The Politics of War

We can all suppose (and hopefully agree) that wars started out as one cave-clan against another for either food, or water rights, or for land rights. Okay, so they might have also included women in there somewhere, but you get the general idea: it was a simple act of who rules the roost. (‘King of the mountain’ in other tongues).

Then, as the time-wheel in the evolution of humankind turned, came ‘respect’ on the battlefield - where each enemy faced the other in rows abreast and went yelling and screaming at each other, until they met in a bloody club-the-hell out of the other guy, when the term ‘warfare’ surely must have been invented, likely by a non-violent poet. (The poets usually did the thinking, and the warriors did the fighting, I suppose).

I mean, just think about the battlefields of yore once guns were created, when the two enemies lined up abreast and at some decided point, began shooting and charging at one another in another kind of bloody battlefield. The victory belonged to the side that killed off the other side, then another poet came along and suggested, likely as not, a ‘truce’ of sorts, to where the fighting could stop and the ‘rulers’ made ‘agreements’ in ‘the spoils of war,’ whatever those spoils might have been at that time in history.

War is too deep of an issue to go into, and I’m not about to lose your attention or fall from your good grace as a result, so let’s consider the present day politics of war.

These ‘politics’ really became ‘policies,’ or, yet another form of rules in warfare. (The Geneva Convention).

Nowadays, despite cutting edge body amour and laser sights with full-metal-jacketed bullets, crude ‘car bombs’ laid waste to  innocent lives that got in the way, much the same as in WWII when bombs were being dropped over major cities on all sides and it was the innocent that paid the heaviest price of war. Not much has changed since the caveman days in that regard. The innocent are always the ones who suffer the most and are the deciding factor to ultimately end wars.

Who will do the labor, the planting of seeds, growing the crops, the harvesting, the making of chairs and autos, if they are all killed off in some useless war?

Our true and greatest enemies of this future world are the dictators. The new Warlords if you will, from those days of yore.

In writing this column on politics, before each article even begins, I hope that it would be the very last one anyone would ever have to write because it is politics that always leads us into wars. It is the root word uttered prior to war.

One warrior once said, “We fight to win at war, for there is no other reason to fight a war but to win. It is in what we ‘win’ that determines why we fought. Not ‘why’ we fought, but what we gained, or even, what we lost.”

Who said that? (Answer at end).

Even now, here in the USA, there has to be a reason to fight (politics), no matter how many people may disagree with the why, it is not left up to The People to decide.

I hang my head in shame when it was related in all of the major news recently that just for a person to run for President in the USA will cost at least, $100 million dollars.

When Bill Clinton ran for office, the price tag was $10 million. This means (needless to say, but I will) that a poor person, no matter how greatly inspired by God Almighty cannot run for President and never will such a person be able to.

What does this say about us? And I don’t just mean in the USA, but in ‘all’ of the Free World where a ‘democracy’ is in-place. Recall that during WWII, Sweden was ‘neutral’ in the war, and yet, it did business (politics) with almost every country involved in that War. Why do you suppose that Sweden did that? Is not ‘profiting’ from a war the same as ‘being’ in that war? Greater minds have weighted that thought, I assure you.

During Vietnam (which wasn’t considered a ‘war’ until it was over), there were men, a few of whom that I knew personally (before women were allowed in certain types of combat), who left the USA and moved up to Canada because Canada was ‘neutral,’ even though it made billions of dollars in the selling of certain technologies that contributed to that war: they ‘profited’ from the deaths and sufferings of other human beings for the sake of money (politics).

The politics of war is war itself, for its own sake—and none other.

That’s off the cuff.

Oh yes: who said that quote? Jason Greywolf Leigh. He is a Veteran of war, and a published poet.