We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.
– Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
War is immoral. Those who start wars and use wars are guilty of the gravest of sins. There is no justification for initiating war. Killing people is wrong. Like John Prine sings, “Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason for.” It is the privileged person lacking empathy who, from his well-dressed office, weighs enormous loss of life against political gains. This is why strongman leaders tend to be sociopaths. A lack of empathy gives them the will to do terrible things that have great impacts on history. As Lord Farquaad said in the movie Shrek, “Many of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.” These aggressors are evil because they choose to trade human lives for power and wealth. They seek territory, natural resources, means of production, labor force, weapons, technology, or political control. But, what about those who are attacked by the aggressor, what about those who have war thrust upon them? What else do we do when the tiger attacks if not fight for our lives? What of those held in bondage? What can the slave do beyond submission but fight to be free?
Animal
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
– Shah Rukh
Sometimes chimpanzees have wars. In the 1970s, scientist Jane Goodall documented a chimpanzee tribe in Tanzania that erupted into war. She named the tribe the Kasekela. When the leader of the Kasekela died, a group of eight chimpanzees formed their own tribe, which Goodall called the Kahama. These eight chimpanzees claimed the southern portion of Kasekela territory. Revolutionaries, the Kahama males would lead war parties into the northern territory. They would beat and thrash members of the Kasekela as a show of strength. They did not kill the other chimpanzees, but they would wound them badly and make a big show of dominating them for all to see. The Kasekela, at first, fought only to defend themselves. Then, they began to plan similar attacks on the Kahama, striking south and beating their males for show, learning from what had been done to them. Over the years, the violence between the two tribes continued to worsen. Then one day, a war party of six Kasekela males, in an innovative act of horror, ambushed one of the Kahama males and beat him violently to death. The Kasekela continued this strategy of targeted and planned violent assassinations of the Kahama males. Outraged and out-smarted, the Kahama adopted the same strategy as a counter measure. The killing escalated on both sides.
Chimpanzees are not the only creatures that wage war. Certain species of ants engage in battles with rival colonies over territory and resources. They mount large-scale attacks that are massive mobilizations and include thousands, sometimes even millions, of ants working in coordinated assaults on other colonies. In between such giant wars, ants raid each other’s colonies and steal larvae to enslave them as life-long workers. All kinds of animals wage some form of warfare. Male bottlenose dolphins form alliances to fight rival pods over mates. Wolf packs wage territorial wars. Meerkats have clan wars. Male lions form coalitions to take over prides and even commit infanticide once they subdue the rival group. Crows form gangs and engage in aerial skirmishes and mob attacks. Baboons, like their chimpanzee cousins, sometimes ambush other groups of males to take their females, territory, and food. Termite colonies wage chemical warfare against rival nests, some termite soldiers even explode as a form of suicidal attack, releasing toxic substances to kill enemies. Examples of warfare litter the animal kingdom. Creatures band together in groups to fight other groups. They always have, it seems. And maybe they always will. So, why is it natural when ants do it and immoral when we do it? Where does that morality come from? That, I believe, is the fundamental question of the human race. Are we different from the rest? Are we moral beings? Why? How? Is this morality somehow the presence of God? Some form of Spiritus Mundi?
After four years of warfare between the Kasekela and the Kahama, many chimpanzees died. Many more participated in awful acts of violence committed upon other Chimpanzees. They fought not for food, or for their lives, but for the sake of warfare. Finally, the Kasekela won the war and took back the southern territory. Victory.
Holy City
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
– Mahatma Gandhi
There is always a grand idea behind a people’s will to go to war. But war fought for the sake of, or spread of, religion is particularly egregious. Every religion is based upon peace. To use a religion as a source of mass inspiration to drive people to commit horrible acts of violence is among the worst one can do in this world. Nowhere has religion been more often evoked to inspire and justify the atrocities of men than in and around Jerusalem, holiest and most horrific of cities. The story of Jerusalem spans over 5,000 years. It began as a small Canaanite settlement, referred to in early Egyptian texts as Urusalim meaning City of Peace. Sadly ironic, the city’s history has been millennia of warfare, all waged in the name of religion.
