Why is war necessary

For over 60 years North and South Korea have endured a sometimes fragile ceasefire, with no peace agreement in sight.

Wars are waged via proxies in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, or external intervention is denied, as in Ukraine. States use legal arguments based on war to justify the targeting of their own citizens in drone strikes in third countries or the imprisonment of suspects without trial.

The question therefore we face today may not be whether war is a prerequisite for peace, but whether war and peace can be disentangled. The problem may lie less in the soul of man than in our political organisation.

The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence.

It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence. That was undoubtedly the primary motivating factor behind the creation of the European Union — an attempt to foster interdependence and reduce the significance of national frontiers in order to never again experience the horrors of war in Europe.

The decision of the UK, the strongest military power in Europe, to withdraw from the European Union and restore its national sovereignty might suggest that the internationalist goal may be a utopia. To find out more about the essay competition, click here. NCH London.

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Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Find in Worldcat. First, many other conditions also have had long-running histories: for example, reliance on astrologers as experts in foretelling the future; affliction with cancers; submission to rulers who claim to dominate their subjects by virtue of divine descent or appointment; and many others.

People eventually overcame or continue to work to overcome each of these longestablished conditions. Science revealed that astrology is nothing more than an elaborate body of superstition; scientists and doctors have discovered how to control or cure certain forms of cancer and are attempting to do the same for other forms; and citizens learned to laugh at the pretensions of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment at least, they had learned to do so until George W. Bush successfully revived this doctrine among the benighted rubes who form the Republican base.

Second, even if nothing can be done to stop the periodic outbreak of war, it does not follow that we ought to shut up and accept every war without complaint. No serious person expects, say, that evil can be eliminated from the human condition, yet we condemn it and struggle against its realization in human affairs. We strive to divert potential evildoers from their malevolent course of action.

Scientists and doctors continue to seek cures for cancers that have afflicted humanity for millennia. Even conditions that cannot be wholly eliminated can sometimes be mitigated, but only if someone tries to mitigate them.

War should belong to this class of events. Finally, whatever else might be said about the pacifists, one may surely assert that if everyone were a pacifist, no wars would occur. Remember: war is horrible, as everybody now concedes but many immediately put out of mind.

As hideous as war is, it is not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent. This statement assumes that war amounts to a contest between freedom and justice on one side and tyranny and injustice on the other. One scarcely commits the dreaded sin of moral equivalence, however, by observing that few wars present such a stark contrast, in which only the children of God fight on one side and only the children of Satan fight on the other.

Even if we set aside such clear-cut innocents and consider only persons in the upper echelons of the conflicting sides, it is rare to find only angels on one side and only demons on the other. In World War II, for example, the Allied states were led by such angels as Winston Churchill, who relished the horrific terror bombing of German cities; Josef Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time; Franklin D.

Roosevelt, of whose moral uprightness the less said the better; and Harry S Truman, who took pleasure in annihilating hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese noncombatants first with incendiary bombs and last with nuclear weapons.

Yes, the other side had Adolf Hitler, whose fiendishness I have no desire to deny or minimize, but the point is that the overall character of the leadership on both sides sufficiently attests that there was enough evil to go around. As for the ordinary soldiers, of course, everyone who knows anything about actual combat appreciates that the men on both sides quickly become brutalized and routinely commit atrocities of every imaginable size and shape.

When World War II ended, leaving more than 62 million dead, most of them civilians, and hundreds of millions displaced, homeless, wounded, sick, or impoverished, the survivors might well have doubted whether conditions would have been even more terrible if the war had not taken place.

The dead were unavailable for comment. It is difficult to believe that the situation in China would have been so awful even if the Japanese had succeeded in incorporating China into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

You have to compare apples to apples, and when I do that, I see this war is going well. This statement about the U. If we make such pinnacles of savagery our standard, then, sure enough, everything else pales by comparison.

But why should anyone adopt such a grotesque standard? What the Israelis did in Lebanon a few years ago bears no comparison with the February Allied attack on Dresden, of course, but the sight of even one little Lebanese child dead, her bloody body gruesomely mangled by an explosion, ought to be enough to give pause to any proponent of resort to war.

For almost two thousand years, biblical scholars have been disputing what Christians may and may not do in regard to war.

The dispute continues today, so the matter is certainly not resolved among devout Christians. Even if Christians may go to war to save innocent lives, however, a big question remains: Is the government going to war for this purpose or for one of the countless other purposes that lead governments to make war? Saving the innocent makes an appealing excuse, but it is often, if not always, only a pretext.

Nowadays, of course, one side invokes the Jewish and Christian God, whereas the other calls on the blessing of Allah. Whether this bifurcated manner of gaining divine sanction for the commission of mass murder and mayhem among the sons of Abraham represents progress or not, I leave to the learned theologians.

These men and women may be willing and able to supply such protection, but do they? After World War I, the government not only kept taxes far above their prewar levels but also retained newly court-sanctioned powers to conscript men for foreign wars, to interfere with virtually any private transaction in international trade and finance Trading with the Enemy Act of , and to suppress free speech in a draconian manner Sedition Act of After World War II, the government again kept taxes much higher they had been before the war, retained for the first time a large peacetime military apparatus, created the CIA as a sort of personal presidential intelligence and quasi-military group, continued to draft men for military service even during peacetime, and engaged much more pervasively in central management and manipulation of the private economy.

The people, for their part, gained the privilege of living with the very real threat of nuclear holocaust hovering over them for four decades while the U. It has also led the government to create an agency now empowered to commit acts in U. Nevertheless, Americans are no safer because of these sweeping infringements of their liberties, many of which have been de facto pork barrel projects and others of which have been nothing more than security theater.

Indeed, in the war on terror, the government has added fuel to the fire of Muslim rage against Americans in the Middle East but achieved nothing positive to compensate for this heightened threat. Every time the rulers set out to protect the village, they decide that the best way to do so is to destroy it in the process. It brought the United States out of one of the greatest slumps in history, the Great Depression.

This venerable broken-window fallacy refuses to die, no matter how many times a stake is driven through its heart. Most Americans believe it. Worse, because less excusable, nearly all historians and even a large majority of economists do so as well. I have been whacking at this nonsense for several decades, but, so far as I can tell, I have scarcely made a dent in it. Should anyone care to see a complete counterargument, I recommend the first five chapters of my book Depression, War, and Cold War.

The government did wipe out unemployment during the war, but only by putting millions of men in the armed forces. During World War II, these forces absorbed, primarily by conscription, 16 million persons at one time or another about three times the number of persons officially counted as unemployed in , while causing a similar number of people to be employed in military-supply industries.