Today, we are living in a world that is extremely dangerous, embroiled in ethnic, regional and territorial conflicts. Conflicting parties have accumulated sufficient arsenals to unleash brutal war in the blink of an eye. As we speak, lethal weapons and weapons of mass destruction are incubated around the globe for a moment that would change the human discourse.
The global powers have them, while Iran is seeking to do so. The acquisition of weapons is driven by the glory of the state and the urgency of need for that “cutting edge device” in a zero-sum game. Citizens will never benefit from the wars; leaders might at the expense of their soul.
What are the causes of war?
A war is a continuation of politics through additional means of national power. Instead of peaceful dialogue and conversation, the conflicting parties use more dramatic and dangerous tools in their political conversation to preserve their interests. War is always about a clash of interests, whether political nature, relating to various forms of power and domination of some political actors over others; or economic, relating to the distribution of wealth and industrial and technological potential.
For example, the Cold War was a conversation between global powers to advance their agenda and ideological myth to the rest of the world with credible threats of using weapons arsenals as a last resort. In Cuban missiles crisis, US President John Kennedy was threatened to invade the island, but the Russians yielded and withdrew the missiles, hence the conversation of cold war continued for almost decades until the fall of Berlin Wall.
While this deleterious game of rivalry continues, political actors frame these issues and market them to the public as a zero-sum game where the winner-takes-it-all. Consequently, the political elites bend the truth and sell the “war product” to the public as an existential and survival issue. The public is rallied on both sides and the conflict will manifest itself in the form of differences in social positions, power, capabilities and superiorities. The conflict will reach a critical mass and differences will become irreconcilable, resolved only through the destruction, elimination or suppression of one of the conflicting parties. That is why apartheid in South Africa, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the wars in Sudan continue for decades with no end in sight. In some instances the state can destroy itself, and even the recovery from the experience of war will be impossible.
The question is, can we avoid violent forms of armed conflict? Can we eliminate the causes of war?
Einstein and Freud expressed quite opposite views on the ability of mankind to abolish war as a phenomenon. Freud was more skeptical and stressed that aggression is endemic to human nature. It is build-in and cannot be separated from human instinct and that war is a transformation of that instinctive behavior. Freud’s position was not to suppress this “natural aggressiveness” but rather de-form and re-shape it in less brutal forms through imposing moral and cultural limitations. The ethics of war conduct and moral codes such as the Geneva Convention are quintessential to preserving the minimum dignity for mankind. Civilians must be protected and POWs must be treated humanely. Society and culture function as the oversized “super-Ego”, which is at least partially able to control and regulate manifestations of aggression.
On the other hand, Einstein believed the political classes tend to bend the truth in the dark places of human ill-feeling; they are ill-equipped to use reason and logic to avert wars. He called for a legislative and judicial body to govern the relationship between nations.
As informed citizens, we should always ask our leaders to have the courage to make peace and less of their aggressive tendency to wage war after war and carnage after carnage. It is time to have sobered and reflective moments, to stop the madness of destroying the values that we built with our blood and tears, with our beautiful minds and our reason.
Let us move beyond the arms race to the knowledge and technological race and innovations for the common good and peace shall prevail.
Hamid Eltgani Ali is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at American University in Cairo. He can be reach at: [email protected]
