What do you think of war?

"What do you think of war? Why has it survived? Is it needed?"

We only respect what we cannot control. We respect physical laws, (gravity) we respect those who insist on respect from us and have some control over us, (parents, bosses) we "respect" physical force, coercion, (the bully is bigger than I am.) We can be manipulated and deceived, no respect required. War is a form of control using physical force, and fear to manipulate. If someone killed everyone in a country that disagreed with them, or did things differently, or just for their land, (genocide) no respect is required, because no one is left to do things differently. You can shove people out of your area, but still might have to deal with them later as they might regroup and come back to shove you out. If we could respect rules that include both parties and could be enforced, war would devolve into whatever process is used to come to the agreements that both parties willingly abide by.

War is the way we determine the value of peace. Without it, we don't know the price of a life.

The conditions for which we will die are the currency of war. If you would give up everything for your child, and have a lot to give, you risk being a target of kidnapping. If you would die for your children, you can be blackmailed by warmongers into going to war to protect them, even putting your life or the lives of your community members at risk. War is blackmail. Negotiation seems pointless in the face of blackmail, but the answer is not to avoid negotiating with terrorists, because terrorism is simply finding out what you are willing to die for. The entire thing rests on the belief that war solves anything. War brings the victim into the ring with the perpetrator. They cannot see outside the ring. Peace changes the terms, changes the language, changes everything, but not through doing war. It is ridiculous to think that war creates peace. It is this thinking that perpetuates it. Show the fallacy and then believe and act differently. Its just that often, people don't know what peace looks like.

War takes away all normalcy. In war's presence peace becomes precious instead of boring. All's fair in love and war really only means that war hides a multitude of sins under the guise of crisis, urgency, and emotional thinking.

Vengeance is never practical in society. War is the only time or place that vengeance seems to belong. Thus giving lots of people an excuse to try it. Lure the person you hate to a war zone....

In jail, the most prized commodity is respect. Amongst prisoners respect is king. People kill for respect. And amongst thieves and murderers, killing is not a way to loose respect but to gain it. To lose the mentality of war we must loose the mentality of thieves and murderers. To respect restraint more than force is a pre-requisite for peace.

Repeat offenders come back into the system sometimes because on the outside there is less than on the inside. Inside is predictable rules that seem familiar to those raised in authoritarian families. Some had no authority at home, no rules, and the rules inside are better than none outside. The outside can have less protection than the inside. Perhaps criminals are treated even worse by a society on the outside. Neglect is worse than negative attention. Being inside walls is better than being invisible.

Terrorists, military, make a living wage in areas where there are no other jobs. The children of war have no jobs to go to. The example of their father's deaths leads them toward a job in killing.

War seems to create heroes, martyrs, is a safe haven for vigilantes. There is a romance to it. The heightened awareness created by the harsh conditions, the abrupt beginnings and endings, the urgency, the necessity of trusting total strangers with your life creates lifelong bonds. The empathy created amongst soldiers is heightened by the extreme emotions of war so that there is no mistaking the relational nuances, like there are in other, more mundane relationships, like family ties, and marital ties.

The stories of war from older heroes to younger create a vision of a way to be noticed, to be respected, to be somebody in a place where there is little to create attraction of a female except farming, poverty and seeming drudgery. This is the lure of the Pirate.

War changes love into fear and back again. We fear for our loved one's safety, and so the love has become fear, which leads to actions taken in the name of protection that directly mirror what is feared.

Protection becomes aggression. War is a place and a time when paranoia is normal. So the paranoid get listened to, respected and have a place. The opportunists can hide behind the paranoid to make money. When the fear dies down, they stir it up again to rake the coals into flames again because they cannot easily convert from wartime to peacetime business.

The conversion from wartime to peacetime operations cost more money, but have less political will behind it because the urgency is not there to be milked.

People will fight to feed their children. When people don't know what else to do to feed their children, they turn to violence because thinking gets the back seat when a child is starving.

