I have realized one thing hard to admit: war is inevitable.
If things go as planned, I intend to live some good 80 years, may be 90 with a little bit of luck. My father lived 88 years and one war in his lifetime, the Spanish Civil War.
In my first sentence in this entry, I am not referring to something that could happen in a foreign country, far away. I speak about your own backyard. Your house, your family threatened by a real danger. One you can smell or be touched by. In Spain or Western Europe, war seems so distant. Things have changed so much. ..Have they?
And then, there is my wife. She is from Taiwan, the most distant place from my hometown you can imagine. She was lucky enough to spare herself from such thing but again her parents and grandparents generation suffered the taste of military and the rotten odor left by gunpowder. Same thing everywhere, no exceptions.
A country may have reasons to go to war, but does a man ever have them? You don’t fight against a country, you shot people, not ideals. You kill citizens, coming from a town like your own. His sons and wife not so different from yours. How can you show anger to someone you don’t know? And yet it seems far easier to kill the unknown soldier and feel no remorse. Just because they said so. Kill a nobody in the battlefield is allowed when defending your country. Self defense.
What are the odds of being in a war in your lifetime? Pretty probable. Did the Germans really hate so much the rest of European countries and people? Did Japanese actually feel hate towards the Chinese peasants or Americans? It is clear that the answer is no. You can say Americans indeed did hate Japan as a whole after Pearl Harbor. But this is only as a result of misinformation. If they only knew the truth beneath that aggression, for sure their feelings would have changed.
From these facts you can deduce that Information is the best and sometimes only weapon to fight war. From the other point of view, Information is always the first casualty prior to make a country go to war. With the world kept well informed and access to information being a non alienable right it would be difficult for any government to convince its population to joint the army to kill. But, all this said, what I really wanted to say is that good chances are you will experience a conflict in your lifetime, in your country. And that should be enough to not be able to sleep at night anymore and to start working to avoid the unavoidable.
But when the time comes, what should a human being do? Defend his country or his family? When wars are over, those who parted are seen in a different way depending on whose side the victory was. If war was won by your country you will never be able to come back. An outcast for ever. Better even change your name. If, on the other hand, defeat was the result, you won't be able to come back either, but mainly because the country will probably be closed for some time till the loser's purge is completed. And the new rulers won't like you anyway.Your once compatriots will hate you because your wife was not raped, your children not slaughtered and you did not have to kill anyone. It is the price they paid for the victory or the defeat, the reason why they hate you. The more they paid, the more they hate you. They do not seem to recognize that you were not the one who drove them to war. It will be soon forgotten. Rulers, good or bad, pass by and their mistakes forgotten. But deserters remain traitors no matter what. Not to kill is always harder.
A killer or an outcast, certain death with honors or hated by your old folks for ever, a murderer or a coward.
Rather than prepared for war, a man should be prepared to die to avoid war.
Because is a nasty business that of war.
If things go as planned, I intend to live some good 80 years, may be 90 with a little bit of luck. My father lived 88 years and one war in his lifetime, the Spanish Civil War.
In my first sentence in this entry, I am not referring to something that could happen in a foreign country, far away. I speak about your own backyard. Your house, your family threatened by a real danger. One you can smell or be touched by. In Spain or Western Europe, war seems so distant. Things have changed so much. ..Have they?
And then, there is my wife. She is from Taiwan, the most distant place from my hometown you can imagine. She was lucky enough to spare herself from such thing but again her parents and grandparents generation suffered the taste of military and the rotten odor left by gunpowder. Same thing everywhere, no exceptions.
A country may have reasons to go to war, but does a man ever have them? You don’t fight against a country, you shot people, not ideals. You kill citizens, coming from a town like your own. His sons and wife not so different from yours. How can you show anger to someone you don’t know? And yet it seems far easier to kill the unknown soldier and feel no remorse. Just because they said so. Kill a nobody in the battlefield is allowed when defending your country. Self defense.
What are the odds of being in a war in your lifetime? Pretty probable. Did the Germans really hate so much the rest of European countries and people? Did Japanese actually feel hate towards the Chinese peasants or Americans? It is clear that the answer is no. You can say Americans indeed did hate Japan as a whole after Pearl Harbor. But this is only as a result of misinformation. If they only knew the truth beneath that aggression, for sure their feelings would have changed.
From these facts you can deduce that Information is the best and sometimes only weapon to fight war. From the other point of view, Information is always the first casualty prior to make a country go to war. With the world kept well informed and access to information being a non alienable right it would be difficult for any government to convince its population to joint the army to kill. But, all this said, what I really wanted to say is that good chances are you will experience a conflict in your lifetime, in your country. And that should be enough to not be able to sleep at night anymore and to start working to avoid the unavoidable.
But when the time comes, what should a human being do? Defend his country or his family? When wars are over, those who parted are seen in a different way depending on whose side the victory was. If war was won by your country you will never be able to come back. An outcast for ever. Better even change your name. If, on the other hand, defeat was the result, you won't be able to come back either, but mainly because the country will probably be closed for some time till the loser's purge is completed. And the new rulers won't like you anyway.Your once compatriots will hate you because your wife was not raped, your children not slaughtered and you did not have to kill anyone. It is the price they paid for the victory or the defeat, the reason why they hate you. The more they paid, the more they hate you. They do not seem to recognize that you were not the one who drove them to war. It will be soon forgotten. Rulers, good or bad, pass by and their mistakes forgotten. But deserters remain traitors no matter what. Not to kill is always harder.
A killer or an outcast, certain death with honors or hated by your old folks for ever, a murderer or a coward.
Rather than prepared for war, a man should be prepared to die to avoid war.
Because is a nasty business that of war.
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