THE BOOK TO END ALL WARS

By DENNIS DEWOLF

THE BOOK TO END ALL WARS, which is a prelude to a second book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SELF DESTRUCTION, examins war from the perspective of a metaphorical virus contracted around the time the hunter/gatherer period of mankind's existence was evolving into more stable lifestyles. Prior to that we see no evidence of war. It then proceeds throu

• Language: English
• Publisher: DEWOLF SERVICES
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692081815

Book preview

Section One

The Haunting Presence of Wars Past

Explanation of Terms and Concepts

The neoliberal ascendancy: This has become the driving force in modern politics for much of what was once called the industrialized world. Since manufacture is rapidly being parceled out to what were once called third world countries—excepting China, which has evolved out of that stage—the terms industry and industrial have become confused in their usage. All of the wealthier nations are, to varying degrees, a captive of this system. This system is a product of efforts to redesign the economic system of the United States, begun initially as experimentation in the unwitting presidency of James Carter, but maneuvered into effect under the collaboration of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in Britain and the United States.

The professed impetus of the undemocratic—and therefore treasonous— adaptations to the economic systems of these two nations was the supposed necessity of dealing with what we were told were intractable economic issues. Engineered by a small cabal with a nexus in the industrial, financial, corporate, and political top echelons of the societies involved, they moved rapidly to redesign the economic structure to their advantage. Ensconced and working like a termite in the superstructure of a wooden home, totally unnoticed by the general public and unreported by the media, which prior to implementation by the cabal were bought out, they began to reconstruct the national structure one system at a time, with the full collaboration of every president since Carter. Like a computer virus, they attacked one program at a time until they gained control of the entire system. Initially working through the guise of think tanks and NGO’s (nongovernmental organizations) these self-righteous conspirators are the vast, right-wing conspiracy that Hillary Clinton spoke of and is furtively in regular contact with.

The ascendancy grows through co-optation of powerful individuals, foreign and domestic, who can be of service to the cabal in their unstated, yet increasingly apparent, goals. The goals range from merely shearing the planet of its wealth, to creating a one-world government under their control. Except that they know they are enriching themselves at everyone’s expense, they probably see this behavior as beneficial on some level. This makes them either delusional or clinically sociopathic.

Ancient regime: This is a term I borrowed from the French Revolution. They used the term to connote the origins of French monarchy, which they traced to the Middle Ages. However, it was too excellent a fit to explain humanity’s perpetually familiar forms of governance for me to pass up. I appropriated its use. In my use, it is used to clarify the one type of government humankind has used since before recorded history. Irrespective of the pretensions humanity has deluded itself with when categorizing its iterations, there has only been one evolving type of government ever used.

While it is quite obvious that there are differences in governments, both presently and historically, these differences are quite insignificant to their similarities. While governments have historically found every sort of nuance imaginable in their economic systems, their main form of government has always been control through force and exploitation of the many by the few. The control mechanisms used throughout all recorded history have been very similar; assumed and actual coercion.

The differences in use and methods of coercion are only nuanced according to the necessity and insistence of getting the various historical cultures to cooperate. Always, behind all methods of coercion, exceptionally violent or just implied, is the threat of a military. AR (ancient regime) societies are all very similar in structure, with the differences small in comparison to the similarities. I will refer to the term ancient regime (AR) whenever I am referring to situations where it is necessary to make clear that this is the ancient behavior of societies that use war as the uniting factor of a society.

Matrix: the social, political, technological, and psychological mix in which we live, the contrived venue or milieu both apparent and psychological. It is the societal structure that we live out our lives in, like a goldfish in a bowl. Each of us lives in the local version of the matrix, to which we are the main psychological contributors to its upkeep. There is nothing particularly real about the matrix. It is a mental construct, not truly of the essence of reality we ascribe to it. The matrix is what we individually and collectively make it out to be, and time adapts this cage perennially. When I refer to this matrix, I refer usually to the collective reality we’re convinced we perceive, which is actually not reality, but just our belief of what reality is. A child perceives Santa Claus as a reality, but is he? Or is he just a perspective parading as reality?

Neoconservatives: Neoconservativism began to congeal under the ill-fated presidency of Richard Nixon. A neurotic politician with a decided antidemocratic streak that he didn’t even suspect existed, he would foster in his subordinates a secretive and adversarial attitude toward the US electorate. By the time these subordinates had risen to positions of power within the government, they had developed a tiny-but-powerful retinue supported by the worst element in the neoliberal ascendancy.