Most of us are familiar with the term antisemitic to mean discrimination towards Jewish people. But the term Semitic is much larger than the Jewish people. The Semitic people are those ancient people who spoke Semitic languages. This broad, diverse group includes both Jews and Arabs, as well as other ancient peoples such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arameans, and Ethiopians. These peoples have shared a linguistic and cultural heritage for thousands of years. Many Americans may think, “Of course Muslims are antisemitic… they are at war with Jews.” But, this statement lacks historical context. Muslim Arabs are Semites just like Jews. Judaism and Islam both came from the Semitic peoples, and so did Christianity.
In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the character Abram lived in the city of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). He was called upon by God who said, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others.” God then changed Abram’s name to Abraham, which means father of many. Abraham left his homeland and traveled westward to Canaan. Canaan was a vast land that included Jerusalem and other settlements as well. When he was very old, Abraham and his wife Sarah still had no children. Thus, Hagar, a servant, bore him a son whom she named Ishmael (or God hears). Then, God told Abraham that he and Sarah would also have a child together, and they did. They named this child Isaac. With God’s blessing, Abraham and Sarah drove away Hagar and her son Ishmael, cast out into the wilderness to be gone forever. God promised Abraham that Ishmael would too go on to become a great nation. Ishmael grew up in the wilderness of northern Arabia. He married an Egyptian woman, and they had 12 sons. These sons became the leaders of the 12 tribes of the Arab peoples. Abraham lived a long life and was buried lovingly in a cave by his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, one the beginning (or continuation) of the lineage of all Jews and the other of Arabs and Islam. In Judaism, Abraham is the first Jew, the one who made a covenant with God. In Islam, Ibrahim is the father of their father, Ishmael. In Christianity, Jesus is seen as a direct descendent of Abraham and the fulfillment of God’s promise to him.
Abraham had lived in Canaan as an immigrant. He had made his home among Canaanites and lived under the rule of the land, and so did his descendants for many generations. In that sense, they were Canaanites. But they were Jewish before they were Canaanite. This held them separate from the other Semitic peoples around them. A minority, slowly growing. And after a thousand years of slow growth, David, descendent of Abraham, united the Jewish tribes and conquered the city of Jerusalem. King David took the city by force from the Canaanites and declared it the Jewish capital.
That was over three thousand years ago, and ever since, the city and the holy land around it have been at war, with only periods of peace scattered along the way. David’s Jewish kingdom fell to civil war and split into Judah and Israel. The Assyrians then destroyed the Kingdom of Israel. The Babylonians then conquered Jerusalem and exiled many Jews from the holy land. The Persians then conquered Jerusalem and allowed Jews to return and rebuild the city. Alexander the Great conquered Jerusalem, and it later became part of the Roman Empire. The Jewish revolts led to another expulsion of Jews by the Romans who renamed Judea to Palestina. The city of Jerusalem was then inherited from a dismantled Rome by the Byzantine Empire, which was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces. Then, Arab Muslim armies captured Jerusalem peacefully.
After a long period of peaceful rule under the Arabs, the city of Jerusalem was once again under attack. This time it was the Christian Crusaders. The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and even directed by the Catholic Church. The main goal of the Crusades was to capture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, establishing several Christian states, and after the fall of one of those states, the Catholic Church staged a second crusade to win it back. They failed. A third crusade gained little more. A fourth, a fifth, were much less successful. As many as nine crusades were organized and sponsored by the Catholic Church killing an estimated 3 to 6 million people over 200 years of warfare. The Church sought power and control of lands, and their army was endless. Religious devotion and a promise of the forgiveness of sins brought in a constant stream of recruits. The Crusades was a massive militarization of faith, giving rise to the global concept of a Holy War. A messy mix of idealism, greed, faith, politics, and violence, the Crusades helped shape Medieval Europe, the Middle East, and the relationship between Christianity and Islam for centuries to follow.
