Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day – the day the Great War ended in 1918. Millions had been killed in the trenches, leaving a great scar on the societies involved. Even now the trauma runs deep, with the annual memorials attracting deep emotions and attention. Yet even when presented with the horrors of this and other wars, most people and the media present it in the context of those people dying in the name of the freedom we currently enjoy, a supreme sacrifice and duty. Although many may have had nobler intent, what they were actually fighting for was certainly not freedom in the true sense of the word.
Wars are fought because of domination. Every conflict in human history has this as the root cause – that one group of people seek to enslave another or rise up to repel it and climb up in the hierarchy. The prime mandate of civilisation and its empires is to constantly grow, and that inevitably will lead to empires attempting to take control of each other and their resources in order to expand.
The Great War is a prime example of this. Two blocs of empires formed – the British, French, Russian and in due course American empires versus the German, Austro-Hungarian and (at first) Italian empires – in order to fight over the global hierarchy. The German and Austro-Hungarian empires were suppressed and lower in the hierarchy by the other empires, and sought to challenge this in order to become more dominant. The other more dominant empires came together in order to put down this challenge, and the people and land of Europe became the bloody battleground on which it was decided. Millions of conscripts were sent in the name of their respective countries to kill and be killed in horrific conditions in a near stalemate, all in the name of imperial expansion. Eventually the ‘Allied’ bloc was victorious, allowing them to become even more globally dominant and remain so to the present day.
Various wars since have copied this pattern, the Vietnam and Korean Wars as proxies of the Cold War between the American and Soviet empires with the Soviets eventually falling, the Gulf wars to secure resources for continued expansion and other smaller wars too. Even the Second World War follows this pattern, with the Allied empires against the fascist Axis empires. It is often pointed out that this war above all was about preserving individual freedom which to an extent is true, but this war was still about imperial dominance, with one of the belligerents simply being further down the road of the states evolution towards fascism (as mentioned in posts previously how current democracies always eventually succumb to fascism). Wars are fought for empire, for their expansion into other countries for its people or resources, and they always ultimately serve civilisation’s purposes.
So when the media calls for the remembrance of the wars, do so, but remember not the supposed fight for our freedom and liberty, not the patriotism or the sense of ‘duty’, but remember the people who died as the victims of civilisation. These people were willing to fight for a system that in reality only exploited them for its continued existence, and ensured more wars will occur in future. We need to remove our trust from this rotten system, and build a better alternative not based on domination, enslavement and growth, but cooperation, equality and sustainability.