Decidedly hawkish, poorly intellectualized, Machiavellian through and through, they use any means at their disposal to achieve their goals. Delusional self-aggrandizers, they use the pay-to-play system to great advantage. Like the ascendancy, they make copious use of the pseudo-intellectualism of the think tanks and media, which serves really as a sycophantic extension of their agendas, to sell their ill-fated, usually rehashed imperial concepts to the public.

They have, these days, become part and parcel of the ascendancy, its right wing, with the difference being in the greater use of the Pentagon and intelligence operatives than the standard ascendancy adherent. They foresee the United States as the hegemon in a global empire. Their lack of self-examination of their own motivations and agendas protects them from facing the facts about their senseless crusades and fascistic direction. They are self-serving, power-hungry climbers who are bound to fail, and no amount of faux intellectual support will prevent it. Their antidemocratic endeavors are the very reason their efforts are doomed to failure and self-destruction in the twenty-first century, since they are out of synch with the times. Since they love war, but most avoid personal contact, their efforts might be comical if they weren’t so inherently tragic.

The Philosophy of Self-destruction

War by Definition

If we go to a dictionary to get a definition of war, as with many words, we won’t find an exact definition that is constant between all the myriad dictionaries out there, but we will find a general description approximate to the one I am giving; A state of armed conflict between different nations or states, or different groups within a nation or state, constituting a revolution. As we see, war involves a political element that other organized violence such as riots, gang rumbles, or lynch mobs lack. Though the final products of violence—mayhem, death, and destruction, may seem similar to the victim, even in the most extreme cases, these other types of violent endeavor have different names for a reason. They are not war.

Even though with all of these there may be organization, some coordination and leadership, and even deadly intent, they lack two vital elements that are very particular to war. Without these elements, we don’t have war, but other sorts of violence. It is important that we get this distinction clear, for there are people and organizations whose whole purpose is to support war in one fashion or another. They make it their business to attempt to cloud the issue of what constitutes a war, in order to equate war to any form of violence, so that they might make war seem an everyday occurrence and one we should learn to accept as inevitable.

They would like you to believe that war is a consequence of human emotion rather than of an actual, coordinated source conducting it for benefit. In war, all violence is preplanned and highly coordinated from the top echelon of society, and not a sudden outburst of overcharged emotion. Most of us know exactly what a war is, so we don’t have to have it explained to us, but for the sake of defending the treatise, it must be precisely understood that we are discussing war and not just any propensity in particular human individuals or groups of people to organize violence for a purpose.

For a violent situation to constitute war, the two vital elements of a national military command structure and an economic trigger must be present. This isn’t an exhaustive list of requirements for war. There are others. I just use these as its two main vital elements, without which we are not talking about war, but other forms of violence. For instance, terrorism is not war, but a criminal act. It lacks a recognized, military command structure and usually has political goals separate from economic gains. I need to make this clear because there are those who defend war, who would jump to war’s defense as normal human behavior, suggesting that humans are necessarily violent by nature, and war is the natural outgrowth of this.

Certainly, there are violent individuals. Organized crime proves that. But what, exactly, is war? Certainly, if someone were dropping bombs from above upon you, you would know you were in a war. If you are, as is the case with many Americans and Europeans, currently very distant from the front lines of combat, war would have a very different conceptual meaning to you than, say, a soldier at the front. If you have not seen or felt it personally, your concept may be confused if you simply equate war to violence. War is much more than just people killing and being killed.

It is important to clarify the term war because there is a definite current trend to try dismiss unpopular views by using intellectual dissection of a subject matter into smaller pieces, in order to dismiss the argument in whole. I’m hoping to stay ahead of semantic attacks on some small portion of this treatise, in order to avoid the piecemeal, resorting-to-trivial-semantics disputes designed to cloud the issue enough to make it confusing. It’s a way to dismiss the entire argument by questioning some small assertion and resorting to inappropriate analogies. Every antiwar track has had to suffer this.

What about in the case of a gang war? This, for instance is an inappropriate use of the word war, since gangs don’t represent a nation, but a criminal substratum within a nation. In order to prevent this, let’s make it clear what is meant by the term war. Then there will be no doubts as to what I am talking about, so as to put an end to all those, but doesn’t this or doesn’t that qualifier arguments that don’t even pertain to war, just to violence. This book doesn’t deal with violence in general, just war. Yes, humanity has to deal with violence someday, that is obvious, and hopefully that will be the subject of somebody else’s book. But is war a consequence of violence, or is a great deal of today’s violence the natural consequence of condoning war?