After the failure of the Crusades and the final Christrian strongholds were stomped out, the entire region came under the control of Egypt, which was soon to be taken over by the Mamluks. The Mamluks were enslaved soldiers (the word Mamluk means owned or slave in Arabic), mostly young Turks or Mongols stolen from their homes and brought to the Muslim world. They were trained as elite warriors and converted to Islam. They became so powerful that they overthrew their rulers and then successfully fought off the Mongol advance into the Middle East, which was a deciding moment in world history. The Mamluks were finally defeated in 1517 by the Ottoman Empire, Europe’s longest-lasting empire (600 years). All the while, Jerusalem persisted.
In the late 1800s, Jewish people were facing growing antisemitism in Europe. Zionism emerged as a political movement calling for the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Jewish immigrants began moving to Ottoman-controlled Palestine, building farms, towns, and political institutions. During World War I, the British expressed support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. After the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and many Arab territories came under European colonial rule. Britain ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. Jews continued to settle in the area, and tensions with Palestinians increased. After World War II, motivated by a desire to make reparations for the horrors committed upon the Jewish people by Nazi Germany and a general racism that helped most Europeans see Arabs as lesser people and dehumanized in some way, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews were given a new homeland, taken from the Palestinians who rejected the idea as an illegal war crime of stealing their land and displacing their people. Arab countries invaded the new Israel to stop the annexation, sparking the Arab-Israeli War. Israel survived the war and even expanded beyond the UN’s proposed borders. Massive Jewish immigration followed from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In 1967, Israel forcibly took East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The nations of the world either supported the invasion and occupation or just looked the other way. In 1979, Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt, returning Sinai, and normalizing their new borders. Today, Israel is acknowledged by the Western world as a legitimate nation, but it is not recognized as such by much of the Arab world. Jerusalem is now the capital of Israel, conquered and declared as such just like in the days of King David over 3,000 years ago.
Jerusalem and the land surrounding it has hosted warfare since the beginning of civilization, killing in the guise of faith, war in the guise of religion, a wolf in sheep’s clothing again and again. How many people were killed in the ancient and classical wars of the area? How many were killed a thousand years later in the Medieval and Islamic conquests? How many people were killed a thousand years after that in World War I, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf Wars, the Syrian Civil War, myriad terrorist attacks, and most recently Israel’s complete devastation of Gaza and the mass destruction of the Palestinian people? Countless horrible acts have been committed over time, millions upon millions of innocent lives destroyed, incalculable amounts of pain and suffering. For what? For the pursuit of power and control over one city, one land? For the glory of God? Victory.
Imperialism
When the colonists came to our country, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.
– Nelson Mandela
Imperialism is theft. True wealth is the ownership of land, labor, and natural resources. Nations invade other nations to take these things. Whether they do it with the Bible or by the gun, the driver is economic. This is not new. Every empire has been built by conquering neighboring regions and expanding control. Ancient empires, the Roman empire, the Han and Mayan empires, all empires everywhere. They spread languages, religions, legal systems, and cultures while extracting natural resources and labor.
Modern history has been no different. Economics still drives imperialism. In the 7th Century, the Caliphates expanded rapidly spreading Islam and building trade networks connecting Asia to Africa and Europe. In the 13th Century, Genghis Khan and his Mongols physically connected Asia to Europe by building the largest contiguous land empire in history. In the 14th and 15th Centuries, European Empires looked beyond their neighbors for expansion. After spending the last one thousand years fighting with each other over Europe, they basically called a bit of a truce and set out to take other, more distant lands. Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands established overseas empires. Colonization of the Americas, parts of Africa, and Asia began, fueled by the search for gold, spices, and other natural resources. The Atlantic slave trade forcibly moved millions of Africans to work in European colonies. Europe carved up Africa and awarded it to one another, then orchestrated violent colonizations for the extraction of natural resources and the control of human labor. By the early 20th Century, the British Empire had become the largest empire in history. It was non-contiguous, spotted all over the globe. The sun never set, as the patriotic may have quipped, on the British Empire. European Imperialism was nothing short of the nations of Europe agreeing to allow each other to wage violent war on less-industrialized peoples to forcibly take control of their lands and create an apartheid state there for the continued extraction of their resources. Not only did this mean constant warfare. But it also eventually heightened the threat of war among the European nations themselves. As they became richer, they each had more economic motivation to take from one another.
