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Preventing Wars.

Human civilization suffered from wars. Now its time we end it.

Timothy Chang

Last edited 26 seconds ago by Timothy Chang

Let's talk about War.

War has existed since prehistoric times, and terrorism goes back at least to the days of the Old Testament (e.g., when Samson brought down the temple of the Philistines in an act of suicide that also killed scores of Philistines). Given their long histories, war and terrorism are not easy to prevent. However, theory and research by sociologists and other social scientists point to several avenues that may ultimately help make the world more peaceful.

“Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor and Franklin

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Roosevelt visiting troops- United States Army Signal Corps

All over the world people are fighting and dying, suffering and sacrificing, praying and purposing that "It must not and shall not happen again." Freedom from war has become the first essential of human well-being over the decade. From the global conflict of World War 2, to the alliance for all against a socialist freedom grabbing, and to recent wars of anti-terrorism and protection, I believe that we’ve failed to ask ourselves one thing. “How can I stop this? How can I stop this from happening? How can I stop the next generation from more causalities?”

Well, there are a lot of aspects that we need to talk about. Not just the fact that we can just simply “stop War.” But without peace there can be no solid ground on which to build just and lawful relations between nations or to protect peoples against enslavement. We can only depend just and kindly relations among men, progress in knowledge and the arts, safety, prosperity, and the preservation of civilization.

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” ― John Steinbeck

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Normandy Landings, 1944

Normandy Landings, 1944

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More people fail to understand War. So what is war? Imagine this. You just got drafted, your life, your job, your family taken from you. You get sent into a camp, where you’re trained on multiple combat skills to better kill people. The cruel part? No goodbyes, you get sent off to war where your commanders don’t care. If you get lucky, you go home to see your family. If you’re unlucky on the other hand, you stay in the battlefield forever. This is the sad reality you’d have to face on the battlefield. Say goodbye to everything.

"More than 1,100 Allied soldiers were held captive at Kinkaseki copper mine, Taiwan during WWII"

"More than 1,100 Allied soldiers were held captive at Kinkaseki copper mine, Taiwan during WWII"

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The battlefield isn’t everything. The battlefield is where people die, where people kill, the ring of killers, but that’s not what’s so scary. The horrors of humanity is also well demonstrated during war. Tortures, violations of ethical standards and international acts, show the despicable actions carried out by individuals during time of war, far away from the battlefield. Most of these war crimes are directed at Prisoners of Wars, or even worse, their own people.

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US Army Sergeant Carl A Pasurka, Age 24

US Army Sergeant Carl A Pasurka, Age 24

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Inside Kinkaseki copper mine, “We were always hungry, and our thoughts were always of survival and getting back home," according to US Army Sergeant Carl A. Pasurka when he wrote in a letter to Mr. Hurst (Founder, Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society) before he died. He recounted an incident when some young Taiwanese girls attempted to pass the prisoners bits of food, and "were promptly slapped around" by the Japanese guards.

Despite the violations of international law, Japan was a signatory to the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, but hadn't ratified it.

"It wasn't a law in their eyes," Mr Hurst told the BBC.

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior. -Florence Nightingale (”The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale”)

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War Crimes were carried out by the Hamburg Police Battalion 101, responsible for unfairly killing at least 100,000 people.

War Crimes were carried out by the Hamburg Police Battalion 101, responsible for unfairly killing at least 100,000 people.

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History tells repeatedly of respectable and caring family fathers who somehow transformed into blunted brutal monsters. One example is Hamburg Police Battalion 101 participating between 1942 and 1943 in the killing of 38,000 human beings in occupied Poland and the deportation of another 45,000 to the Treblinka extermination camp. During this period of history, another caring family father, Dr. Joseph Mengele, committed the incomprehensible in the name of medical research. Principle medical ethics failed when he performed his well-known medical experiments with children (twins). During these experiments, twins were measured to the inch and their hair was shaved within a few days. After all of the research had been completed, the twins were killed with a single injection of chloroform in the heart and then they were dissected, with the organs being sent to research centers (“Education and Legacy Forum”). Besides these standard procedures, stories of twins with tubes forced down their noses and lungs and ventilated with gas, and afterward placed in hot-water vats to the point of passing out just to collect body hairs, indicate just some of the horrors that Dr. Mengele put his victims through and give clear evidence of how far away from any medical research his work was. Even recently, a “incident” involving the volunteers of the World Central Kitchen who were killed by Israel artillery fire, are clear examples of war crimes on the innocent in recent times.