Let’s take a fairly current event as an example that may shed some light on the difference between certain types of violence and war. The event has many of the elements of war, but it is not war. Take the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s as an example of something that is not a war, but can closely mimic the inherent violence. Notice it is called a genocide—and not the war in Rwanda—for a reason. While it did have many of the elements of war, and indeed, may have seemed very familiar to people present that might have been to a war, most especially if they had witnessed a civil war where members of the same society disputed control over the command structure of a society, it was not a war. Why? Because while it did have some elite coordination from the higher echelons of Rwandan society, it lacked the two vital elements of war, a military command structure and a clearly defined economic agenda.

A situation can have one or the other, but one is not enough. It must have both elements working in conjunction. What transpired might be closer to a lynch mob than a war, or to a massacre where there is little or no armed resistance, although one not perpetrated directly by a military. Armed groups can appear to have a military bearing. While the author dismisses all forms of violence to be something for humanity to endeavor to rise above, I focus this book on an end to war as the necessary first step to the ending of the cycle of violence on this planet.

It is important, especially for historical reasons, that we define war clearly, or those vested in this most exceptionally remunerative of all human endeavors will dispute tirelessly its efficacy and origins. The term war has legal and social implications that allow its instigators leeway to confuse observers. The Korean War was called the Korean Conflict, a police action, in its time to avoid the complications that calling it a war would have had in that era of the early United Nations interference into wars. Yet people were not fooled by semantic distinctions, for today it is referred to by most as the Korean War. The war, on both sides, had military command structures and economic motivations, albeit clouded in ideological flimflam.

People no longer make these semantic distinctions today, since they are useless. Most people recognize the Korean War as a war regardless of what lawyers and politicians profess. So, we see that war is obvious to people regardless of how you try to twist reality around legal nuance. What is likely to be more confusing, though, is human violence organized so that it starts to appear like a war. We hear terms like gang wars, which, of course are not wars.

To the average person, it might seem trivial, but it is important that we keep our terms straight—as in the case of Rwanda, where the use of the word war could have had political ramifications that went either way for intervention or nonintervention. We have to remember that politicians use semantic arguments to cover their tails and also to avoid responsibilities they need to address. But be assured, regardless of the rhetoric, the reason for nonintervention in Rwanda had little to do with the use of the word war and everything to do with political will. Had there been oil in Rwanda, there would have been a war in Rwanda, meeting both criteria. Let’s move on.

When we looked at the definition of war, I spoke of the two vital elements to war that I introduced momentarily and very casually. Now we have to explore these two vital elements to war to make our definition complete. In doing so, we will shed some light on the mechanisms that drive war. The first of these vital elements, apparent in the definition, was a command structure driven by national politics in an international arena. The second vital element is buried in the first—in its national purpose. This purpose has been historically kept concealed and left out of any definition or conversation of war for quite some time, yet it defines war’s true nature in economic gain.

Let’s look at the first vital element, and then move on to the second vital element. To make the truncated dictionary definition clearer requires a few words to clarify how a war is led, so that we are clear about what causes the conflicts that arises between nations. A tribal or national military command structure coordinates combat in conjunction with or through a political contingent; that is blatantly apparent. In all societies that practice war, the population is well aware that there is a military that either runs the society outright or works at the behest of the political form the society has taken. These war societies accept as a matter of everyday occurrence that this is a necessary element of their society.

This, the most apparent of all societal structures, we will call the war complex. The war complex is the conjunction between military and political systems working in tandem. This complex does—and always has—worked in unison with various supporting logistical structures that range from industrial to agricultural to financial providers, even to religious collaboration.

Let’s look closely at the various aspects of the command structure before we move on to the providers. What makes a military organization different from other forms of coordinated violence organizations is the complicated command and logistical structures of a military command. Most significantly, other violent organizations lack the huge logistical support of—and general participation of—

the culture in which they operate. This makes a war a national commitment and not just some scattered, violent affair. A war has the backing, at least initially, of a significant portion of the society, or it would be foolish for a command structure to fight it, since, without popular support, a negative outcome could well overturn the system that fostered the war in the first place.

