architects of Allied victory in Europe in World War II said, “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the MountS Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
In 1951 General Douglas MacArthur said, “I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”
And Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 said, “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. The 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.”
Why then is war so popular? Perhaps we can get a clue from the Nazi Hermann Göering who said at the 1946 Nuremberg trials, “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Apparently it still does.
David Steiner lives in Allenspark.