People prepare to transfer the body of a World Central Kitchen WCK worker killed by Israeli air strikes, near the Rafah border crossing, in the southern Gaza Strip, on April 3, 2024. (Khaled Omar / Xinhua Post via Getty Images)

People prepare to transfer the body of a World Central Kitchen WCK worker killed by Israeli air strikes, near the Rafah border crossing, in the southern Gaza Strip, on April 3, 2024.  (Khaled Omar / Xinhua Post via Getty Images)

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The strike was deliberate, in line with Israel’s demonstrated pattern of targeting aid workers, journalists, and doctors. The victims’ cars were marked with the World Central Kitchen logo, and the charity was communicating their position directly with the Israeli military. The IDF bombed three vehicles in succession, the second carrying survivors from the first, and the third carrying survivors from the second. Even in this surrealist version of events, Israel’s war is just and necessary, but, hijacked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his mistake-prone gang of hard-liners, it has gone awry. Case in point: In a widely discussed speech, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer blamed “extremists” in Israel’s government for the country’s failure to live up to its “values,” lamenting,

“Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear. We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.” - Chuck Schumer, (D-NY U.S Senate)

With each image of a Palestinian corpse mangled by tanks, each mass execution in the courtyard of a hospital, each emaciated child who starves to death, and each American ambassador who smugly vetoes a UN cease-fire resolution, the hypocrisy deepens. Yes. Unfortunately the United States government isn’t doing enough to stop war crimes.

But we are. We the people. Since 1960s, the Vietnam anti-war movement was one of the most pervasive displays of opposition to the government policy in modern times.

“Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” —John F. Kennedy

The Mayday Protest in 1971 is a prime example of how citizens used the nation’s capital as the ground on which to stage their disapproval. Activists planned to shut down the city completely, handicapping the government and making it impossible for it to function. Protesters camped out in masses on the edges of downtown Washington on May 2, 1971. They chose this place so they would be able to spread out along the entrances to the city as quickly as possible the next day. Traffic was stopped, at least for a few hours, and although it angered some commuters, no one could disregard the strength of the movement. CIA director Richard Helms remarked that Mayday was “one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the [Nixon] administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.”

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Protestors gather in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1966 to protest the Vietnam War.

Protestors gather in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1966 to protest the Vietnam War.

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Once and for all, let’s put all wars to an end. America doesn’t need another war. So does the other places. We may have failed to preserve human society from mass destruction, but as the new generation, we grew up in a reconstructed civilzation developed to be the best of the century. And we understand that we have to keep going.

Sources: (EM 12: Can we prevent future wars? (1944), n.d.)

https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/gi-roundtable-series/pamphlets/em-12-can-we-prevent-future-wars-(1944)⁠

Umn.edu. Retrieved May 20, 2024, from

https://open.lib.umn.edu/socialproblems/chapter/16-4-preventing-war-and-stopping-terrorism/⁠

(No title, n.d.)

https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/172/suppl_2/7/4578224⁠

Sui, C. (2021, June 15). WW2: Unearthing Taiwan’s forgotten prisoner of war camps. BBC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57465359⁠

Zehner, H. (2024, April 19). Israel’s attacks on Gaza are not “mistakes.” they’re crimes. Nation (New York, N.Y.: 1865).

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-mistakes-war-crimes-discourse/⁠

Anti-war protests of the 1960s-70s. (n.d.). WHHA (En-US). Retrieved May 20, 2024, from

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/anti-war-protests-of-the-1960s-70s#:~:text=The%20Vietnam%20anti%2Dwar%20movement,late%201960s%20and%20early%201970s.⁠

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