Forever wars

Disputes over possession of land, over religion, over ideals - and ideas -  have persistently escalated into war over the centuries.
 
“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” wrote John Steinbeck.
 
True.
But nothing changes except the methods used to fight and to kill ‘the opposition’.
We have now come to the point where, instead of spears, instead of bows and arrows, cannons and gun ships, we have the most sophisticated, murderous and unspeakable weapons never before imagined.
Someone has designed and devised these terrible tools of war.
Forever there have been creative men (mostly men) who have used their knowledge and skills to develop weapons with the sole purpose of destroying nations and the people therein.
Why would they do that?
Why would they use fine skills for such heinous purpose?
Because if they didn’t, someone else (from the ‘enemy’s side) may have?
 
In the 1950s, USA president Dwight D. Eisenhower stated:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
 
Is this statement any less meaningful today – 60 years later?
No.
And yet still we never learn.
 
Forever, young boys, after imagining the heroics of war and the suggested adventures, have eagerly raced off to join in the fighting.
This is not something new.
In a different and terrifying method to help destroy the 'enemy', we are now seeing boys (for they are mostly only boys) join the likes of IS after being encouraged to do so by ‘brainwashing’ (people say).
This is somewhat different from the youngsters who altered their ages to join the armed forces in World War 1. It differs by the methods used to recruit them. But it is perhaps also very different because of the way boys can be used as human weapons, in that they are loaded up with ‘suicide vests’ and sent off to deliberately die. (I don’t think that the boys and young men in the trenches of World wars were deliberately set up – but I may be wrong).
 
However, the dreadful facts remain that war and the destroying of societies and the purposeful killing of others (it’s murder, after all) has always been with us.
That is hard to accept, but true.
 
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” (Howard Zinn - American historian)
 
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PS: After this blog I plan to attempt writing on happier subjects – to stop depressing my readers as much as myself!