But what do we mean when we say a significant portion of population, and what is this command structure? I will answer these questions one at a time. Let’s begin with what we mean by a significant portion of the population. By this, we are actually referring to that portion of the population that actually has any real influence in society, or 20 percent, as determined by Noam Chomsky in Manufactured Consent. This is a number that I feel has been greatly reduced since the writing of his book, due to the ascendancy’s reorganization of society (covered later). This 20 percent of the nation (much smaller in dictatorships) represents the most influential strata of a society. The movers and shakers whose opinions must be considered.

The question of command structure is a bit more involved. Since war is both a present phenomenon as well as a historical one, command structure is a continuously evolving situation. We have to study both the various present permutations of the war complex and the even-more-numerous past variations of the complex. I have devoted a section of the book to the history and evolution of war. It shows how command structures have changed over time, so we can see how we got to the point where we are now. It is vital to understand this, or I wouldn’t have troubled you with an otherwise possibly tedious history lesson, rehashing facts learned in school.

Regardless of how command structures have evolved and changed over time, there are common threads that run through all command structures—in societies both past and present—that define them. The most well-known aspect of a command structure is the system of ranks. The ranks generally correspond to class structures prevalent in the society. Officer ranks are reserved for the upper classes in a society, while the lesser ranks are much more numerously inhabited by the lower classes. In modern societies, this is not as steadfast a rule. Proficiency in war provides for rapid advancement, and the upper class no longer bother themselves with military service, but there are social barriers (such as education and other acceptance factors) that bar many from the officer ranks.

A command structure is a pyramidal structure. At the top of the pyramid is the society’s elites. These elites are either military or civilians of high rank or authority. There is what is called a chain of command that incorporates both political and military figures into it. Most current, industrialized societies practice very similar procedures of military command structure, so the differences between them is insignificant. Besides the military command, lurking behind the scenes of the nation’s corridors of power, there are also lesser known but equally powerful members of the war complex. These are the arms brokers and financiers that make war possible. They are not in the chain of command, but they have to be dealt with, so they might as well be, though they’d never agree to any form of control put upon them.

Only those members of the military who are at the top of the chain of command, leaders who are vested in the system, are privy to a war’s actual motives and goals. These generals and admirals are highly regarded, highly motivated, and highly compensated. Anybody who hasn’t reached this level and hasn’t yet been bought into the system will never be briefed as to what a particular war is really about. Even for these privileged characters, there are questions never to be asked or delved into, like questions about the war’s true benefactors. Except for this privileged few, to everybody who is involved in a particular war, the war’s true motivations won’t be known for some time, until historical records are released, or perhaps not even until after their deaths, when the verdict of history is finally in. Even then, this verdict will be the property of academia and perpetually debated, usually avoiding the obvious question as to who benefited from a particular war. The names are not hard to find years after the war, but names of who benefitted from the war are rarely exposed.

For those people who have come into contact with this command structure at its lower levels, the most lingering effects of military contact will be the discipline instilled in them. Even if you have never come in contact with the military, you still will, at some point in your life, come in contact with the command structure of your nation and its discipline, at least at its lowest levels. Discipline, correctly understood, is another word for unflagging cooperation and support—or else you suffer the consequences of denial of authority. If you have been pulled over for a ticket, you have come into contact with this command structure enforcing its will upon the general public. This is the lower-level national and state command structure in its most irreproachable capacity, simply enforcing the law on its calmest level, apparently harmless if not provoked.

For war’s prosecution, the command structure is at its most quintessential form and its highest disciplinary level. Command structures are only possible where there is discipline. This discipline can be either voluntarily or involuntarily imposed or applied. You can agree to go along or not, but refusal has its consequences. Command structures function at their best under conditions where people agree to the imposition of discipline rather than having it forced upon them, but it does work either way. You can shoot people for desertion, or you can convince them of their duty. The person driven by personal values will defend a defensive position much longer than the person who gets shot either way

That soldiers, sailors, and airmen volunteer to undergo the rigors of discipline and face the dangers of war for meager reward is an odd aspect of human behavior. It begs the question of why people support war when they have so much to risk and so little to gain. Why, in fact, does a society support a war? There are many factors to this to consider, and they will be addressed later in the treatise. For now, let us get clear on what a war is and is not.

