So, let us take as an anchor or
the starting point of our historical, prediction the obvious result of
such a war and ask, who could sincerely think about a WWIII, without to
be afraid of the annihilation of the human civilization? Only those with
tendency for suicide, or those who act out of ignorance and instinct,
without to be able to think about consequences of their acts.
War is a common act of a
community of people, who have an emotional glue strong enough, to
persuade every individual in the community to endanger its life in the
sake of preserving the community as whole. What are these glues? An
obvious case is family or tribe, very similarly as it happens in the
nature with certain highly skilled animals that live in communities.
But the humans have an
additional glue, the cultural bond. This makes us, us and those others
different. Yet culture is a very wide phenomena, and I have to ask does
all cultural phenomena have potentiality to cause a conflict or
alienation of one group from the other? Take for example the most simple
one, the food you eat or don’t eat. I am sure, a religious Muslim or
Jew is annoyed by seeing a non Muslim non Jew eating pork. The same is
with the clothing. The hijab or yarmulke as well as too exposed women
clothing may cause fury and anger among those out of the community. If
so simple and apparently neutral cultural phenomena have potential to
create need for segregation and animosity what about more basic and
fundamental cultural differences like cultural epic story strongly
believed, religious faith, code of rules, ethical behaviors, etc.? All
these cultural uniqueness phenomena, if connected, arise in the
individual humans negative emotions towards the other, the different. If
we add to it lingual and facial and body feature differences, even if
the slightest ones, it can bring animosity that may result war.
There are many reasons for wars
in history, but roughly they can be divide to two. The wars between
separated political entities and civil wars happening within the borders
of one political entity.
The well known examples of civil
wars are the Russian and French revolutions, which are wars within the
society, where people who were left out of political influence fought to
change the ruling elites and the whole political system they represent.
On the other hand the Spanish civil war, even if also fought within the
borders of the same political entity, was different. It started as a
military coup, where the army, that was part of the political elite,
supported by certain part of the society, used its military force to
replace the existing political system. The Spanish civil war started
when big parts of the society decided to oppose this act of their army.
Then we can take as a different example, the civil war in Rome following
the murder of Julius Cesar, this was a war among the ruling elites. So
if to categorize the wars called revolutions, the question is who fought
it. Was it one segment of society against other segment of society, or
segment of society against the ruling elites, or one ruling elite
against the other one.
And what about the wars between
the separate political entities? For example what kind of war was WWI. A
war among different nations? Did really the Germans hated the French or
the Russians more than they hated their own neighbors? Hard to believe.
Maybe for a moment. And still they were enthusiastic to enter the war.
On one hand WWI was caused
because of competition of the ruling elites, who fought each other for
dominance, on the other hand it seemed as if whole nations were
recruited in this effort to achieve dominance. National wars are
relatively new phenomena that started in Europe with Napoleon and the
redefinition of the European political entities from dynastic
monarchies, kingdoms, oligarchic city states to national entities. The
most common joint feature of national state was a common language (or
what they were told that is a common language in spite of wide range of
dialects), religion and race. The definition of nation is not so clear
as it may sound. For example the Jews mother tongue in Germany, Hungary
France etc., was German, Hungarian or French, still they were excluded
from the definition of the nation. Probably the best definition for the
nation would be one language and one national epic that we all believe
or suppose to believe.
Before Napoleon the wars in Europe were;
a. religious – Crusaders, 30 years war, Muslim wars, Protestants against Catholics, etc. ,
b. socio-economic -Barbarian take over of Roman empire, the Viking invasions,
c. wars for dominance of one cultural empire upon the other, -the Romans against Cartago, the Greeks and later the Romans-Byzantines against the Persians),
d. wars for achieving imperial dominance with tolerance to the different culture -
The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the
Greeks, the Romans, and so we can go on in whole line of the history,
e. battles
among different fractions of the same ruling elite -the very best
example is the 100 years war between the English and the French, but
many other conflicts were of this kind.
