WAR KILLS

THE CAUSES OF WAR

A booklet for everyone all over the world, in every language of the world

Non-copyright, non-intellectual property, everyone can write a version of it, free to use anything that is in any other version.
Each version is identified by date and place and number of pages (so people will have some idea of how to use it).
Source can be identified so that others can get copies, but it need not be.

Something like this can be circulated already, to encourage others to make a start too.

Length can vary, but the standard versions would be only a few pages, cheap and mass-produceable.
There can also be big tomes, full of research.
They should go round the internet on mailing lists and chatrooms.
They should be downloadable from the Internet.

They would be available at all demonstrations and protests, put in libraries if possible,
all schools that study wars in their syllabus should have copies in that syllabus.
Here are no 'activities' such as crosswords with clues about airmen falling into the sea.
Versions can be written for any level of education but the basic one should be readable by a child of ten (a critical age).
Every official in the UN and every country should have a copy in their language.
Everyone involved in any industry to do with war - including the media and entertainment - should have copies.

If publishers want to publish versions they can sell - as it is to be hoped they will, because the productions can be much better - the title can be different.
They cannot copyright any material that is already in an earlier version.
Periodicals can be encouraged to publish versions - as wholes or in serial.
The material is free - but if they edit a version at all, then it is another version and should bear a new date, place and length.
They can include their name so that people know where to buy copies.

NOTES FOR A DRAFT TEXT

(too long for the short booklet, but could be a larger booklet too)

WAR KILLS

THE CAUSES OF WAR

This consists of thoughts as they come - a mass-distribution version at ten-year-old level would have to be very much cut and different, but a larger booklet is also needed.

1. Cover picture - Color or b&w photo of the surface of Mars. Text: 'Is this the planet Mars? No, it is what we have done to Earth.'
2. Quotations from round the world can head pages, including the introduction.
3. Contents. Each topic starts a new page. Here they are not in order, but as they come to mind.
1. Introduction about aims and how to spread and use the booklet. Most people have no idea about this.
2. History of wars and their results
3. Causes - a human instinct?
   • Male child development
   • The psychology of war, and its cycles
   • The need for heroism and sacrifice
   • Glory
   • Greed
   • Competition
   • Solidarity (how is it that when there is a war most people living on one side will fight and die for that side and most people living on the other side will fight and die for their side?)
   • Love of country
   • Forced to fight (most people in almost every war have been forced to fight, conscripted, compelled)
   • Power
   • The armaments industry. Employment
   • The leaders of war
   • Religion and other doctrines
   • Oppression
   • Fears, real and whipped up
   • Fighting over resources (overpopulation - [war is] the wrong response)
   • Causes of wars and triggers for wars
4. Can wars cease?
• Glory, excitement and joys of peace.
• Love of country - to save it.
• History of peace.
• Heroes of peace from every country.

DETAIL

1. OTHER PICTURES

   • Cover picture - Color or b&w photo of the surface of Mars.
     Text: 'Is this the planet Mars? No, it is what we have done to Earth.'
   • Other covers can have other pictures - eg:
   • Goya's Fruits of War or the Firing Squad
   • Charge of the Scots Greys
   • a moonscape of World War 1 trenches
   • Famous painting of the Knight's Vigil



2. QUOTATIONS

   from around the world can head pages, including the introduction

   Love your enemy.

   Do not return evil with evil, but return good for evil, and overcome evil with good (the heart of the Christian message)

   The God of Righteousness (Jewish)
   The God of Peace and Love (Christian)
   The God of Mercy (Muslim)
   - and their followers?

   There once were two cats of Kilkenny
   Each thought there was one cat too many,
   So they bit and they tore
   They scratched and they swore,
   Till instead of two cats, there weren't any
   

   from Sassoon - eg the Menin Gate:
   'Well may the dead who struggled in the slime
   Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.'

   Bits from the poem by ? Southey of the children finding a skull and asking grandfather,
   who says it is the site of a famous battle, but when pressed about causes can only say:
     Why, that I cannot tell said he, but 'twas a famous victory

   Give me liberty or give me death.

   My country right or wrong.

   The origin of Jingoism:
     We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we've got the men, we've got the guns, we've got the money too

   O valiant dead, who to your glory came
   Through dust of conflict, and through battle-flame,
   Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved
   Your memory hallowed in the land you loved

   Lest we forget. Forget what?

   Kipling's Recessional updated (vy qv.)

