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User:Americanus/war

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Historically, wars have been fought for resources. Resources include:

  • Food
  • Shelter
  • Water
  • Land
  • Money
  • Raw Materials
  • Oil
  • Animals
  • People

After reading the article of war, it seemed to me that some things were missing. After examining the history, I discovered some items that seemed to be deleted from the War article. An account of these follows:

Americanus Hypothesis

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A living thing will by nature do everything in its power to survive.

Imagine yourself in front of a button. If you press the button, you will be killed. If you don't press the button, a stranger will be killed. If you push the button, you are choosing compassion. If you don't push the button, you are choosing survival.

Jesus and Ghandi taught that compassion is always the correct choice.

War is when a group decides that survival (or life) is a higher value than compassion. All groups with this value system are at war.

In order to avoid conflict, groups must work together to ensure that all groups will survive.

The purpose of this project is to ensure that all groups will survive, avoid conflict, and prosper.

It is not necessary to end war in order to have periods free from conflict.

A long term goal is to end war all together. In order to do this, each group must decide that compassion is a higher value than survival (or life).

Marxist theories

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The economic theories also form a part of the Marxist theory of war, which argues that all war grows out of the class war. It sees wars as imperial ventures to enhance the power of the ruling class and divide the proletariat of the world by pitting them against each other for contrived ideals such as nationalism or religion. Further, wars are a natural outgrowth of the free market and class system, and will not disappear until a world revolution occurs.

Biological theories

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All living organisms reproduce until their size or their numbers exceed their food supply, unless kept in check by predators or by natural disasters. For most living organisms, predators are the primary population control. The world is not overrun by rabbits thanks to wolves. Rabbits in Australia, and deer in Vermont, are good examples of what happens in the absence of predators.

Man has no natural predators other than disease, and disease has not, historically, limited human population growth effectively. After even so devastating a disease as the Black Plague, human population quickly returned to the maximum sustainable level. This maximum sustainable human population remained relatively constant for all the millennia between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

Various animal species have developed various ways of coping with overpopulation. Some animals eat their young, when kept in overcrowded conditions. Men fight wars. Lacking effective predators, man must be a wolf to man. If war was universal, rather than almost universal, alternative theories might explain war.

There are two exceptions to the otherwise universal rule that wars occur at all times and in all places. The first was the Pax Romana, which coincided with the invention of the sheepskin condom. The second is the current peace in Japan, the United States, Europe, and Australia, which has lasted for more than fifty years, as of 2005, and which coincided with the invention of the birth control pill.

George Orwell

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In Nineteen_Eighty-Four, George Orwell talks about war being used as one of many ways to distract people. To inspire fear and hate among the people under the government. The meaning of war had become misleading.

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes.
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading.
It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.George Orwell aka Eric Blair: "1984"

Conquest

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Many wars have begun with the goal, stated or unstated, of capturing land, labor or wealth for the aggressor. For instance, the Spanish conquest of Peru claimed the wealth and territory of the Inca Empire. See also: colonialism, imperialism.

The United Nations and War

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The structured international system and the United Nations were principally created to find ways of avoiding war in general, but more specificially, total war on the scale seen during World War II. The Charter of the United Nations begins:

"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,".

It is a historical irony to note that the organization which was created to prevent war has bore witness to over 700 wars or civil conflicts since its founding, while approving just two - the Korean War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Most countries do not seek Security Council approval for waging war, although sometimes, as in the case of the War on Terror in Afghanistan, the UN Security Council will issue resolutions in support of a particular side.

Some examples are:

Even coalitions of countries waging wars typically dodge UNSC approval in pursuit of higher objectives. Three examples of this are:

The legality of all international conflicts not approved by the United Nations is an ongoing legal, and often very political dispute. Some nations such as Canada and Germany, and organizations such as Amnesty International, the UN Secretariat and the Non-Aligned Movement maintain that the United Nations must approve all wars for them to be legitimate. Others such as the United States and the United Kingdom say they reserve the right, as soverign nations, to engage in military conflicts without approval, especially in cases of national defense (the doctrine of pre-emptive war is an outgrowth of this.

France, Russia, China and NATO (as an institution, not as member states) are likley somewhere in between depending if the conflict is in what they perceive to be their respective spheres of influence. These positions were shaped before the very devisive Iraq War and have led to discontinuity in stance on the issue. Most notably, the 1999 Kosovo War (also known as Operation Allied Force was waged by the NATO Alliance without (and some might claim in defiance of) UN approval, with the full participation of France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and with the tacit approval of Russia. In the West, it is seen as a humanitarian intervention to stop ethnic cleansing. In many other parts of the world, it was seen as a war of aggression. Thus the political situation in a war being deemed legal or illegal, just or unjust, is just as significant, if not more so than what the letter of the law says.

It is likley that, despite the letter of the law in the form of the United Nations charter, the ability for states to wage war will remain, in practice, a soverign right. The subsequent debate about legitimacy of conflicts without UN approval is likely to be the sum of many factors, including the overall political, economic and military power of the parties in the conflict, the scale of the military conflict, the harm or good it might do the world economy, the prior and subsequent human rights situations and the precipitating factors that led to the outbreak of war in the first place.

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