The second vital element to war will begin to elicit some disputation and a bit of animus because I am kicking a sacred cow and, at the same time, implicating all of my species in the process. Whether anyone likes it or not, I must still make this statement. Listen closely. There has never been, and there never will be, a war fought on this planet that does not have at least some element of economic motivation involved in it. In modern times, especially since the advent of the Enlightenment, modern political or military complexes have sought to obscure these cleverly hidden, never-to-be-spoken-of economic motivations.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century brought with it a new social order based on the voluntary cooperation of the commoner rather than enforced cooperation through his or her subjugation or enslavement. This brought a new, more enlightened view of social responsibility, since the belief in the divine rights of nobility began to fade in the Renaissance, and social participation in society had to become more general. It finally brought an end to powerful players doing as they pleased without regard to public opinion. There was a final end to leaders sanctioned by God, doing God’s will—or so it was said.

Since that time, coinciding with feudal nobility’s demise, the modern persuasion toward war took on subtler tones. Since that time, it requires crafting a complex set of schemes and subterfuges—cleverly devised to garner popular support—before the military complex unleashes the dogs of war. The general population by its open or tacit approval then makes themselves accomplice to the war’s initiation without ever knowing the true facts behind its initiation, causes, and projected gains. Yet the fact that societies are so easily led astray, usually accepting even questionable versions of facts, attests to the fact that they condone war as an instrument of policy even at the cost of their own lives, wealth, and integrity.

Since humanity is, at last, evolving a conscience over the past hundred years or so, in our current times of readily available resources, it is important to the instigators of these conflicts to develop massive support mechanisms to propagate various ruses, conspiracies, and justifications to bring their schemes to wage war to fruition. Regardless of how the war is portrayed for general consumption, at the very root of all wars is at least one—though likely several—powerful interests that have the motive of gain of some sort. Wars are not a matter of national temperament as often portrayed. It is not questions of national honor or international threats that cause wars, but insults and threats to someone’s profits. For economic interests, translated as powerful players, it is imperative to be gathered into a political force that will use the nation’s political clout to restore their present and/or future business goals to viability, should anyone threaten them. Should this entail war, so be it.

Besides the military complex, which is always vested in war, ready to fight at any moment, in any war of any sort, at any time, there are always other elements of society that can be counted on to rally to supporting war. These elements are always searching for a reason for another war out of purely economic motivations. These economic motives constitute themselves as war profits, increased markets for products, control of financial mechanisms of war, and other windfall gains possible in conflict.

These motives are then mated to the military strategies of geopolitical positioning, proxy wars, power struggles, international power struggles, revolts, and the protection of trade routes that the military specializes in to create an unstoppable lobby. Through the mutually beneficial mating of the military to the economic sector and its main screen in the media, working in conjunction with the oligarchic junta controlling all societies, war is very easily contrived. Selling it to the rest of the society is a very practiced art, centuries old. I cannot think of a war in our present times being fought for any other reason than economic, if truth be said.

Through whatever media a modern nation’s political system might use to sell its pretext, it disguises its economic or geopolitical motivations. It transforms economic motivations into a series of prepositioned, hypothetical, arcane threats to the safety and security of a society, or even an assault on its belief systems, if that will work. A series of justifications are proffered that range from the reasonable to the plausible to the hypocritical to the absurd.

It might seem exceptionally odd that rich societies that practice free speech and thought are often persuaded to war by supposed ideological threats coming from poor, third world nations, but it’s not uncommon. Nations have appeared to have even gone to war over the outcome of a soccer match, but common sense should tell us that we should look a little deeper into what’s really happening before we buy into anything that absurd.

But what about countries attacked by another? Even countries that can justifiably claim self-defense, if we look closely at why this nation is being attacked, we would come to the conclusion that the war is being fought mainly to protect the wealth of the ruling oligarchy in the victimized nation. A country’s resources don’t just sit there unattended; someone owns them. Could this just be the consequence of some powerful player in one country being unhappy with the price he receives selling goods from some powerful player in another country? People are very easily convinced that the wealth they are protecting is theirs, if only in some secondary way. Occupiers aren’t interested in the petty belongings of the average person. They fought a war with a stated purpose and goal in mind. In modern times, war’s rarely petty theft. It usually involves national resources and geopolitical positioning. The positioning to protect trade and product routes.

For instance, in the American South, there’re still many people, even one hundred and fifty years after the conflict, who can’t accept the obvious fact that that the Civil War was fought for the protection of the wealth of plantation owners, even though this is brazenly obvious and historical evidence is obtainable. This attests to the efficiency of media to control thought and opinion, even intergenerational, and of people to perpetuate myths handed to them by the powerful, obviously created for their benefit.

