When Capitalist’s get erections, countries go to war.
George Papanastasiou
Victoria University, 4/3/03



The world is being dragged to war, kicking and screaming, by those who garishly uphold the banners of bravery, patriotism, democracy and freedom – but who’ll never see their own blood soak the sand.

Picture this: a searing, copper-coated bullet slices the air with supersonic speed, striking and expanding in a human skull. The entry thud muffles an explosion of smashed bone and brain matter on the other side. A bloody mist wavers momentarily, before descending cloak-like on the body slumped below.

Life spent, cheaply.
Is it your father? Your mother? Your brother or sister? Is it your son or daughter?

It is.

Is it romantic? Brave? Should we sing the national anthem?

It happens often, only some distance from you. Violence becomes mechanical. They got us: now to get them - the title of the cookbook of death – with new editions and recipes published regularly.

Over 2000 years ago, Plato directly described the reasons for war in ‘The Republic’, a study of collective metaphysics. (Here I must cite the importance of our classical philosophers; they remain to this day among the greatest thinkers of all time.)

Almost unintentionally, whilst speaking as the imposing and historic philosopher Socrates, Plato wrote: “Let us only notice that we have found the origin of war in those passions which are most responsible for all the evils that come upon cities and the men that dwell in them”. (b373)

So what are “those passions”? Plato’s fictional city descends into war when its citizens “overpass the bounds of necessity and plunge into reckless pursuit of wealth”. (d373) Quite simply, and to be sure, war has its origins in the passions derived of the ‘reckless pursuit of wealth’.

Today we call this capitalism, a word we purposely mistake as a synonym for freedom because it then serves as a more appropriate basis for murder.

You see - it’s a lot harder to get soldiers to kill and die for capitalism than to kill and die for freedom. Why? Because ‘capitalism’ has made a third of all its combat veterans in the United States, its unknowing defendants, into ‘homeless people’ – ‘bums’; and because ‘capitalism’ has an insidious rationality whereas ‘freedom’ has more of a dreamy aura.

And even principles like ‘freedom’, in contemporary terms, are defined according to our avarice and then used as blueprints to manufacture a debauched world – one where the rich, as Plato described, “have no praise for anything but riches”. (c330)

In purest truth, capitalism, of course, negates freedom - and murder cannot be reconciled with any doctrine. But even as we understand these Socratic ideas… we may never realise them in any practical terms because we again stand poised on the brink of madness.

So we regress into warfare, characterised by the most appalling violence - always unique in ingenuity and sadistic in nature. From here we follow an evolutionary doctrine of ‘Efficiency in Death’ – where the winners are those who can kill as much of the enemy, as cheaply as possible. Where flesh is torn, scorched, stabbed, hacked, drowned and ripped in every way. Where man can look into another’s eyes before cutting his throat and then go on to draught rules for warfare, to kill humanely - the ultimate oxymoron.

“War is Capitalism with the gloves off” affirmed Tom Stoppard, connecting a capitalist psychosis spreading violence and militarism more septically than materialism.

I recently described violence in a poem as “a test for passive disposition”, “a gauge for higher consciousness”; asking “Is it on sentinel duty? Guarding of tomorrow? Is violence the armour… or the end?” knowing those least inclined to violence will also suffer least from it. So violence in man, in every respect, acts like a sive, filtering and disposing of the violent, violently. But if we understand this natural principle, as we now do, it no longer applies to us naturally. Collective consciousness can steer away from violence and the proverbial bullet in this game of Russian roulette.

We understand that violence is not a characteristic of higher consciousness so cannot be a trait of tomorrow. Nothing good comes, has come or can ever come from man lifting a fist, throwing a stone or shooting a bullet at another man.

And what of justice? Plato spoke of dispensing it to the wicked or to ones enemies – he said when men are harmed in its name “they become worse as men, that is, worse in human excellence”. (c335) They become more unjust. So nothing is gained from war, nothing from violence. In fact, everything is lost.

The pending war reflects all these assertions.

So I ask you - Who will do the killing and who the dying?

It will be your friend. It will be your father, your mother, your brother and sister.
It will be your children.

And as you sit by unspoken - it will be you.


Fidel Castro, President of the Republic of Cuba, recently ended a speech to world leaders with these words:

As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.

It should definitely be said: "Farewell to arms.”
Something must be done to save Humanity!
A better world is possible!


Responsibility for global violence is foremost with those who’ve the global weapons. If the United States of America succeeds in its ruthless crusade to attack Iraq, the war will be remembered forever as the greatest crime committed by that country in its history. Greater than the cruelty of Vietnam, greater even, than the perpetual crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the genocidal sanctions already suffered by Iraq.

Pandora’s box couldn’t be so big as to hold all the horrors that await.


Say NO to war, any war, whatever the reason.

Say NO to violence – and instantly you evolve as a person.


Who knows, a better world may indeed be possible.