#92 JUSTIFIED
SECOND IN A SERIES ON WAR
WE ARE ALL SOLDIERS OF SOME SORT SHAPED LIKE WATER SHAPES THE EARTH
KILLING
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
W
ar occurs at the moment the mind finds justification to kill another human being.
War is about killing and destroying. Nothing in the definition of war suggests that rescuing and constructing will occur as one people clash with deadly force with another people.
War is so anti-human that the term is shied away from now and everyone seems to want to use the term conflict.
What kind of conflict is war, is that war is deadly destructive conflict. Conflict is not war unless the conflict is deadly and destructive.
Conflicts can occur at a summer picnic or a Christmas dinner of a dysfunctional family.
For sure, death can occur at conflicts that are something less than war. America’s gun violence epidemic of mass shootings occurring at public schools ,movie theaters and street festivals are something less than war, even when thought of collectively as something more than a singular urban terror attack.
Urban street terror is not civil war. And a militia uprising is something more than a mass shooting.
War involves a bit more of a totality, such as an unwavering commitment for success through another nation’s death.
Genocide of course is a much more fanatical death march involving justifications based on sheer, inhuman, horrifying hate for difference.
SERIES OF SINFUL JUSTIFICATIONS
The Holocaust began with a series of justification underscored with social commentary – and once the community standards had been changed by that commentary, legal justifications were created to allow for a more systemic implementation of the hate program. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws institutionalized the dehumanization of one people, by another people for no other reason than racial hatred.
The enforcement of these laws then led to the justifications being incorporated into the collective consciousness of the citizenship, with Jews living among the population as non-citizens.
One justification led to another justification and soon the institutions became involved in the systemic elimination of the Jewish population in Europe through killing, subsequently facilitated by the invention of the mass killing machine: the gas chambers and crematoriums of the concentration camps.
Interracial war is genocide because of the singular purpose of killing without any real justification other than hate. Genocide may be the worst side of humanity because of the sheer, make your blood boil, hatred that such an act of killing involves. War is bad as well, but the level of hatred in war is something less than that occurs during a genocide, and quite a bit more than random street violence.
The justification for war can often become a fallacious argument to kill, because you really got to hate someone to want to kill them. And war ultimately results in a lot of killing.
A hate crime is biased motivated violence. Genocide is the eventual escalation of this racial violence, if a hate crime goes unchecked.
The motivation for war comes from many sources, and from many directions. Biased motivated violence maybe just one component that also includes economic incentives, territorial integrity and quite often the foolish maniacal thoughts of ‘boys with toys’.
War, these days, is often divided into two camps: the defensive war and the offensive war. Once upon a time both sides of the war waged the war offensively with a lot of religious zeal despite killing being disallowed in the Bible.
Euthanasia and suicide and murder are prohibited under the 6th Commandment of the Bible, “Thou Shall Not Kill.” But kill people do especially in the Old Testament when the great Flood occurs and then when God provides a bit of muscle for Moses moving the Israelites out of Egypt. A lot of violence occurs in support of Moses in this great Exodus from enslavement.
Killing may still be necessary to punish wrongdoing, but eventually Jesus convinces people that murder is wrong. Jesus even allows himself to be crucified for the sins of the people who have been getting away with a lot of killing and lechery behind God’s back.
Jesus’s death gives everyone a new start, with all the sin being absolved at the very moment of his death on the crucifix under a thunder cloud. But people just cannot get the rule right, justifying murder with killing as justified punishment and subsequently using punishment as a justification for killing.
We remember Jesus today. On other days, we remember the wars and the generals, but not the people, other than a few war memorials installed in various town centers.
Jesus may be one of the few non-military historical figures remembered, because Jesus gave up his life for us, and so did a lot of other people following in the footsteps of Jesus.
The children may sing for the peace taught by Jesus, but everyone else kills: kills people, kills ideas for peace with no second thoughts, and by leaving no second chances here on earth.
Killing is and has always been a disease of the mind in which somehow the thinking of peace and neighborliness distorts into justification for killing.
In American big cities like Detroit and Chicago someone justifies killing a neighbor in street gun violence almost every day, with as many as 130 mass killings already this year. These killers are not soldiers, quite often not terrorists with a message or religious zealots with false, distorted inspirations providing a spring in their footsteps, but they are just people decidedly bent on killing other people.
KILLING HAS BECOME JUSTIFIED
Killing has become justified in America from a police officer shooting a fleeing suspect in the back, to an urban ambush for the sole purpose of killing police officers. These killings add up thoughts over the years that begin to lean humanity to thinking softly about war. War is on the nightly news of the world, in the movie theatres and on the video game console. War becomes thought of as just another part of the world.
But war is killing and there can be no justification for killing. Instead, you’ve got to break the problem down so that there are no losers and no victims. You’ve got to break the problem down before there are thoughts of war and justifications for killing. The world must be deprogramed of all the justification for war and of all the justifications for killing.
But at the end of the day, we are who we are, and war is in our nature. War has shaped the civilizations for an eternity. People kill, and there’s no doubt about that.
There exists no answers for stopping the killing, really. The better pat answer is to accept that wars occur and to prepare for that inevitability. Ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu advised that one must shape the enemy and bring the enemy to a position where the enemy can be conquered, just “as the water shapes its flow”. (VI.28), the enemy must be shaped, rather than to go where the enemy may be the strongest.
But at the same time, if you make the enemy desperate, the enemy will fight to the death like cornered wild dogs. (VII:32).
This duality is how the world prepares for the next day: preparing for war but not to humiliate the enemy so as to incite hatred and the resulting vigorous battle to the death that results from such a position of weakness. There must always be an escape from war to avoid death down to the last person.
And so, war has been a defining instrument of civilizations, despite occurring with improper justifications as there can be no justification for an offensive war that undoubtably will result in killing. When there has been peace, the prospect of war has shaped our desire for lasting peace.
War is organized. People talk about and muddle their thinking about war. War shapes us like the flow of water shapes the earthen path. To suggest otherwise would be foolish and naïve.
War does show what humanity can muster. People just need to focus that same will to kill and to deconstruct another civilization on accomplishing peace and construction and development of civilizations moving forward as one.
Rather than allowing the declaration of war to legalize killing, killing of every sort should be once again outlawed and redefined as murder, whether under the banner of conflict or the banner of war or some other fancy name for killing.
War: How Conflict Shaped Us, by Margaret MacMillan, New York, Random House, 2020.