War
Created | Updated Feb 9, 2002
War
War is an incredibly ancient convention, one that possibly predates human civilization and probably will end up contributing to the demise of said species. As such it is virtually impossible to accredit the invention of war to any one historical figure, which is probably just as well because no one deserves that much royalties.
Some people will try to tell you that the causes of wars are manifold and varied. These people are just trying to keep you from experimenting with war and should be ignored. Some of these same people claim that wars are motivated by cultural differences. This is also not true. Countries are caused by cultural differences, and countries in turn lead to wars. Some times a country gets so anxious to have a war that they just have a war with themselves. These are called civil wars, because for some reason killing your neighbor is supposedly more civil than killing some guy you don’t know.
Wars are started because Party A has X, which Party B wants. Party B decides that the best way to get X is to kill off enough of Party A that Party A is no longer able to prevent Party B from taking X. X could be oil, choice overseas trade routes, the independence of one of the involved parties, a nice section of land, or a particularly fetching woman.The fact that both parties usually forget what the initial cause of the fighting was during the course of a war is irrelevant.
For a long time this was all there was to wars, but then people invented these stupid things called treaties that complicated everything and ruined the simple elegance of wars. Treaties take on many forms. The most popular form is a simple agreement saying that Party A won’t go to war with Party B. These are usually pretty worthless because after a while Party B realizes that they still really want X and the stupid little piece of paper they signed isn’t going to stop them from getting it. The treaties that do cause problems are ones that introduce new players. A particularly sneaky Party A will sign a treaty with Party C saying that if Party A or Party C is attacked, the other party will jump in on their behalf. Party B is usually put off by this development, and sign their own treaty with Party D with similar wording. These treaties are more frequently abided by, because Party C and Party D have been itching for an excuse to fight anyway. Every now and then a seemingly unaffected Party E will leap into the fray because they realize that while everyone else has been preoccupied with X, Y has been left conspicuously unattended.
In the beginning the details of war were fairly simple. Groups of people came together and tried to smash or poke holes in each other. Over the years people found better and more efficient ways of smashing or poking holes in people, which lead to the invention of things like swords, arrows, catapults, bullets, explosives, tanks, and neutrons. Recently there has been a lot of research devoted to developing whole new forms of killing people, like vaporizing them, filling their lungs with some horrible chemical, infecting them with little germs that do all the work themselves, or causing all the nerves in their body to stop talking to one another, but most countries still rely on the basics to get the job done.
Poets and philosophers have spent thousands of years badmouthing war and warning mankind against it, mainly because poets and philosophers tend to be really bad at it. For the most part, however, wars seem to be a rather popular past time, because countries keep having them. Some wars have been so popular that they have had sequels.
Whole industries have grown out of war, giving rise to professions such as soldiers, generals, medics, Defense Ministers, aerospace engineers, marines, armorers, combat journalists, nuclear physicists, anti-war activists, war-mongers, fighter pilots, gunsmiths, squires, mahouts, grenadiers, radiomen, war crimes tribunals, scouts, saboteurs, guerrillas, and Bob Hope. The ever-present push to improve the technology of killing one’s fellow man has resulted in countless technological advances that have then been incorporated into general society: guns, radar, rockets, Morse code, GPS satellites, jet aircraft, morphine, and submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles.
It seems likely that as long as there are human beings there will be wars because the purpose of wars is to destroy human beings, and as long as there are still some of those left war hasn't completed its job. It’s a good thing too, because if people stopped having wars all the historians would run out of things to write about.
War is an incredibly ancient convention, one that possibly predates human civilization and probably will end up contributing to the demise of said species. As such it is virtually impossible to accredit the invention of war to any one historical figure, which is probably just as well because no one deserves that much royalties.
Some people will try to tell you that the causes of wars are manifold and varied. These people are just trying to keep you from experimenting with war and should be ignored. Some of these same people claim that wars are motivated by cultural differences. This is also not true. Countries are caused by cultural differences, and countries in turn lead to wars. Some times a country gets so anxious to have a war that they just have a war with themselves. These are called civil wars, because for some reason killing your neighbor is supposedly more civil than killing some guy you don’t know.
Wars are started because Party A has X, which Party B wants. Party B decides that the best way to get X is to kill off enough of Party A that Party A is no longer able to prevent Party B from taking X. X could be oil, choice overseas trade routes, the independence of one of the involved parties, a nice section of land, or a particularly fetching woman.The fact that both parties usually forget what the initial cause of the fighting was during the course of a war is irrelevant.
For a long time this was all there was to wars, but then people invented these stupid things called treaties that complicated everything and ruined the simple elegance of wars. Treaties take on many forms. The most popular form is a simple agreement saying that Party A won’t go to war with Party B. These are usually pretty worthless because after a while Party B realizes that they still really want X and the stupid little piece of paper they signed isn’t going to stop them from getting it. The treaties that do cause problems are ones that introduce new players. A particularly sneaky Party A will sign a treaty with Party C saying that if Party A or Party C is attacked, the other party will jump in on their behalf. Party B is usually put off by this development, and sign their own treaty with Party D with similar wording. These treaties are more frequently abided by, because Party C and Party D have been itching for an excuse to fight anyway. Every now and then a seemingly unaffected Party E will leap into the fray because they realize that while everyone else has been preoccupied with X, Y has been left conspicuously unattended.
In the beginning the details of war were fairly simple. Groups of people came together and tried to smash or poke holes in each other. Over the years people found better and more efficient ways of smashing or poking holes in people, which lead to the invention of things like swords, arrows, catapults, bullets, explosives, tanks, and neutrons. Recently there has been a lot of research devoted to developing whole new forms of killing people, like vaporizing them, filling their lungs with some horrible chemical, infecting them with little germs that do all the work themselves, or causing all the nerves in their body to stop talking to one another, but most countries still rely on the basics to get the job done.
Poets and philosophers have spent thousands of years badmouthing war and warning mankind against it, mainly because poets and philosophers tend to be really bad at it. For the most part, however, wars seem to be a rather popular past time, because countries keep having them. Some wars have been so popular that they have had sequels.
Whole industries have grown out of war, giving rise to professions such as soldiers, generals, medics, Defense Ministers, aerospace engineers, marines, armorers, combat journalists, nuclear physicists, anti-war activists, war-mongers, fighter pilots, gunsmiths, squires, mahouts, grenadiers, radiomen, war crimes tribunals, scouts, saboteurs, guerrillas, and Bob Hope. The ever-present push to improve the technology of killing one’s fellow man has resulted in countless technological advances that have then been incorporated into general society: guns, radar, rockets, Morse code, GPS satellites, jet aircraft, morphine, and submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles.
It seems likely that as long as there are human beings there will be wars because the purpose of wars is to destroy human beings, and as long as there are still some of those left war hasn't completed its job. It’s a good thing too, because if people stopped having wars all the historians would run out of things to write about.