Then, as is still done today to a lesser extent, the church pulpit was the media of the day. From the pulpit, political rhetoric can be disguised in moralistic crusades, sanctioned by sources of unassailable sanctity. To further illustrate the economic element of that war, notice the fact that during the American Civil War there were pockets of wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers who were surreptitiously helping the South because they were vested in the cotton trade. Well, at least until after the war, when they realized greater money was to be had in Southern land speculation and seizures. Money has no loyalty.

There are verifiable instances, even in the tragedy of the Second World War, of American corporations selling weapons and other supplies to our enemies even after war was declared. Even as we speak, corporations trade weapons and technologies to countries that build armies in preparation for war with the same countries that sold them the weapons. Profits have no national loyalty. This attests not only to the fact that wars have economic motivations, but also that the same elements in society that push to start them do not personally take them very seriously. To them, war is just a profit center. Today’s corporate executives have rarely fought in wars themselves, nor have they sent their families into harm’s way.

In that light, let’s take another look at the victims of a hungry, aggressor nation. In this brighter light, we come to see that economics is still the leading virtue because the wealth of the victim country’s elite is what is really at stake, not the property, safety, or the miniscule wealth of the mass populace. What we are looking at in actuality is not two countries fighting, but two sets of powerful elites arguing over wealth and resource distribution—the wealth and resources being the property of the general population of a nation only in name, since they would never share in the wealth these resources produce, but are bound to be taxed to help industries to extract them through subsidies.

The taxes these elites pay, or better, don’t pay, is the only benefit to the general populace from their extraction, except a few jobs produced. If the resources are captured by a foreign power, how does the commoner suffer? Being taxed is all the middle class truly participates in regularly in their society. Should they care who collects the taxes or gobbles up the profits? Whether locally or by a conqueror, either way it will not do much in the way of societal betterment.

What, then, does a citizen have to gain by protecting domestic businessmen from the foreign? It has even been known to happen that in the aftermath of war, the enemy brings more prosperity to the general population than the homegrown regime was willing to give. Case in point, Japan’s economy prior to, and after, WWII. Is it possible that if we didn’t support war, the greedy elements of the world’s nations would just have to fight it out among themselves without our help?

Consider that with a few rare exceptions in recent history, such as the Nazi regime of Germany where the conqueror slaughtered quite unnecessarily, the loser of the war—in the case of a conquered nation’s citizenry—may even be better off than they would be had their own ruling junta managed to survive the war politically intact. After all, had their country won the war, once the enemy was repelled, the damage done by the war would still be there. Now their own political systems would expect them to indemnify industry immediately for any losses accrued by the economic elites of that nation, throwing in some corrupt gains due to profiting on the situation to boot. This scenario regularly plays out in recent history, where way before any consideration to rebuilding the society has been considered, the nation’s profit system must be restored.

In contrast, the conqueror is likely to be preoccupied scooping up the remains of the wealth of the ruling elites, who were their real targets to start with, before they go after you. When they get around to further exploitation and extraction, they may understand the country is in ruins, and that trying to extract too much in taxes until the society is rebuilt would likely net them a poor harvest. While the country is destitute, they will be satiated counting the gains they extracted from the country’s wealth and resources, which were always concentrated in the country’s ruling elite’s pocket anyway.

This can’t be counted on to last for long, since the nature of these elites is to come to some sort of arrangement with the conquerors that transfers the extraction process right back upon the backs of their fellow citizens. Even after a war, the wealthy always seem to retain a portion of their wealth. Since they have insider information on the war’s progress, they know when war efforts are failing. At that point, they will have spirited away some of their wealth to neutral countries, perhaps even early on in the war, while they were asking you for more sacrifices.

The occupiers may even ignite a modicum of prosperity in the lower classes of the occupied nation by their need for labor to extract their newfound wealth. This is in comparison with their former system, which would likely demand restitution for elite losses from their own populace regardless of the consequences to the population, or the condition they’re in after the war. We see this in America, though not in the case of war, where a ruling elite demanded from taxpayers—mostly lower middle class—recompense for their losses in the 2007 crash, even though this was due to their mismanagement, regardless that there was a worldwide depression hitting the nations lower classes hard. They took the money and handed it out in record bonuses.

