“The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”
- AJ Muste, peace activist, 1941

“We have got to understand that people in 3rd world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We have go to understand that they are us and we are them”
- Rachel Corrie, aged 10


Have you ever been bereaved? Anyone who has will surely be able to relate to the trauma and suffering that affect dozens of people following the unexpected death of just one person. People’s emotional lives will be damaged, often for a very long time; frequently the effects will be permanent. The upheaval in general will often be incalculable.

It is hard to conceive, given this awareness, something that is present in most people, how we in the West then find it so easy to declare or advocate war on other countries. This is something that is done with relatively reckless abandon, as if it is a sinequanon of living in a powerful Western country that once every so often we need to go and bomb, or help bomb another country. In doing this, we will inflict, without fail, the same level of trauma that we have felt upon our bereavement, onto thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. Given the trauma that we have felt upon our bereavement (for those who have undergone such), this is surely something not to be wished upon any other person. Yet we do it with such insouciance, that the question that surely must present itself, is how warped must our view of war and its effects be, if we can advocate the foisting of our most traumatic and painful suffering upon potentially millions of other people?

We are not a nation of psychopaths, so it is pretty obvious that this sort of reasoning is not one which is rational. The simple fact is that we have become so inured to the horrors of war, that we are completely dislocated from its consequences upon civilians in the country upon whom it is visited, to the extent that we just see deaths as numbers and statistics, rather than human tragedies, despite the fact that we may have lived such tragedies ourselves. The irony is that the military desensitizes its personnel to such a degree that it looks upon civilian casualties as “collateral damage”- a dispassionate reckoning of human suffering as a set of statistics- but in normal society, i.e. in circles where we are not trained to commit brutality upon people we have nothing against, we find ourselves victim to the same tendencies. In the same way that the military needs to be desensitized to violence so that they may better kill, we members of the public have also been desensitized to violence, so that we do not hinder the killings committed by our military.

This is not to say that military action is prima facie wrong. It is the case that there is little evidence of military action undertaken by the US/UK since 1945 that could rationally be justified; but nonetheless, there are circumstances in which to go to war may be the last resort. The point is that society has lost all recognition of what the term “last resort” means or implies. When people in the public say “We need to bomb Iran”, that’s fine- so long as they are aware that the consequence of this is going to be minimum tens of thousands of people- civilian non combatants- living the same level of trauma and suffering that that person has been through at the lowest point of their life, when their loved ones get blown up or shot to pieces. If that person is willing for such intolerable suffering to be visited on such a huge swathe of people, then fine. But there had better be a hugely important and urgent reason to justify it- one does not realistically come to mind.

We need to understand the consequences that military action will have on countless non combatants- people who though they live in different countries to us, laugh, smile, cry, and suffer in exactly the same ways as we do, and have as much of a right to a peaceful life as we do. Bearing this in mind, we can be aware that war is terror, and it is something that will be overwhelmingly, and radically opposed by all corners of society. But until we each arrive at the understanding that war will impose as great a trauma as we have ever individually felt in our lives, upon countless other innocent people, we will remain inured to the realities of war and its effects on people like you or I.

***

Yes, there are bad guys in the world. But one must understand, that in any war, for every 1 bad guy you kill, there will be 10 innocents, at a bare minimum, who will die alongside. Thus, violence in war is indiscriminate, since it systematically makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. Indiscriminate violence affecting civilian populations with the aim of achieving a political or an ideological goal is the textbook definition of terrorism. Thus it must be realised that not only is war terror, but war is terrorism. The US/UK would do well to bear this in mind when strategising how to reduce terrorism- step 1 would be to stop participating in it.