I like the answer given by another person in this discussion:

"... as long as we all co-operate. That means that we won't demand a ridiculously high price for things that others need, and we won't just take something from others because it's cheaper to fight for it, than pay for it. We put the welfare of all as our top priority, and we won't try to oppress others until they have to go to war, just to get some kind of life."

We will have war as long as we have egos. Not the Freudian kind of ego, the existential kind. The kind of ego that sees everyone as a unique individual completely independent of every other ego. And the kind of ego that sees the source of all things as coming from "outside" in the world of things. The kind of ego that thinks that the answer to all problems comes from the "outside" of every person. So the material world is so completely mesmerizing, (Mesmer was a hypnotist) that we are hypnotized completely by it, with no light coming in from outside the perfectly square cube of the material world (a cube like a prison cell.)

A crack of light from the "inside" like a rose being seen for the first time, and we see the power of the other forces that create the material world to begin with. The pre-material world is invisible unless there are eyes to see it. This vision is necessary to peace.

The egos are children fighting over a toy. Peace is knowing all the other options to fighting over a toy.

If you can only see the one toy, you cannot see the complete abundance that is out there. And with visions of scarcity, no one believes in peace. If no one believes in peace, then this is the compete limitation of peace...not any other thing but this. All the soldiers in the world, (all the "peacekeepers") are not enough to bring peace if there is no belief in peace. Every single person on earth could be a soldier and it would not be enough.

The death penalty is "an eye for an eye." The world is a mirror. The deadly are killed. The death penalty didn't deter any of those on death row. To kill all those who have killed is just mirroring their action. To kill coldly, with precision and little emotion -- that describes most death row executions, and also often describes their crime. The only difference is that the executioner has seemingly more control over his actions at the time. And yet, he is being paid, and has almost as little say in the actual death and how it is done as the most senseless act done by a sociopathic perpetrator.

A quote from another friend:

"war is something else. It's not the primal, chaotic mayhem of actual combat. In concrete terms, war is what people choose to do because their other options are even worse. To provide them with some better options might lead to less of war. That takes work, not ideology. There is no mystery to what makes war and what prevents things getting to that point of decision. The mystery is how educated people with abundant knowledge at their fingertips will profess a love of peace while doing nothing actually to create alternative solutions to armed conflict.

Talking is a fun time. It is an ego thing. It is an expression of sentiment. It is the height of conceit and the ultimate form of moral impotence. Meanwhile, in many places, there are people whose actions speak louder than these empty words. They tend to the work of peace and grow solutions like a farmer grows food, and sometimes as a farmer growing food in fact, to feed people, so that deprivation does not predispose them to the rage for which war is a balm. There is no shortage of opportunity to support the preference for peace by working for it, but there is also no law saying you can't sit comfy on the sidelines having grand opinions and leave it at that."

Fighting war is not the same as creating peace. What you resist, persists. I like the visual of "growing peace." As has been said before, peace is not just the absence of war, it is a lifestyle and attitude of its own.
A vision of peace is better than any gun, but harder to buy and sell. And so if we "let the market decide" we will not have peace, because a dollar cannot see a vision. You can't sell a vision on Amazon, and if you did, it would be considered a scam.

A vision of peace should be free or it is for ransom, but war always has a price.

War is destruction of stagnation. It is change, and clears the table. It is a cruel easy way to start over. Peace is a balance of forces that allows for change that is more gradual and less risky to life. Construction and destruction must both exist. If destruction (reorganization) is impossible without violence, war will ensue.

"...People will always be fighting for their rights."

It is everyone's right to combine their actions with others to have rights, but the rights have to be agreed upon to be given without violence. We often don't know what rights we need or value or want, until violence or the threat of violence forces us to think about them.


I agree with this statement:

"...On one hand we have to recognize that further competition is necessary to culture what we are within. On the other hand we have to be sympathetic to the collective ideal that a less suffered competitive platform is valuable as well...."