These economic elites won’t consider the general welfare when it comes to their personal losses, that can be guaranteed anywhere in the world. However, a new exploiter who has not yet become acquainted with the system, or who may want to ingratiate themselves to the populace, might have a lighter touch when it comes to extraction of middle-class wealth.

Take, for instance, the vanquished nations of Germany and Japan. The surviving populaces of these nations did better, I suspect, by losing the war than they would have if the war had ended in a cessation of hostilities. Had the fascist regimes they were under managed somehow to have found a settlement to the war before they were completely destroyed, the citizens of those countries would be faced with cruel and incompetent leadership, dealing with a situation beyond their capabilities. They would certainly have to resort to draconian measures to rebuild the society.

As it was, the great masses of these vanquished nations just temporarily substituted one oligarchy for another. In this case, however, their new overlords had more progressive ideas and took a lighter hand at societal control than the previous political system would’ve ever considered. Odd, considering many of the same faces previously ruling in these nations were in place under the new system, installed by their conquerors—yet they ruled differently. Or maybe not so odd, if you consider how ruling elites consider their counterparts, regardless of popular belief, as related by job title. This should be a lesson to the general populace of every nation on earth to overthrow any leadership that has led them into a losing war, before it is too late, and then to sue for peace on the best terms they can receive. It would make wars shorter, more predictable, and harder to prosecute for greedy elites.

War is an economic venture, even in the case of a very poor nation being set upon by an aggressor mostly for the purpose of geopolitical positioning. For it is understood by the aggressor nation’s various economic contingents that there will always be, at the very least, some cheap labor and raw materials that could be exploited to enrich certain elements of the aggressor’s society. So even for nations that attack other nations just to position an army for hegemonic control over another nation, or because they perceive a future threat, there are still economic reasons involved. These reasons are protection of vital resources, protection of sea lanes, or even of markets; all economic in nature.

If a country (I don’t know if one exists) has absolutely no appreciable wealth and no wealthy or powerful neighbors, it is fairly secure from attack. Costa Rico, for instance, has no standing army. Why? Because it is a fairly poor country, has poor neighbors, and is not near a global economic center or even a trade route that could be currently threatened. The cost of conquering this jungle-protected nation would be prohibitive, considering what could be gained, so at least for the present, it is relatively safe from attack. If oil were discovered there, the odds are high that they’d have to get themselves an army, or powerful friends. With all that money floating around, oil companies, foreign nations, and arms dealers would insist upon it being attacked through their connections in embassies and intelligence operations.

Getting back to the original point, the actual cause of the war, at least from one (but usually both) of the participant’s perspectives, is economic gain. No economic gain, no war. Even from the perspective of the country under attack, it is the defense of its wealth that necessitates a determined defense. Yet this simple fact, that war is about wealth, is never to be uttered in public. This makes me a renegade or dissident for simply mentioning it.

The greatest efforts at misdirection have been put forth, historically, to camouflage this simple observation. This requires the ruling elites, in cooperation with the entire status quo, to cloak the endeavor, since most of us are unwilling to die for the few possessions we own, and certainly not for the protection of the massive possessions of the wealthy. People need to be motived by concepts of a higher order than just the prosperity of the wealthy in order to induce them to fight and sacrifice. The motivations to participate in war are many, and will be covered through the course of this writing in as much depth as possible. I will cover war from its inception in our prehistorical past to present times in due course, but next let us examine a hypothetical imputation that war actually imitates life in the form of a virus.

Aspects of War as a Virus

There is something so utterly senseless in the way that war is so easily resorted to on this planet, regardless of its tragic costs, that it would be easy to question the general sanity of humankind. Are we all brain damaged? Intoxicated? Or has some malady effected our cognitive processes? Perhaps we have all been infected by some rare disease that does damage to just certain areas of our brains, the parts of our brains where cognitive processes involving nationalized violence are processed. It goes without saying that anybody debilitated by a brain malady would be the last to realize that they were.

Brainwashing, as it is called, imitates mental defect in that the victim can’t diagnose their own symptoms either. Something has been placed in their head, and they have since lost track of its source, so they begin to see planted ideas as their own. It would appear to any society that doesn’t practice war that the whole population of a society that does has come down with some odd mental disease that causes homicidal rage over minor, and often secondary, incidents that they refuse to address on any level but violent. These nonparticipators in war would ask the question, Since war is not beneficial, destructive, and unnecessary, why would you participate in it?

