VAGABONDAGE

Men have fought each other since time immemorial. Some wars are fought for power, some for freedom, some for revenge and some for women. Whatever the reason, one thing has been common; people get killed! Man has this animalistic tendency to resolve conflict with violence rather than with reason.

Jonathan Swift, in his book Gulliver’s Travels takes a satirical dig at the wars of his time; Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end. An Emperor comes along and decrees that all eggs be broken on the smaller end. The differences between Big-Endians and Little-Endians give rise to "six rebellions wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".

Usually neither of the two sides in a war is right all the way. Take the war on terror for instance; killing innocents is never justified, but these terrorists didn’t do it because they liked screaming “Jihad!” and blowing themselves up. They did it because they were pushed to the point of desperation (this is what American author and journalist William Blum has to say http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WhyThateUS.html).

I am not taking any sides here, just trying to present the facts. The terror attacks led to the deaths of thousands of innocents, and so did the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Each side believes these killings were unavoidable, and each side has its own accounts of the “truth”. A Hero of a nation is the villain of the other.  

Let me give you an example to show how even the law can be bent; The Bush administration got away with torture of inmates at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. They claimed that “Protections of the Third Geneva Convention do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters, Article III of the Geneva convention only applies to uniformed soldiers and guerrillas who wear distinctive insignia, bear arms openly, and abide by the rules of war.” That sounds like some smart manipulation of words to me. By the way, The Third Geneva Convention, first adopted in 1929, defines humanitarian protections for prisoners of war.

So, what can be done, in the modern day, to avoid wars? I can’t give you any secret formula that we have been ignoring all along. The answer is the obvious one. There is only one path I see, we need to stop being so selfish. Human beings need to start acting human and be willing to share. Most of the wars are a result of man’s greed for more than his share. Examples are plenty; European colonization of various lands and the subsequent fights for freedom, The oil factor behind America’s war on Iraq, The Hundred Years’ War between England and France, among others.

What we need is a wiser human society that does not consider war an option. We need a United Nations where every member has equal say (Yes, even the insignificant ones), unlike the present one where a few powerful nations bully the others. And when a nation commits aggressive action against one of the members, all of the other members should be united in support of that member. This will, hopefully, scare off the bully. As the future leaders of mankind, we are the ones responsible for this shift.

This is easier said than done, because it involves the powerful nations relinquishing their power. But what the leaders should realize is that the present system is not working, to attain peace the power needs to be distributed. The present system leaves the weak with nothing and inevitably leads to war, and war is definitely not the answer. When you think about it, it sounds stupid to say “when we have a conflict, we decide who wins by killing each other”.

Need more convincing that we are being stupid? Then we need to consider the world food crisis; the world produces enough food to feed everyone. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that 925 million people were undernourished in 2010. That is one in about 7 people in the world! The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food. The real shocking thing is that close to half of all food produced worldwide is wasted. (Source:  worldhunger.org).

So the problem is not production, it is just that some people are getting almost nothing while some are getting more than they need. I am not a communist, but the way I see it, food, water and shelter are every man’s birth right.

In any society differences are inevitable, but a more evolved species would resolve them with reason and with mutual interests in mind. Human beings will not survive another World War, but unless there is a massive shift in our handling of conflicts and our treatment of the weaker nations, that is where we are headed.

I would like to finish by quoting Odysseus from the movie Troy; “War is young men dying and old men talking.”