Flada Blog

No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
- Douglas MacArthur

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
- Thomas Jefferson, The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

---

When will there be an end to all war?

It’s not a popular thing to say, but war gets a bad rap. War is Hell! What is it good for… absolutely nothing! A list of actual quotes castigating war is too long to actually contemplate (and too long to come up with a good simile which is why I chose the cop-out of saying “too long to contemplate”). When was the last time you’ve heard someone defend war? You see, this isn’t an easy task I’m taking on.

The way I see it, there are really only three things that cause war: people who want something that isn’t theirs, people who wage war in the name of their religion, and people who want to keep something that is theirs. Ok, you got me, that’s really only two causes; without the first there wouldn’t be any need for the last to wage war. It’s only right to keep what you’ve earned, after all. As far as I’m concerned that’s an axiom: what you’ve earned you have a right to keep. So that breaks it down to really only two root causes of war: a desire to gain something you haven’t earned, and religious reasons.

We’ll get back to those reasons in a few minutes, but let’s first take a closer look at my axiom and some implications. If you agree that people have a right to their property then you must also accept that they have a right to defend that property. Ownership without a means or a right to defend that ownership isn’t really ownership at all. If you disagree with the axiom, then I’m not even sure where to start with you, but please join my boards so that I can try to understand your position. For those who don’t believe in property rights at all, perhaps it’s best to break things down even more simply by finding out if they even believe in the rights of life and liberty. I’d argue that life without these fundamentals is hardly living at all. It can hardly be debated that if someone wants your property badly enough that your life (or the lives of those you love) won’t long stand in their way.

Anyway, on a small scale, defending your property or life might mean shooting an intruder in your home. On a larger scale, defending the collective property (or lives) of your society (and by that, I mean all of the things that are privately owned by the members of society and any property that is collectively owned) requires forming a militia to defend against aggressors from other societies. If you’re still in agreement, then you’ve admitted that it not only acceptable to be the defender in a war, but that it’s actually a right.

So that brings us back to the two root causes or the aggressors in wars. If you accept my premise then all war aggressors are basically large-scale thieves, religious fanatics, or both. Although perhaps we should remove religious fanatics from this list since usually wars that are fought for religious reasons have an underlying cause that can be traced back to wanting something that isn’t yours.

So all wars are basically waged by aggressors who are actually large-scale thieves. But is that true? Maybe it’s just the leaders that are guilty of these offenses. And that makes it easy because condemning individual leaders is not only simple, it’s fun. But when you put all the blame on the leaders, you absolve the foot-soldiers of at least some of the blame for their aggression. And many of these foot-soldiers should be absolved, after all what choice do they really have? Fight or die. Fight or starve. Fight or your family starves and dies? These are the choices the soldiers make all while being told that the defender is really the aggressor. The other guy has so much while you have so little.

This is where things really get confusing because we’ve all been an aggressor. Anyone who’s ever taken anything that wasn’t theirs is a small-scale aggressor. Those things you gained through production, barter, free enterprise, or other voluntary associations are yours and as we’ve already agreed you have a right to defend them. But anything else that you have gained through deception, thievery, or fraud is not rightfully yours. You stole the fruits of another persons labor, and what is labor but time? What is time to a man but a piece of that man’s life? This means, in a nutshell, that to steal property is to steal life. They are one and the same.

That being said, the difference between the leaders of aggressive societies and everyone else are differences of scale. When will there be an end to all war? When every man stops wanting what isn’t his to have. When you (and everyone else) stops stealing.