All war is nothing more than 'an organised crime'. Do you agree?
...th the unshod hooves of stocky Mongol ponies. Our leaders today tell us that war must be an option made available to the nation-state, lest we should lose our peace. Some primal instinct that makes us uneasy with war must still flow through our veins, for men to have to keep thinking of new, pallid platitudes and aphorisms to justify war. Could it be that this primal instinct is related to the innate moral compass that helps us identify what is criminal? Let us look at the similarities between crime and war. The former involves taking property belonging to someone else; the latter involves taking territory belonging to someone else because you believe it rightfully belongs to you. Crime sometimes involves killing; war requires you to kill, to defend your nation. Once again we see the constant need to justify war. It is, in the eyes of its proponents, a very human attempt to deliver justice on a political scale. The concept of a just war is not new. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in the 5th century in the year of Our Lord, wrote that a state should not be the aggressor, should not kill women and children and should strive to end the war as quickly as possible. This hardly seems criminal, since a just war strives to be fair. The act of war cannot be organised crime because of this aspiration, it is not even similar to crime because it claims to be sanctioned by a great body of people, a society. It is for these reasons that war is infinitely more horrified, more absurd and more insidious than organised crime. Genghis Khan and St. Augustine lived in simpler times, when wars were declared by caliphs, kings and emperors. We now perceive our modern wars to be more "just" because they are declared not with the fasces[?], but with the righteous, raised fist of democracy. One sad Americanism dating from the Cold War is "Everyone loves a good war." The nature of domestic politics in America enshrines the importance of the individual will as expressed through the ballot box, in theory. The American public voted for Nixon because he claimed that he would end American involvement in Vietnam. He did withdraw US troops from the mire of the Vietnamese conflict, but not before the Watergate political scandal at home and bombing North Vietnamese cities with more ordnance than had ever been used in a single bombing campaign, eclipsing even the devastation the Allies wrought in Berlin during the Second World War. It is a great pity that the ideals of democracy are seldom fulfilled, until the last days of a president's term. But what if democracy could work? Would war still be a crime if it were declared through the most holy tabernacle that is the ballot box? Depending on the constitution, a two-thirds majority may be needed for a referendum, or perhaps a simple majority. Therefore the ideal nation-state could possibly delcare a just war, s...