   I vow to thee my country, all earthly things above
   Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love,
   The love that asks no question, the love that pays the price,
   The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
   But there's another country, I've heard of long ago
   Most dear to them who love it, most great to them who know,
   Its ways are ways of gentleness, and all its paths are peace.
   (Cecil Spring-Rice, I think)

   'In God we trust' or 'In Bombs we trust'?

   We wander now who marched before,
   Hawking our wares from door to door.
   So it is to be an old soldier (? Housman)

SECTIONS & CHAPTERS

1. INTRODUCTION about aims and how to spread and use the booklet. Most people have no idea about this.
2. HISTORY OF WARS AND THEIR RESULTS
   Includes:
   • the aftermath of battles fields full of dead and painfully dying left to the birds of prey and dogs to eat
   • The retreat from Moscow
   • The American Civil War
   • The deaths in slime of World War II
   • The deserts made by wars
3. CAUSES - a human instinct?
   
   • Freud's desperate conclusion that there was a death instinct
   • The sexual drive interlinked with violence, and war's fascination and adrenalin
   • A way to kill off dying civilisations - like the Roman Empire? The Fresh Blood theory
   • Madness. 'Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad'
     (Greek observation of the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires around them.)
   • Hubris (see power) as a form of drunkenness - and people like getting drunk
   • Male child development:
     
     • Ten years old as a peak for love of fighting in reality and in imagination, and
     • how training and environment determine what happens to that instinctual behaviour at that age
     • Male teenagers need for danger and adventure and showing off
     • The lure of adventure
     • To get out of the boredom of everyday life into something that is a Man's World
   • Computer games. Competitive sports as a 'sublimation' but what happens when they go to excess
   • The phallic significance of swords, lances, guns, rays
   • The orgasmic significance of bombs and explosions
   • The child's love of destruction (because it makes a big impact as evidence of one's power, and is faster and easier than construction)
   • The psychology of war, and its cycles
     • After a big war, the determination NEVER AGAIN, the terrible memories, the suffering that must still be lived - and then after a while, the young do not know, and the fascination stirs again
     • The terrible example of what is happening at present [2004], with the appalling revival of war films, pilgrimages, processions, school studies of wars, NOT driven by the impulse NEVER AGAIN.
     • How much of this revival is being promoted deliberately, to make people readier for war?
   • The need for heroism and sacrifice
   • The need for males to demonstrate that they are brave and heroic
   • Female admiration of the military (the white-feather syndrome in women, and how 'there's something about a soldier')
   • WAR IN IMAGINATION
     • Excitement
     • The excitement in killing in computer games
     • The appeal of 'blood toil tears and sweat'
   • ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION
     
     • Rupert Brooke and others imaging the opening of the First World War as an opportunity of cleansing, to sweep away the detritus and degeneracy:
       as swimmers into cleanness leaping
       and instead, the mud, ordure, lice, and bloated, stenching corpses, with disease killing more than battles and today women and children dying more than soldiers
     • War as 'boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror'
   • GLORY
     Alexander, weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer.
     Being attractive to women.
     The glorious paraphernalia of war
     - it used to be the drums and trumpets, the uniforms and banners, the mythology around swords and armour.
   • GREED
     War also as license - the freedom to do all the awful things.
     The Liberian child soldier with nine siblings in the USA but he prefers to be a soldier in Liberia because there he can do anything he wants.
   • COMPETITION
   • SOLIDARITY
     How is it that when there is a war most people living on one side will fight and die for that side and most people living on the other side will fight and die for their side?
     The solidarity by having enemies - for nations, schools, sports clubs, children's gangs.
     How people in power can exploit this xeno-hating in order to maintain their own power when there are internal weaknesses.
     The mateship of war - many people find their greatest experience of mateship in the face of danger and death - why not have this as great in the face of the dangers and adventures of peace?
     (Baden-Powell, Salvation Army, Onward Christian soldiers, sports clubs, social reform movements, the protest movements)
     The need for an enemy - the psychology of the projection defense, so that all evil is outside.
     The enemy as inhuman.
     
   • LOVE OF COUNTRY
     Patriotism and Matriotism
     Dulce and decorum
     It is sweet and right to die for one's country
     
   • FORCED TO FIGHT
     Most people in almost every war have been forced to fight, conscripted, compelled, against their will.
     (Or wanted to get out once they find what they are in for)
     Without conscripts, what would happen?
     
   • POWER
     - for individuals, groups, countries.
     Parallels in modern economics of robber barons and hostile takeovers.
     
