Chernyshevsky021

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On War

From Arkady Chernyshevsky's In Our Likeness: Essays on Humankind Reaching Adulthood:

War is the crudest, most obscene human activity. It may justly be called an abomination, for it is the absolute negation of conscious human will. 5358

There is only a single cause of war, for all the endless deceptions that are foisted upon us, and that is the acquisition of resources. Varied ideologies are constructed to justify this crude behavior, this childish degeneration of thought and communication, but history reveals the ruthless, unflattering truth.

We imagine crusaders as fanatics of a cause, willing to die for their religion; yet the Fourth Crusade culminated not in the conquest of Jerusalem, but in the looting of Constantinople, setting the stage for the triumph of the very enemy the crusaders claimed to oppose. Why? The answer, as with every war, is the same.

It is popular amongst the ghouls of the establishment and their misanthropic friends in the intelligentsia to ascribe the persistence of war to human nature. But a careful observation of the facts reveals the opposite to be true: individual human beings must be broken in order to submit to war, their minds distorted by ideology and their bodies by poverty and ruthless "training" to make them compliant. Without force, the majority of human beings only seek to protect themselves, and are traumatized by the act of killing.

But if it is resources that are the core cause of war, then it is only in the production and distribution of resources that an answer may be found. It is not enough to morally condemn war; we must work to prevent the material issues that endanger us all.