The Meanings of Wars - Book Report/Review Example

The Meaning of Wars It has not occurred in this mind that war, or “hot war” as the call this conflict between and within nations, can have a positive connotation as useful, appropriate or legitimate procedures, instruments or adventures for instituting change. One can only generally view or define wars in the context of the devastation that may have been caused upon the world’s civilization or wherever they may have been waged. Barash and Webel’s attempt to define it by the number of protagonists or the number of casualties is drowned by their own borrowed description: “I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.” (14) Barash and Webel may have been instigating rebellion in their initial approach to their subject, but this writer thinks they have succeeded in quelling the growing agitation as they moved on to describe very dispassionately the frequency and intensity of wars (15). The highly intellectual level of their treatment of casualties and damages from wars and the very scholarly analysis of the extent of such casualties lend some settlement to this writer enabling him to acquire a deeper understanding of wars and prepared him for a more thorough discussion and analytic thinking (16). Such data as one war per year from 1500 to 1942 claiming an estimated 49 million deaths would come in simply as figures on paper. As the authors moved deeper to account indirect casualties and damages, the figures would create more of a hit on the mind and less on the feelings. This writer admires the authors’ way with words. After they have put the readers to a level-headed understanding that wars end casually in deaths and other material consequences, they would move in to put their readers on their feet. In the section on the “waste of war,” this writer felt a surge of emotion to the description of human losses in the Battles of Somme and Ypres. Indeed, “the numbers can be numbing” (17). And as they cited stories after stories of loss statistics that would now stagger the imagination, one could see not numbers on paper but silhouettes of human bodies serving as “bloody rugs” at the end of conflict. Fortunately, if there was an instigation of sorts, it was strategically watered down by the historical trends. The reader is led to a recitation not only of the human, economic and environmental costs of war (18) but also of the various dynamics that characterized the wars before and after they were waged. As wars were analysed to the present time, one gets to understand the decrease in combatant casualty, the increase in civilian deaths, and the speed at which wars spread to additional belligerents (18). The analysis would also suggest that wars were evolving or progressing or developing, as in the occurrence of low-intensity conflicts called insurgencies (19) within nations and the emergence of terrorists movements and religious wars. The discussions on modern weaponry was a treat to the intellect, how instruments of wars have changed or have become deadlier or more destructive from the earliest period using muscle power (20) to the most recent period employing the threat of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction (21). One gets to have a clearer understanding of how weapons have changed from the stone to metal to gas to atom. Whether we inject logic or imagination to these developments, war would have been obsolete in view of its assumed capacity for destruction, as has many times been expressed by analysts and historians, most notable of whom was Noman Angell who wrote the book “The Great Illusion” where he said that war “had become impossible.” Ironically, three years after he made that statement, World War I broke out (22) and one is left to imagine what else could happen in the future. The assumption or the conclusion that modern weaponry has rendered wars obsolete presupposed that man is reasonable or rational, emerging with a well-analysed decision not to use them for their destructiveness. But it would appear man is not, for the decision to use the weapons have overturned the original logic not to use them. “Never in the history of human warfare has an effective weapon been invented and then allowed to rust.” And yet weapons were developed mainly to defend from, if not to prevent, aggression (23). Modern wars have assumed a new dimension. They have become total wars, more pervasive or expansive as well as more deadly to targets, and they now involve entire nations, not only the combatants. In modern warfare being total wars, all inhabitants are deemed war characters and war is a cause for all citizens to defend (24). As the authors proceeded to explain the evolving ideologies of modern wars and began to assess the consequences on humanity (25), one gets a hair-raising sense of horrifying ending from a war type that no longer recognizes the innocents and the uninvolved in conflict. The count of the casualties in the last two world wars is a seeming miniature prelude to what weapons of modern warfare – toxins, biological weapons, chemicals, nuclear bombs – could mean or do to the world. Today, we seem to be set up in a crossroad between the desirability of peace and the justification for wars, making peace very difficult to attain. On the one hand, more people desire lasting peace. On the other hand, another group, a very influential group, justifies the waging of wars as if life was nothing but a game of boards that they have to win at any cost. They justify wars as an instrument of arbitrating disputes and “achieving glory” describing it even as a “rewarding, virtuous, manly and biologically appropriate.” (29) At the rate more justifications are coming up for wars, it is becoming imminent if not evident, following the way of thinking of these leaders, that no such a thing as lasting peace can ever happen. And one is left somewhat despairing about what all this progress and all these advances meant to man if the imminent ending is nothing but nothingness in an instant (30). There is a crying need truly for a more conservative view of wars in favor of peace. This writer feels strongly for the propagation of the “natural state,” of hierarchies, of the established authority, of democracy, of public opinion, so that wars become unnecessary or even impossible (33). There is hope in the final treatment of the emergence of a definition of peace as “refusal to fight,” and for leaders of the world to think more carefully and cautiously so that wars could be prevented (37). 30 - Work Cited: Barash, D. and Webel, C. “Peace and Conflict Studies,” California: Sage, 2002, pp. 13-38 Read More