If there’s one thing human beings have been programmed to believe, it’s that we are not capable of analyzing issues and coming to our own conclusions.  Everything has to be broken down for us by experts.  Human beings have been taught to believe that we should always wait to be told by authoritative figures how to think about certain issues, be it politics, economics, unfolding events, even what we should eat and how we should live our lives.  That’s why whenever we read news articles, we always find references to what the experts have to say about the issue at hand.  The idea is basically to tell us how we should think about the issue, thereby eliminating the need for us to think critically and come to our own conclusions.  Whenever a newsworthy event happens, we get the panel of experts to chew the facts for us and feed us with the proper way of thinking about the issue.  This programming is so deep within us that many of us automatically shy away from thinking deeply about ideas or events that are happening around us and prefer to take at face value whatever the experts are saying.

It is in this context that I originally shied away from writing this article because I thought to myself, well what do I know about war?  What do I know apart from what I see in the media about wars breaking out here and there and soldiers being sent to battle in various parts of the world and bombs being dropped in faraway places?   I assumed as many people do that military decisions are made by war generals and political leaders who surely know better than any of us what needs to be done.  How many times have we seen decorated war generals solemnly and authoritatively declaring that this and that war is being fought for this and that reason and it never even occurs to us to question why this is so and whether this person actually knows what they are talking about?  How could anyone question such an authority figure?  He is the expert on such issues after all.

Or are they? Maybe that’s just what we’ve been led to believe?  If the people who make decisions about whether or not a country should go to war are the experts on such things, then why is the world in such a mess with endless wars being fought everywhere and nothing much ever coming out of these wars?  How comes these so-called experts always say that the war will achieve this and that goal, but this is never the case?  Doesn’t that surely tell us that these people have no clue what they are talking about?  If they did, why do we have situations such as the ones in Afghanistan or Iraq in which wars are fought for decades and end up making the situation even worse than it was before?  What about the current wars going on in the world such as in Yemen or Syria or in some African regions?  If the decision to fight or intervene in these wars were made by experts, people who supposedly know better than all of us, then why are things so much worse than they were to begin with? 

If the people who make decisions about whether or not a country should go to war are the experts on such things, then why is the world in such a mess with endless wars being fought everywhere and nothing much ever coming out of these wars?

Let’s talk about why these wars are even possible in the first place.  Where do the weapons come from?  Where does the ammunition come from?  It is common knowledge today that both sides of a war are usually supplied by governments or corporations that stand to make huge profits from the sale of these war supplies.  Sometimes even both sides of a war could be supplied by the same people.  The most shocking thing of all is that the developed world that is always quick to condemn countries that go to war are the same ones that supply nearly all the weapons being used in wars around the globe.  It doesn’t take an expert to see that war is a huge calamity for humanity as a whole and that anyone who makes the decision to send people to war whether a president or a parliament or an army general is essentially condemning a lot of human beings to death without caring too much about the individual human lives that are going to be lost.

Let’s be clear about one thing: war is the extreme objectification of human beings, because human beings stop being seen as individuals but as objects to be used to achieve whatever objective the decision makers want to achieve.  The end thus becomes more important than the human lives that are going to be destroyed by the war.  Soldiers are seen as resources to be used in fighting wars, no different from the weapons and the fighter jets and the bombs that are used in war.  The humanity of these people is denied and deemed to be secondary to whatever objective the war is supposed to achieve.  The people who are killed in wars become nothing more than statistics for us to briefly reflect on during news reports before quickly moving on to other news.  The people who are displaced by war, the millions who are forced to emigrate to foreign lands where they are greeted with hostility and hatred are seen not as the human beings they are, but as destabilizing elements that need to be kept out of the clean and civilized societies into which they attempt to enter.  We refuse to see their humanity and choose to see them as different from us and as threats to our way of life.

It’s no big secret that the reason war exists is because war is an industry and a very profitable one at that.  Profit is the only reason wars are fought.  This is pretty much an open secret today.  Of course, those who benefit from war will always try to hide this from the population and they will always find ways to justify why this and that war must be fought.  What about the massive expenditure by governments on their military?  How could this be justified if no wars were being fought, if there were no enemies to fight and protect ourselves from?  These huge budgets could be used for the welfare of the people, but instead they are used to prepare for and fight against real and imagined enemies.  Why is this still going on?   Why do we, the people who are hurt by wars, who don’t benefit in any way, who have everything to lose from war allow this to continue? 

It’s because we have been programmed to see the world in this way.  We have been programmed to believe that war is a natural part of being human and the idea of a world without war is never even presented as an option, leave alone debated as a serious possibility.  But if human beings can envision a world without poverty, if people can envision a world without disease, why can’t we envision a world without war?   We’ve also been made to believe that every country must have an army for the sake of self-defense because supposedly we are surrounded by enemies who are just waiting for an opportunity to attack.  But did you know there are countries that have no standing armies such as Costa Rica, Mauritius and Panama?  How comes no one is attacking them?

A journalist by the name Hannah Arendt who reported on the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the final solution during the holocaust wrote a book about what she called the ‘banality of evil’.  The banality of evil basically means that the reason people commit acts of evil is because they refuse to think for themselves.  They mindlessly take on ideologies and follow orders and commit acts that are evil because they do not take time to analyze and think about what they are doing and question what they are told.  We are so accustomed to being told how to think about everything that we do not actually take time to think for ourselves.  As an example, consider the idea that is aggressively pushed by Hollywood that soldiers who go to fight wars are heroes.  We all know the atrocities that are committed during war, so how are these people heroes?  Why do we accept this idea?  Are these people heroes or are they pawns in a game that is so masterfully played that we have all been fooled by it for far too long?  If only every soldier who thinks about joining the military could pause and think for themselves and ask themselves whether it is justified to kill another human being and whether this is something they personally want to do, then maybe we would start seeing a change in terms of people becoming unwilling to subject themselves to this objectification. 

We are so accustomed to being told how to think about everything that we do not actually take time to think for ourselves. 

Wars are not a necessary or inevitable part of life on this planet.  There are people who would prefer that we continue to think about war in this way, that we continue to view war as an integral part of being human, something that can never be eradicated because it is human nature.  But we know that it is not in human nature to kill other people, in fact it is so contrary to human nature that even those who are trained to do so end up being severely traumatized by it.

The worst part about war, despite all the propaganda, is that war never achieves the goals that it sets out to achieve.  No war ever goes the way it was supposed to go.  People who were thought to be weak turn out to be not so weak after all.  Armies that were seen as invincible turn out to be not so invincible after all.  The one thing that is certain about war is that it results in casualties and death.  So essentially, the value of a human life is made secondary to some obscure goals that will in all probability not be achieved.  If we viewed the soldiers who go to fight wars and the people who are affected by wars as human beings who have a right to live long and meaningful lives, we would never allow our governments to send anyone to war.  It’s time we said no to this objectification of human beings by the war industry.