Once they realized we were rational and in our right minds, if they were able to watch us for five decades, they might assume that we’re addicted to war. This would explain our rationality juxtaposed with our odd propensity for self-destruction. For only an addict proceeds against all common sense and survival instinct to act upon drives that would otherwise make no sense.

In our times, we treat addictions as diseases because we’ve found it is the best way to deal with them. They were, at first, treated as character defects until it was realized that by dismissing the addict thusly, you only accelerated the slide further into addiction. It’s hard to hold people responsible for something they stumbled into that later spiraled out of control. If we look at it from a medical perspective, it has symptoms and a cure. In that way, you treat the disease and not the person. Have we become addicted to war? It shows all the signs: Always on the lookout for a supply; A nervous tension when there is none to be easily had; The thought that we can’t live without it; The constant preoccupation with it.

What if war is a disease in the more unconventional meaning of the term? If it is caused by an actual contamination, when and where did we come into contact with it? Then you would think, wait now, war way predates my existence. If I, and many others, have been affected, when did this disease first appear? That would lead to question of whether we were infected by some sort of a virus in our prehistory that has rendered us self-destructive and homicidal, a disease of the brain in which the patient is unaware of the symptoms and leads a normal life except for this strange anomaly. Does this seem unlikely? It seems quite as a viable as the possibility that we were built to be self-destructive. What other species does that?

Why not look at it as if were just a disease that causes this illogical behavior? It would, as in the case of addiction, simplify the cure. If we did that, we could consider the hypothetical possibilities of us having contracted an ancient virus in our prehistoric past that renders us homicidal and self-destructive, through no fault of our own. Now we just have to cure the disease, and it’s over. For if we treat this propensity for slaughter as an abnormality, as a temporary, curable affliction rather than a very normal, permanent aspect of our human psyche, it is much easier to recon with, to diagnose, treat, and to find a cure. It’s also a lot more acceptable.

So, let’s grant ourselves this indulgence to assuage our consciences. Let’s give ourselves a little piece of feel good. Let’s proceed on that premise—war is a disease caused by a virus. The similarities between war’s behavior and a virus’s behavior are striking. To humankind’s discomfiture, war began to spread on this planet after our first contact with it in the same way a virulent virus spreads. Like an infection, war has spread by contact, one society at a time, until nearly all were— and are—infected. War spreads like a disease, and therefore should be considered one, if for no reason other than for the sake of finding an actual cure.

Similar to alcoholism, war is a self-inflicted addiction that begins with the acceptance of that first intoxicating contact and ends in full-blown addiction. As with addiction, it is sampled by the addict initially because of peer pressure and notions about it efficacy. War always seems to offer something different than the everyday struggle for survival; like drugs and alcohol, it’s an escape. War, we are led to believe, is just part of the human condition, so what’s wrong with giving it a try? This is the same reasoning that leads people to addiction. We hear approbations about its salubrious effect on the economic prosperity of a society, and we become initially tempted. War draws us in like drugs, at first out of curiosity.

Viruses are not considered life by some medical experts because they lack certain qualities that constitute life. To survive, a virus needs to gather these aspects of life from a host organism in order to complete itself biologically, in order to give it all the aspects of life it requires to nourish itself, grow, reproduce, and eventually fade back into dormancy when conditions are no longer conducive to its survival. For this reason, viruses can stay in a state of stasis nearly indefinitely. Like any inefficient parasite, they will kill off a large percentage of their host population before they either mutate, or their hosts become so thinly populated that the organisms have trouble spreading. Always there are some that develop immunity. They never seem to kill the entire species, so as not to make themselves extinct.

War and a virus are very similar in all these aspects, right down to their respective destructive techniques. The final war would make war extinct, as would the last victim of a plague would stop the disease. When there is no one to either fight or to die, both of these would go dormant. Starved of victims, both of these retreat into dormancy. Unless the final war was the one that ended humanity, the possibility of a future breakout remains—the virus has just gone dormant. Like they say in AA meetings: You are never cured, just sober; in war’s case, just safe for the moment. A virus begins its life cycle when it finds a compatible host. The host needs to meet the necessary criteria for infection and incubation to take place. War also needs a compatible host.

So, let’s see how the virus of war compares to the virus of, say, the flu. Like a virus, war shows no sign of life until it finds a host. Prior to that time, it lies in a dormant state, lifeless