This October, the US completed the tenth year of its ongoing Afghan war. Incidentally, it started with the beginning of the 21st century. By all definitions, it was a bad beginning. It was bad because war brings nothing but death and destruction. In spite of the pain and grief caused by it, one is surprised to learn that in mankind’s march from barbarism to civilisation, there have been just 268 years without war in the last 3500 years. This is a poor record, nevertheless, a lopsided explanation can be that these wars were waged by the man, who was just a “savage” that had not evolved into a “civilised” and “modern man”. More so, this brute was certainly not the cultured westerner, who is often presented as the harbinger, sustainer, and paragon of modern civilisation.
A quick look at the western history shows that it is a fallacious assumption. Whether eastern or western, or ‘modern’ or ‘ancient’, man can be quite mean, wolfish and predatory. War has been his chief preoccupation. It seems to have been the only ‘constant’ in modern history. A glance at the modern western world of the last six centuries reveals his ferociousness.
The “Hundred Years’ War” was fought for over a century between England and France from 1337 to 1453. Many wars from the mid-fifteenth century onwards were waged in the name of patriotism and for the cause of the nation-state whereby in the name of ‘national consciousness’, man learned to hate and slaughter fellow man. The legendary hatred of the Englishmen towards the Spaniards or the Swedes towards the Dutch was ironically rooted in this very idea. As if the nationalistic lust for butchery was ungratifying, the Catholics and the Protestants of central Europe crossed swords in the name of religion in the “Thirty Years’ War” from 1614 to ‘48. Not content! The British and the French slaughtered each other in seven major wars between 1689 and 1815.
The carnage continued in the middle of the eighteenth century when the major powers of Europe- Austria, Prussia, Britain and France fought the “Seven Years’ War” from 1756 to ‘63. Just imagine its consequences: the British exchequer wasted 160 million pounds whereas Prussia ‘sacrificed’ half a million souls. As if human life had no worth, and who says that lessons could be learnt from history, the same Prussian state, yet again, engaged itself in the “Seven Weeks’ War” with Austria in the later half of the nineteenth century.
Those who do not learn from their mistakes are condemned to repeat them. The two World Wars in the twentieth century were a testimony that the Europeans had learnt no lesson from their bloody history. Facts speak for themselves: in the First World War that went on for four years, ten million lost their lives and twenty million were wounded. These were horrendous figures by any standard. Not for the ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ Europeans. One feels aghast because within a span of two decades, the same people were at each others’ throats, again. This time they were even more brutish as fifty-five million humans lost their lives.
These were big tragedies that afflicted a greater part of the world. Did they have a sobering effect on man? Not really! Only the Europeans have learnt not to kill one another but not the ‘modern’ man as a being. Leaving the death and destruction caused by the ongoing Iraq and Afghan wars aside, as the chroniclers are still busy tabulating the mass murder; since World War II, seventeen million souls have licked the dust and more than two billion (about two-fifths of total humanity) have been directly affected by the conflicts in Asia and Africa.
Even if the ‘blood and tears’ factors in war are kept aside, the extent of treasure spent on waging and preparing for war can be mind-boggling. How the countries can be better off if they do not throw away their hard-earned monies in the business of war can be understood from two examples. Napoleon Bonaparte’s European campaigns swelled the military expenditures from 462 million francs in 1807 to 817 million francs in 1813. Elizabethan England as well as Philip II’s Spain devoted three-quarters of all state expenditures either directly to war or to debt repayments for previous wars.
Moreover, due to World War 1, the British defence expenditures soared from 91 million pounds in 1913 to 1.956 billion pounds in 1918, which was about 80 percent of the total government spending and 52 percent of the GNP. How war eats away the wealth and ‘health’ of the nations can be imagined from the fact that those countries that got embroiled in World War 1 were actually spending a very small proportion of their national income on armaments (about four percent) before the war but due to the exigencies of the war, the same states had to allocate around 25 to 33 percent of their total earning to the war effort.
When war is such an ugly enterprise then why has it been waged so consistently, particularly by the ‘modern’ man – the ‘maker’ and ‘inheritor’ of the modern culture and civilisation? It is useless to ask the generals because in Churchill’s words, war is too serious a business to be left in their hands. At the same time, politicians have their own axes to grind. To whom should we then put this question? Possibly, to the savants of the West. And who can be better than Plato- the greatest of them all. To him war is a guilt that though, confined to a few has actually many friends. It is often fought by choice for the sake of competitive foreign trade and as a necessity against the enemies.
To the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, it is caused by the ‘vain’ search for national glory that can easily be attained by the forcible seizure of territories owned by the ‘inferior’ peoples. The German sage Immanuel Kant agrees with Spencer by stating that much of the European militarism was the consequence of their expansion into America, Africa and Asia in which the behaviour of the ‘civilised’ was inhuman, unjust and horrifying, treating the foreign lands and peoples as if they belonged to nobody.
However, another German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche puts war on a grand pedestal. To him, despite all its vulgarity and pettiness, ‘war is good’. Can it ever be good? Never! opines Spencer, who firmly holds that it is nothing more than ‘wholesale cannibalism’; notwithstanding Nietzsche, who expounds an intricate yet fascinating philosophy behind man’s passion for war i.e. every man has an innate desire to be a “superman”? And how can one be a “superman”? Just by being good but goodness is found in bravery which in turn lies in being powerful, therefore, it is man’s will to power to become “superman” that makes him a fervent lover of danger and strife, and hence, warlike.
The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
