Let Them Fight Their Own Wars

There is a question nobody in power seems willing to answer honestly.

When a government declares war, who exactly is angry? Who, precisely, has been so wronged, so insulted, so threatened, that they are prepared to kill and be killed? Is it the farmer in the valley? The nurse on the night shift? The grandfather watching his grandchildren play in the yard?

Or is it the man in the suit? The general with the medals? The ideologue with the map and the grievance and the appetite for someone else’s sacrifice?

Because from where most of us stand — on every continent, in every language — ordinary people do not wake up hating their counterparts across a border. They wake up thinking about the same things. Work. Food. Their children’s futures. The roof over their heads. The people they love.

War is not a human instinct. It is a political instrument. And it is almost never the people holding the instrument who bleed for it.

A modest proposal, then.

If a head of state believes so deeply that blood must be shed — if the grievance is so personal, the honour so offended, the principle so non-negotiable — let them settle it themselves. A ring. A referee. Whatever weapons they deem appropriate. Their argument, their fight.

Because that is what war actually is, stripped of its flags and its anthems and its solemn ceremonies. It is one group of leaders telling another group of leaders that they are wrong — and then sending other people’s sons and daughters to prove it.

The leaders rarely go. They never have. They send. And the ones who are sent do not choose the cause. They are handed it, told it is noble, and pointed at another human being who was told exactly the same thing in a different language.

History does not record a single war called for by the people against the people.

Peoples have revolted against their own tyrants. Communities have risen in self-defence when violence was brought to their doorsteps. But the ordinary human being, left to their own devices, has a remarkable tendency toward the ordinary: trade, conversation, curiosity, coexistence.

It is governments — specifically governments that have lost the capacity to be questioned — that call for war. It is ideologues who need an enemy to make their own power coherent. It is the insecure, the cornered, the fanatical, and occasionally the simply greedy who find that war solves a domestic problem very neatly by pointing everyone’s attention outward.

The people pay the price. The people always pay the price. In lives, in grief, in the long wreckage that outlasts every peace treaty.

So here is the question worth putting — loudly, and without apology to any “leader” ready to send soldiers to any war:

If you believe so firmly that this war is necessary, will you fight in it yourself?

If the answer is no — if there is any hesitation, any reference to duty elsewhere, any suggestion that your particular contribution is better made from a distance — then you have answered the real question.

You do not believe in this war enough to die for it. You merely believe in it enough to let others do so.

That is not leadership. That is not honour. That is not principle.

That is tyranny with a press release.

Leave the people out of it.

We did not start this. We do not want it. We have never wanted it. We want to live our lives, raise our families, and be left in peace by those who confuse the wielding of power with the possession of wisdom.

If the leaders of this world have chips on their shoulders — and history suggests they always do — let them work it out between themselves.

The rest of us have better things to do.

“Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” (Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.) — Tacitus, Agricola

Last Updated 5 months ago

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