War Isn’t Actually Pointless
People often say that war is pointless, and it must be admitted that their argument is a good one:
What was gained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Things there are just as bad today as when the Western armies rolled in. And the threat to the West seems no less. To what end were all those people killed, mutilated, and terrorized?
What was the point of all the kingdom-versus-kingdom wars? Borders shifted left; borders shifted right; but the daily lives of the farmers, bakers, and traders mostly went back to normal after all the death.
And so on.
Even in the case of World War II – our best “wild man must be stopped” scenario – the facts don’t actually bear out the effectiveness of war. Yes, I’m very glad that Hitler was stopped (had I been there, I might have undertaken to kill him myself), but in full honesty, we must also admit that while the war stopped Hitler, it also made the world safe for Stalin, who went on to kill more people than Hitler ever did.
And without Stalin and a strong USSR, would Pol Pot have been able to kill a fourth of the population of Cambodia? Would Mao have been able to rack up the greatest death toll in human history… as much as Stalin and Hitler combined?
So, even in our very best scenario, a good argument can be made for war’s pointlessness.
But alas, I am drifting from my title subject, where I maintain that war is not pointless.
The Ruler and the “Poor Slob”
One of the more instructive quotes on war comes from Hermann Göring, a key member of Hitler’s inner circle. Notice the distinction he makes between the people and the leaders.
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
This explains why we so often see war as pointless: We’re looking at it from the vantage point of the poor slob, not from the vantage point of the ruler.
So, the truth is that war is not pointless… it’s only pointless from the standpoint of the poor slob who has to suffer and die in it.
For the ruler, war has a clear and compelling purpose: it gets rid of competitors.
States fight. That is as accurate as any statement of history that can be found. It was true 6,000 years ago and it is true now. Conflict is part of the core nature of states; they compete like animals over limited territories. Thus, war serves them.
Individuals can fight too, of course, but ask yourself this: Among the 200 or so human beings who live closest to you, how many fistfights have you seen over the last few years?
On the other hand, among the 200 or so states on this planet, several dozen have had wars over the last few years. Doesn’t that say something about the nature of states versus the nature of individuals?
The Other Reason
But it’s not just because of their perpetual competition that war has a purpose for state leaders. They also need it for upholding their legitimacy.
As we mentioned two weeks ago, every state rests on legitimacy: the belief that is it right for the state to take money by force, to punish those who disobey them, and to send children to die in wars.
If people ever stopped believing these things – if they stopped holding them as legitimate – the state itself would fail.
So, the other purpose of war is to uphold the legitimacy of the state.
One way to uphold state legitimacy is simply to work the perennial human weakness, fear. Thus, we have our modern “war on terror,” including this year’s new bogeyman, ISIS. The terror of monsters works for legitimacy, because scary monsters require something equally big and scary to stop them… and that necessary thing is a warfare state.
Interestingly enough, war is especially important for legitimacy just now, since “forever prosperity for all” isn’t working and the less-favored classes remain compliant only because they’re bought off with free food. So, war is one of the few things that still uphold the state’s legitimacy.
Curtailing war would help the economic situation, of course. But that would also remove the bands that tie millions of people to the state for emotional comfort. (See here for an explanation.) So, pulling back on war would probably be a net loss to legitimacy.
This is especially important to the state, because once legitimacy breaks, it’s hard to get it back. Following the Vietnam War, for example, “Team America Always Wins!” stopped selling and didn’t come all the way back for decades. So, with “forever prosperity for all” failing, war remains essential to state legitimacy.
So…
My point in this article is that war tends to be pointless for the average person, but it’s definitely not pointless for their rulers. It is, to quote an old phrase, “the health of the state.”
So, when does war end? I’ll close by letting Albert Einstein answer that question for us:
Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
That might be a good topic to discuss with friends and neighbors.
Paul Rosenberg
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
People who say fighting or violence or war don’t settle anything are either fools or liars who want the advantage of a sneak attack. Violence or the threat of violence settles most conflicts. The trick is to win after the violence starts.
I’m with Smedley- War is a racket. If you took the money out of war, there would be no war. Regional conflicts ,maybe.
The comments about Hitler also remind that truth is another casualty of war…..
” Violence or the threat of violence settles most conflicts.” ———– OTC
I think you should add to the end of the sentence the word “temporarily”. If your statement is true, then why hasn’t the ME conflict been resolved in the past 4,000 years? Wars only temporarily solve conflicts … then they are re-escalated.
Good article. Yes, war is GREAT if you’re the STATE.
“Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.” — Einstein
I had this EXACT poster scotch-taped to my bedroom wall when I was in high school.
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Enuf violence will settle anything. The more violence, the longer it stays settled. It is possible to kill enuf people to permanently end violence.
Unpleasant fact. Violence is the only thing that settles anything. That is why government demands a monopoly on violence. Threat of violence is a fine deterrent.
This is a good read. I like any author that isn’t scared to ‘go there’ with WWII. It’s too taboo to bring up, since the vast majority, even ones who recognize the mistakes we made with Iraq and Afghanistan, tend to view that as the last ‘good war’ we fought. It’s funny if you look back in history, we freed Eastenr Europe from hitler only to turn it over to Stalin.
I think about Japan when I hear people criticize diplomacy with Iran. Had we accepted the numerous attempts from Japanese diplomats to talk about negotiating an end to the sanctions in return for Japan leaving various places like manchuria( which the Japanese were willing do to to avoid war) all that senseless slaughter could have been avoided. But, it wasn’t pointless for the govt, it allowed them a back door into the conflict, so millions more had to die to accomplish their goals.
