War No More?
MCDOWELL, EDWIN
Perspectives WAR NO MORE? by EDWIN MCDOWELL During an interview some months ago with C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, President Nixon said: "I seriously doubt if we will ever have another...
...It replied that in 5,560 years of recorded history there had been 14,531 armed conflicts, or 2.61 per annum...
...Is it because we, like Hegel, think war is moral for nations...
...Walt W. Rostow, special assistant to LBJ, once made a similarly optimistic assessment: The "aggressive, romantic revolutionaries" seem to be disappearing, he said, and the Vietnam war "might be the last great confrontation of the postwar era...
...Ironically????that is, it will sound ironic to people who regard all military men as warmongers????it was General Douglas MacArthur who, following the formal surrender of Japan on the battleship Missouri, cautioned: "The problem [of war] basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years...
...This is probably the very last one...
...An estimated 3.8 million people were killed in the 19th century's battles...
...Although we cannot say something is impossible just because it has never been done, little in human history suggests that man will ever cease to view armed conflict as, in Clausewitz's words, "a continuation of politics by other means...
...Indeed, Gaston Bouthol, director of the French Institute for the Study of War, confessed that after 30 years of studying the causes of war he was no nearer an understanding than when he began...
...Is it because, as Robert Ardrey has said, in the slow process of evolution man was born of "risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers...
...In 1960 a Norwegian statistician asked a computer to count mankind's wars...
...by EDWIN MCDOWELL During an interview some months ago with C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, President Nixon said: "I seriously doubt if we will ever have another war...
...It seems wars to end all wars, or wars to make the world safe for democracy, make for grand shibboleths but bad history...
...So why, then, can't mankind simply renounce war, which Bertrand Russell described as "our failure to live generously out of the warmth of the heart and out of the living vision of the spirit...
...It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh...
...The Communists, of course, have a ready-made explanation: Wars are the inevitable result of capitalist economic systems...
...almost 100 million have been destroyed in this century...
...I don't know what the comparable figure is for Vietnam, where the U.S...
...But who will dispute it...
...Those who have made serious attempts to analyze war and to determine its origins usually discover that there are no facile answers...
...And in 1962 military scholar Fielding L. Greaves observed that the statistical average for the years since 1945 was 2.94????indicating man has regressed even as his knowledge has increased...
...at one time laid out some $3 billion a month...
...And who????no matter how devoutly he may wish an end to strife and suffering, and how frequently he may wish to believe Isaiah, Richard Nixon and Walt Rostow????would quarrel with Plato's belief that "only the dead have seen the end of war...
...Alas...
...The prophet Isaiah, too, had a vision of a time when "there shall be war no more...
...Yet if war really could be attributed to any single cause, how easy it would be to abolish it????by outlawing "merchants of death," for instance...
...To those eager for scapegoats, MacArthur's explanation will seem a copout...
...Edwin McDowell is editorial page editor of the Arizona Republic...
...Is there, as anthropologist Konrad Lorenz suggests, an aggressive instinct in man and beast that is directed against members of the same species...
...While it cost about 75 cents to kill a soldier in the time of Julius Caesar, it cost more than $20,000 in the First World War and $50,000 in the Second...
...But there is no denying the frequent claim that the money spent on war in the last 70 years alone could have built sufficient schools, libraries and hospitals for every city and hamlet on the globe...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 2