Competition is great for improving skills, but compare and despair. Now that we have global means to see other ways of living in our own living rooms through the media, we are all at risk from people who compare their lifestyles with our own, despair of being respected, and will take violence as a path to rectification.

"As long as greed is in man's nature, war will be in his nature. There will always be a man/country "A" who will always want something man/country "B" has and will do whatever he has to to get it."

Greed is not a "nature" as much as a vice. Wanting to feed your family is not greed. Greed is a relative term. If money is power, and the greedy cannot be stopped from continuing to waste, corrupt and warmonger, then it is this that is the problem -- the control is in the hands of people who are in the grip of a vice. Money can't tell who is handling it. And so if money gravitates toward an unscrupulous person, then the unscrupulous actions will be rewarded. And rewarded over and over again. The money itself has no value system, yet we often treat people with money with more "respect" than people without money. And so the simplest way to gain "respect" and attention from others is to display a lot of money.

If we looked at people with money with the same critical eyes as those without money, we would see a different picture. If you take a person's money away (in your mind, see them as just a person with only generic clothes on their backs) do they "look" the same to you? Or do they seem less because their actions don't speak loudly for their character? If we were all to judge each other based on what the person's actions tell about them, and not about how much money (or power) they can bring to things, we might have a more just world. Because simply having money wouldn't buy respect anymore. This is what funds so many charities -- people with money making up for this difference in the way they act and are treated because of their money.

Greed is a tool of materialistic societies. Our country planned it this way. We capitalize on greed. We nurture greed. We feed on greed. This capitalistic system is supposed to work so that we can create wealth that we then put to good uses, even against our own natures. However, if we only do the first part (capitalize on greed) and not do the second, (put it to uses that benefit society and mankind as a whole) then we have failed entirely. Then we allow the greed to take over from its secondary place of generating wealth to the top place in our society, where greed, a snake without a head...no guidance system in place...runs the show.

And this valueless thing, the dollar, profit, corporations with liability coverage, never does what is best for everyone, because it has no brain, no heart, no empathy. That we expect an inanimate process to rule our society is what causes war, because war is highly profitable. Human lives are "addicting."

Drug dealers give away addictive substances until the user is unable to function without the substance. Then he starts to charge for it. He can charge whatever he thinks you are able to earn, steal or beg from someone. He has control over your brain, your body, your talents, your resources, your family.

Family bonds are strong. If you threaten to take away a loved one, it works the same way. We are held hostage to our love for our families. If no one cared about anyone else, no one could be convinced to go to war and risk their life for someone else. So we are a lot less "self-serving" than we seem. If we put profit motives into this, we find that there is a price people are willing to pay. Then we have let the inanimate object/objective (money/profit) become in charge.

Money is simply a tool, like a gun. It is what we do with these things that determines everything. War is the result of money having power at a distance from the realities of life amongst real people. Every product, every service, every government, should be judged on how its existence, its trading, its movement in the world affects everyone involved. We can do this within countries (somewhat) but much less outside national boundaries. It seems, at the border, all the laws governing human behavior become lost. Nations can't seem to deal with each other with the same set of guidelines they use within their borders.

Third world countries learn to copy what was done to them when other countries came through and tried to control them. If we treat others callously, because they are far away, (out of sight, out of mind) and only the money passes between us, then we risk facing the same behaviors coming back to us later.

Peace. We have so many ways to manipulate human behavior. Advertising, marketing, movies, books, newspapers, propaganda... If we were to do as much for peace every day as we do to sell hamburgers and soda, we could have peace. Define peace, define success with peace, set a goal of peace, refuse to do non-peaceful things in this effort, and then practice it every day with a portion of our resources, and then check in real life to see that it is being done and not being corrupted.

We wait until war to value peace, and then we spend billions and billions on what we never wanted -- war. Those billions are rewarding warlike behavior. We must divert some of those billions to creating what we say we really wanted in the first place. Peace.