   • THE ARMAMENTS INDUSTRY
     How much the arm industry profits from feeding wars around the world
     How important it is in many economies, esp USA, Star Wars research, weapons of horrible destruction,
     Africa where mass starvation marches with children in fancy uniforms carrying automatic weapons paid for by [the people].
     Beverley Nicholl's Cry Havoc 1933 is still absolutely true.
     
   • EMPLOYMENT
     In many countries and times the employment of the male aristocracy has been preparation for war and war expeditions - they kept down the helots this way.
     Military castes with that as their reasons for status and income, cf in Hinduism.
     Some countries completely militarist for these reasons, from Sparta to Nazi Germany.
     Countries which use armies as a way of employing the young - a few lists from ancient Assyria to Nazi Germany and now.
     Africa as a dreadful example.
     Today thousands, possibly millions, are in armies because there is no other way to eat.
     
   • THE LEADERS OF WAR
     - glory for them!
     Much harder to be a leader of peace.
     
   • RELIGION AND OTHER DOCTRINES
     The Promised Lands, Crusades, Teutonic Knights
     and other 'Christian' military orders, jihads, whirling dervishes, forced conversions,
     Wars against Albigensians and Cathars, Thirty Years War.
     Religions of peace and their history - Christian, Buddhist, Jain...
     
   • THE PROMISES OF HEAVEN TO THOSE KILLED IN WAR
     - the long and varied history of these promises needs to be known to everyone
     - eg the Vikings for whom death in battle was the only way to reach Valhalla,
     the janissaries,
     and now Muslim.
     Political beliefs can be as religions, and fighters believe that they are fighting on the side of history - the list is long.
   • OPPRESSION
     - no ways out?
     Wars for liberation.
     
   • FEAR
     - Real fears, and how fears are exploited by warmongers too.
     Self-defence and what happens when people are unable to defend themselves against aggressors
     - how could the situation have been prevented?
     
   • FIGHTING OVER RESOURCES
     Overpopulation meaning outstripping available resources.
     The Vikings, the waves of invaders westward out of Asia, the wars over water.
     How this is increasingly counter-productive because the wars are destroying more than they can provide for the victor.
     Look at the scenes of war on the TV - look at the scenery. Where are the trees gone, let alone the flowers.
     Deserts and new desert - Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa.
     The greatest pollution, the greatest waste of oil and metals, the greatest destruction of civilisation and its treasures.
     The permanently wounded far outnumber the dead.
     
   • CAUSES OF WARS AND TRIGGERS FOR WARS
     There is an Aesop's fable about a lion and a rabbit or some such, and no matter what the rabbit does, the lion still has an excuse to eat the rabbit.
     The War of Jenkin's Ear.
     The assassination at Sarajevo.
     Someone trips or says the wrong thing.
     A teenager with a suicide bomb.
     Peace.
4. CAN WARS CEASE? Can there be fiction or drama without conflict?
   Yes, there can be the struggles against the human condition, rather than fighting each other at any level.
   'Peace has her victories, no less renowned than war,' said Milton, hopefully, because they still have to have that renown.
   Within years after the first human flight, there was US research into how it could be used to drop bombs.
   Nothing has been invented, it seems, that has not been turned to war,
   and there is even the barefaced claim that it is out of military research and war that so much benefit to us has come - the Red Cross, antibiotics, lasers, sonar...
   Ah, but why can't that research be directed directly to those benefits, instead of spin-offs from causing murder?
   Star Wars grips the imagination so much that even our weaponry considers space, and even the boys' delight of Star Trek has grown men thinking that, when this earth is destroyed, we can take ourselves to other planets - leaving behind the unelect, like Noah and the drowning around him.
   Perhaps Peace Processes should be held in hospitals where the wounded lie on the floor around them, or amid recent rubble, not on satin chairs or around polished tables.
   Palestinian negotiations held in Kosovo, Yugoslav discussions at Mogadishu.
   Afghani talks in Haiti.
   Eating the same as is available to the victims.
   
   • GLORY, EXCITEMENT AND JOYS OF PEACE
   • LOVE OF COUNTRY - TO SAVE IT
   • HISTORY OF PEACE
   • HEROES OF PEACE FROM EVERY COUNTRY
     List some:
     
     • The Indian hero in the Mahabharata who draws the spears to his own body
     • The courage needed by the conscientious objectors and draft resisters
5. LISTS OF BOOKS, PICTURES, MUSIC AND SONGS:
   
   • Where have all the flowers gone?
   • We shall overcome some day
   • The Internationale
   • Goya
   • Lists of military songs from different countries:
     • the British Grenadiers,
     • Marines hymn,
     • bloody words of the Marseillaise
     • (what of the message of Waltzing Matilda!)