War? Why?

What does it take to realise that war is futile? Any kind of war.

Reports of (alleged) atrocities committed by Australian Special Forces against unarmed – and sometimes very young – Afghan citizens is sickening.

Then there are the stories of Australia’s returned ‘veterans’ taking their lives in unimaginable numbers, after returning home.
There is something terribly wrong here!

We reportedly have ‘our’ soldiers shooting civilians – let me rephrase that – ‘our’ soldiers murdering Afghan civilians and ‘our’ soldiers suffering terribly from what they have done and what they have seen.

We constantly hear of veterans suffering from PTSD…that’s POST TRAUMATICE STRESS DISORDER. Let’s check those words:
Post = ‘after’. That is, AFTER something has occurred.
Traumatic = ‘ causing severe and lasting emotional shock and pain’
Stress = ‘pressure, tension, strain’
Disorder = ‘disruption, upheaval, tumult’.
Do you see? PTSD is not just a glib expression to describe worried soldiers, it is a declaration of what happens to people after being exposed to war situations or other trauma.

Let’s mull over the futility of war:
Just one example of war’s pointlessness:
Australians and Japanese are great and helpful friends – as nations.
Quoted in the news in July of his year: ‘The Australia–Japan partnership is our closest and most mature in Asia…’
And yet, in the 1940s, my father and my husband’s father left their families, and spent months and years in appalling conditions in the NT and New Guinea protecting Australia from the Japanese.
That didn’t end well for anyone, especially the Japanese, after being obliterated by atomic bombs.

By no means am I suggesting that we should ignore or malign Japanese folk. What I am trying to point out is that, once upon a time – not so very long ago - we were deadly enemies and now we are best friends. That seems to be often the case with warring nations – eventually.

Sure, some wars are never-ending and these disputes are even more ridiculous. If a dispute is impossible to settle, even after decades of fighting and killing people who are different, or have differing views, then what’s the point?
It is like a grotesque version of Dr Seuss’s children’s story book about the Sneetches, when there were ‘Sneetches’ who were envious of ‘the other’ – in this case those who wore stars.
It’s a story we can learn from.

The memory of the futile and deadly war in Vietnam is still in the forefront of many Australian minds, and yet Vietnam is currently one of Australia’s favourite holiday destinations.
What the hell did that awful war achieve?

Remember John F. Kennedy’s famous quote?
“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.”
Truer words have seldom been spoken.

And just think of all the BILLIONS of dollars that are spent on war, war ‘machines’ and the thousands of army personnel.
The world would have no homeless people, no impoverished people, no hungry people if money was spent on helping humans to live, not to kill.

What with us obliterating the planet by ignoring Climate Change - and making wars a perpetual way of life and cruelty, there’ll be nothing left soon.

“I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones”, (Albert Einstein purportedly said).

Think on that!