WAR
Last Updated on Saturday, 22 August 2009 18:10 Written by remg Saturday, 22 August 2009 01:09
I can understand that conflicts between nations in the past caused wars. Evidently, like every aspect in life, it’s all about evolution. In the past even the concept of Nation was evolving with the independence and formation of new countries and the fragmentation of others.
The word “war” and “nationalism” are always next to each other. Yeah, that’s is quite obvious!!, but maybe we should think about it for a second about that… nationalism in lato sensu is just a reflection of a causality, we can’t choose where are we born. In stricto sensu it is the bond that we have to the people around us while we were growing up and our surroundings.
The ideals of your country (the crimes, the culture, its policies in most of the important aspects of the human being, health, education, taxes, and politics) reflect in your personality in categorical way. But I wonder, is the nationalism so powerful that it defines us, instead of just describing the place we were born?
In the everyday life, your nationality defines you. This goes beyond telling a person your nationality before your name when you are traveling or something. This nationalism makes people die and kill, and it’s all because of the “ideals of a nation”.
If I ask you, are you allowed to kill? Your answer would be: no, I’m not allowed to kill, it’s forbidden. A lawyer or a person with any kind of knowledge about the law would say that in most of the countries the penal code is not written as an imperative, therefore, it is not forbidden to kill. The penal code describes just actions that if you commit, you would get a punishment.
In conclusion, if you kill, you get a punishment, right? FALSE. That premise only applies to civilians, military law allows killing if you are defending you nation. That order that the same state establish (to protect the life, and the security) does not apply to its authorities when they are killing people of another nation.
Internal law tells us that its wrong to kill, the international law tells us, that as long you are fighting for your nation, it’s OK to kill.
What kind of logic is that?
Like I said at the beginning, I can understand that wars existed in the past but now that the gates of technology, science and knowledge in general are opening for us, we cannot let ourselves support wars.
The world its opening for all of us, the globalization, the mass media, the communications are thing that are leading us to the internationalization.
WAR IN GRAPHICS
Global Distribution of Military Expenditure in 2007
Military Expenditure Increase 1998 -2007
Allocation of US Taxes 2009
US Military expending vs the World, 2008
(In billions of Dollars and total %)
2008 TOTAL Military Expending: 1,473 Trillion
As you can see the graphics tell us that the nations are expending more and more money in military that ever!
Could you imagine if that money were invested in science to improve our health, take care of the world and discover the universe, or education or to create abbondanza and a world without hunger, suffering.
It is time for us to let Machiavelli (the Prince) and Sun Tsu (Art of War) in our book shell as an anecdote of the past, they were literary master pieces but they shouldn’t be applied anymore.
Maybe I can dream for a second that in the future the Republic of Plato or Thomas More’s Utopia became a reality… maybe by then we’ll be able to talk about fairness, justice and equality.
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