If we don’t end war, war will end us

Estimates of people killed in war range from 150 million to one billion

By Chidanand Rajghatta

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EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / TOPSHOT - A woman reacts as she stands outside destroyed apartment blocks following shelling in the northwestern Obolon district of Kyiv on March 14, 2022.Two people were killed on March 14, 2022, as various neighbourhoods of the Ukraine capital Kyiv came under shelling and missile attacks, city officials said, after the Russia's military invaded the Ukraine on February 24, 2022.(Photo by Aris Messinis / AFP)

Published: Wed 6 Apr 2022, 11:34 PM

By one account, of the past 3,400 years of civilisation, humans have been entirely at peace for only 268 years

Writers, philosophers, and scientists have for ages reflected on the futility, yet inevitability, of war. From Plato, who said only the dead see the end of war, to Bertrand Russell, who said war does not determine who is right, only who is left, some mused about its pointlessness. Others suggested it was inescapable in one form or the other. The oft-quoted Sun Tzu, in his Art of War argued that the best, most tactful wars are those which are never fought directly. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” he counseled, adding elsewhere that excellence in war consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without combat.

Despite such sage advice, humankind has been in bloody and mortal conflict for much of its existence with death toll in the millions. By one account, of the past 3,400 years of civilisation, humans have been entirely at peace for only 268 years, or just 8 per cent of recorded history. Estimates of people killed in war range from 150 million to one billion. If we don’t end war, war will end us, said H. G. Wells. Well, there is no end in sight for wars. As for us...

The ongoing war between Russia and the United States - and make no mistake, it is that - is remarkable because the two countries have never directly or overtly fought each other. In fact, Russia has fought wars with almost every one of its 14 land-bordered neighbors - among them Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine. It also shares maritime borders with four countries – Japan, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. The only country it has NOT fought a direct war with? The United States.

Indeed, in their own chronicles, America and Russia are paragons of peace. The United States has officially declared war only 11 times, even though it has been at war for most of its nearly 250- year existence, fighting dozens of wars, often in distant lands. “We like war! We are a war-like people! We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice!” the late comic and social commentator George Carlin riffed during the Gulf War, referring to the US penchant for initiating a major war every 20 years or so, almost always against non-white countries. American Presidents simply throw their men into battle without Congressional approval (only the US Congress is empowered to declare war), whether it is in Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.

Russia does even better. According to Dima Vorobiev, a former Soviet propaganda executive, the Russian Federation has never officially been at war with anyone. Two Chechen wars in 1996 and 1999 were officially “police operations” against terrorists. The war against Georgia in 2008 was a “peace-keeping operation.” And the current invasion of Ukraine is, famously, “a special military operation.”

Yet, the two countries have brought the world to the edge of annihilation.

Wars are horrific. But their brutality is often broadcast to the world belatedly, much after the murder and mayhem has occurred. After the guns are silenced and the tanks and planes have left. Now, with the advent of the internet, livecast, and social media, the horrors can be instant. Even so, the carnage in Bucha and other towns in Ukraine have taken a few days or weeks to be revealed to the world. Why so? We should know in due course.

But reflect on the fact that the outrage currently gushing out is largely because two major powers are at loggerheads - one with almost complete control of social media - and the main battleground is Europe. There are currently some 40 wars and conflicts going on across the world. Some of them are barely a blip on the media radar. Is it just because they have no nuclear weapons? Or because they do not drastically affect the world economy? Or perhaps there is one other additional reason?

Take the Tigray war involving Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan or the Somali civil war, or the ethnic violence in South Sudan or the Boko Haram insurgency, each with cumulative fatalities a thousand times more than in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. They have attracted perhaps 1/1,000 the attention from the western-dominated global media. Even the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have simply receded into history. How many Buchas were recorded – or not recorded – in these places?

Wars are intrinsically ugly and grisly no matter where they are fought. Militaries across the world have codes of conduct and honor. But in the heat of the battle, into which seeps the pathology of the dispute (primarily about resources and exclusivity), all bets are off. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that humankind is still in a primitive state. The simple act of sharing and caring, which involves empathy and compassion, is yet to fully establish itself in the human DNA.

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