Since Napoleon it became clear
that national identity is a very strong tool to create cohesion within
the political entity that gives military advantage, almost invincibility,
when used against political entity that doesn’t have it. For example,
the weakness of Austrians in WWI was the absence of such a cohesion,
after Catholicism, that gave to them cohesion since the thirty years
war, lost its attractiveness among the secularized elites. On the other
hand this Austrian weakness became one of the reasons for the Austrian
leadership support of war before WWI, while hoping that a war will mold
such a cohesion within the borders of the Austrian Monarchy.
Unsurprisingly the result of the WWI was liquidation of the Austrian
Monarchy in spite of their relatively long history, if compared to the
short time the German state existed. And still Germany survived the
defeat in WWI with even stronger national identity than before the war,
while Austria has not, and their identity become unclear. This became
obvious with the Austrians support for the German Anschluss. By the way
the German Anschluss paved the road to the Munich agreement, etc.
So if we look more deeply into
this rather lingual division between wars and revolution, we will hardly
find a clear cut between wars among different political entities or
revolutions happening within the same political entity. At the end of
the day, all the wars are about competition for dominance of one group
of leading elites against other group of leading elite and the
difference is rather the pretext used to mobilize the masses by these
elites. Of course many leaders among the leading elites
don’t have the sophistication to understand this reality, and have
honest faith in their cause. But their illusion based on faith is always
short lived, while the reality is very, very prolonging. I do believe in Robespierre’s honesty, but who survived after him? Fouche, Talleyrand, Napoleon and then the Bourbons. The
same can be said about Lenin, who was followed by Stalin. I could bring
up many politically successful idealists, who against all the odds
successfully changed the political system according to their ideas, but
very soon the cruel reality overcame their best intentions.
Here I would like to start with a
new perspective of categorization of the wars. I would divide the wars
to those to be the totalitarian wars, their aim is destruction and
annihilation of certain segment of human community, and wars with
limited destructive aim. The Punic war of Romans against Carthage was this kind of war.
In twenties centuries we could
find many wars, their aim was destruction and annihilation of certain
human society segment, be it a national, racial, religious, economic or
social segment. The German intentions to start WWII aimed from the very
beginning to annihilate subordinate races. In Nazi Germany they started
with homosexuals and mentally ills, then it went to Jews, Gypsies, Slavs
and probably all the “ non Aryans” would follow, if Nazi Germany would
win the war. An other totalitarian war was the “Big October revolution”,
that at the beginning aimed to annihilated the ruling elites of the
Russian society, then the bourgeois and the kulaks followed them, and
then the Ukrainians, the Generals, the intellectuals and who could say
where it would end if not the WWII, that eventually saved Russia from
ever more crazy plans to annihilate new and new segments of the society. To
these examples we could add, all the genocide type of conflicts, like
in Cambodian, Ruanda, but also the Chinese cultural revolution, that
aimed and was quite successful to diminish the Chinese cultural
identity. It seems, in these days in Syria a new rampant
totalitarian war fulminates, while the Sunnis try to annihilate the
Shia and the opposite, and both sides try to annihilate the Christians,
the Druze and all the others.
All this leads me to the
thought, that we should be rather focused on the potential totalitarian
war than the political war. These are the wars with potential to start a
WWIII.
Let us remain to ourselves;
a. The modernity did not secure the humanity from the totalitarian wars.
b. The cultural belonging is still a very strong biding force among people.
c. People
are strong in their readiness to kill and to be killed for all the
non-rational reasons that the human fantasy can imagine. The major and
most persuasive substance behind the conflicts is the “Our Story”, as
contrary to “Their Story”.
If to look for the next
potential conflict, we shouldn’t look for the economical problems, since
these have become more and more marginal, unless there will be some total collapse of the economic system, as it almost happened at 2008.
We also should not look for the
national conflicts, even if some of the world powers, like Russia and
China, tend to behave nationalistically. But both these countries
adopted the rational modernity as the only way how to manage and solve
political problems.
To my opinion, the conflict that
appears to have potential to become a pretext to start WWIII is
conflict between societies, who look for salvation for their problems in
modernity, science, technology, or in other words the future, and
those, who oppose all this, and are looking for truth and legitimacy in
the stories of the past. While doing it, they deny the modernity as
legitimate way of life, but still are ready to use the tools the modern
technology creates as legitimate to achieve their aim.
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