Next time you hear someone talk about how you ‘can’t trust the Iranian govt ‘ ask yourself why , after these EXACT SAME people led us into a fucking fiasco in Iraq to get saddams ( nonexistent) WMDs, we should ever trust them again.
America’s wars are very expensive. The Bush and Obama regimes have doubled the national debt and we the American people have no benefits from it. Nothing flows from these wars. Resources in the form of taxes are extracted for the benefit of a few powerful interest groups that rule this country. The military-industrial complex, Wall Street, the Israel Lobby use the government to take our resources to serve their profits and power. Our incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the one percent.
To these people success at war no longer matters because their success is based on being at war. This is why wars will not end and dipomacy is seldom persued.
The man who will not use violence puts himself at the mercy of those who will use it.
It is better to be feared than loved,if you cannot be both- Machiavelli
I think this about sums it up:
Its a money maker for a small few. I cant help but wonder about the people who volunteer to go to war right now.Fighting for? Oil companies. The folks on tv with the missing limbs? Showing they are that stupid? Right now the only place i see for our military is the southern border.We are being invaded.
The people in power who are for these wars are the same people who will go down in history as being the ones who destroyed our country. Evil people who are making money off death.
@yeahsure
Cousin joined because he needs a job, and for no other reason. Zero skillset. Lots of youth like that these days.
Look up Goering’s comments about war while he was being tried at Nuremberg.
1. If Lincoln had not attacked the Confederacy for leaving the Union:
2. There would have been no monolithic USA for Wilson to use to smash the stalemate of WW1.
3. Without Germany & Russia being crushed in WW1, no Treaty of Versailles and possibly no Bolshevik Revolution.
4. No treat of Versailles, no Hitler and no Nazi Party.
5. No Bolshevik Revolution, no Stalin, no Iron Curtain, no USSR, no Mao, no Cultural Revolution and no Great Leap Forward.
6. No Cold War.
I do love counter-factuals. No one knows what the world would be like, but we do know:
1. The civil war wasn’t a civil war, it was a war to PREVENT secession.
2. WW1 was Wilson’s way of smashing monarchy, which he hated.
3. WW2 was guaranteed by the Treaty of Versailles.
4. Germans were already trying to kill Hitler by 1943. They reached out to the Allies for help and were ignored.
5. The Military Industrial Complex of which Eisenhower warned is in FULL SWING.
6. The seeds of the CIA and NSA’s virtual take-over the the US Republic were sown in WW2.
7. In all likelihood Kennedy was murdered because he intended to dismantle the CIA.
8. The USA is currently so fat, dumb and happy that we literally have multiple sub-governments, kingdoms, really, running right under our noses.
The power and money that flows into the hands of those who run these invisible kingdoms (mostly the CIA & NSA now) cannot be estimated, but it makes those people on the “inside” wealthier than the British Royal Family.
dc, should be mentioned, another motive for killing Kennedy was that he was resisting getting involved in Vietnam.
Einstein quote:
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
I assume that to mean that there will not be sufficient numbers of people to sustain a modern civilization. Some might say that would be a good thing.
War is never pointless, at least not for everyone. Some do great. For the ones making the money it isn’t. For the ones dying in the field it almost always is.
Would you have undertaken to kill Hitler himself Paul? I doubt it. Hardly that. Why, you would have been turned into a bar of soap, then a lampshade, then put into a cage with an eagle and a bear and ripped apart. Having died, you would have been reconstituted by Mengele, and then steamed alive like a lobster, then made to climb a tree while the evil nazis cut it down. Then your brains would have been bashed in by a pedal driven machine. Those evil nazis, they almost succeeded in driving the Bolsheviks back to the pits of hell from whence they came.
Thank god we, the Americans, came to the rescue and killed those evil bastards, so that we could fill the world with Jewish, Bolshevik culture and ethics. And fight the Cold War for all those years. What a victory it was Paul! Think of it! All the millions who died under Jewish inspired communism, and the millions more who were beaten and raped in the Bolshevik prison camps! Wow, total victory Paul. Just think if you killed Hitler how many more Christians would have been raped and/or killed. Wouldn’t that have been great?
Go fuck yourself you sack of shit.
“we must also admit that while the war stopped Hitler, it also made the world safe for Stalin, who went on to kill more people than Hitler ever did.
And without Stalin and a strong USSR, would Pol Pot have been able to kill a fourth of the population of Cambodia? Would Mao have been able to rack up the greatest death toll in human history… as much as Stalin and Hitler combined?”
—-from the article
What a crock of shit. Stalin killed MOST of his victims in peacetime USSR before WWII, not after. Same with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which used some of its communist doctrine and all of its AK-47s from Mao/China, not the USSR, and started his Back to the Year Zero program. And Mao himself broke from the USSR to launch the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths of Chinese citizens well after he won a war in 1949.
None of this shit happened during “wars” in the classical sense. None. Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death and sent millions of others to die in Gulags. Mao and Pol Pot just slaughtered tens of millions who they deemed “deviants” when they were in charge after conflict.
It was the LACK OF WAR that allowed these monsters to kill on a massive scale. Got that? A lack of war. Sheeple to the slaughter.
Don’t forget that people. Someday you may have to pick your battle, literally. Choose wisely.