Nationalism was also on the rise and this paradigm. This heightened competitiveness and negative sentiment towards one another. Germany and Britain were locked in a naval arms race. France and Germany were arguing over Alsace-Lorraine with growing geopolitical tension. Each nation’s politicians were under increasing pressure to assert their dominance, believing in their cultural, military, or racial superiority. This nationalist fervor created a public enthusiasm for war. Many citizens viewed the coming conflict as a chance to prove their nation’s greatness. Propaganda framed war as noble and heroic, strengthening enlistment and support. By the time of the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the lit fuse, war in Europe was inevitable.
World War I and then World War II weakened imperial powers and spurred independence movements. Inspired by leaders like Gandhi in India, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and others, colonized nations began to demand self-rule. After World War II, the newly formed United Nations officially supported decolonization, and by the 1970s, most former colonies had achieved independence. In the meantime, imperialism had fueled the rise of global trade networks, provided cheap resources and new markets for European goods, created economic dominance for Europe, spread European languages around the world, and led to Christianity being the world’s largest religion. These economic and social-cultural gains were achieved through unprovoked, violent war waged on weaker nations to take their resources and overpower their culture, leaving millions dead, centuries of apartheid, and a deep-seeded global economic and power disparity.
Imperialist nations always have justifications for taking the natural resources and wealth of other nations. They create moral justifications like arguing that they are bringing “civilization” to the peoples they conquer. They invent racial justifications such as the burden of the superior race. They imagine religious justifications like saving souls and answering God’s call. They design economic justifications such as access to raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets for manufactured goods. They architect strategic justifications like national security interests and global stability. The fact is that imperialists will create and develop any type of justification that will stick, anything that can justify taking other people’s stuff. It’s a valid justification as long as it justifies the forever warfare upon which the Western world’s wealth and dominance is built. Victory.
Military Industrial Complex
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
— Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC
Laws determine ownership and access within a society, and money determines riches in such a society. But true wealth transcends legal boundaries and monetary systems. During a true crisis, control of resources, not money, dictates survival. Control over land, water, and trade routes have always been at the core of power. Military power enables protection of real resources and geopolitical influence. Control over physical resources and production often hinges on the ability to defend them or enforce claims.
To maintain true power over the world, the United States continues to invest heavily in its military. $850 billion given to the Department of Defense’s military programs represents about 11% of the total federal budget. Over 40% of total global military spending, the U.S. Defense budget is more than the combined military budgets of the next nine countries. This is a lot of money spent on defense, and it begs the question: what are we spending it on? And more importantly, whom are we paying it to? It’s being paid to someone. Well, not surprisingly, a substantial portion of the U.S. defense budget is allocated to private defense contractors. Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX Corp (formerly Raytheon Technologies) are among the top recipients of these contracts. In 2024, Lockheed Martin reported net sales of $71 billion (a 5% increase from 2023). Approximately 93% of Lockheed Martin’s revenue in 2024 was derived from government contracts, with 74% coming specifically from the U.S. government. Lockheed Martin is a publicly traded company whose top shareholders include State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock (who are the majority shareholders in almost 90% of S&P companies). So, if you follow the money, the more our nation spends on defense, the wealthier the top 1% of individuals get as a result. Thus, much of our defense budget functions primarily as a way to funnel public dollars into the hands of the wealthiest Americans.
Under the guise of defense, under the threat of war, and in the name of peace, our industrial military complex is designed to, and functions to, increase the wealth of our nation and to consolidate that wealth within our nation to the richest of us. Victory?