The Business Of War

World War I Photo - Reportedly of Americans - The Human Cost of the War to End All Wars

World War I was described as “the war to end all wars.”  If only it were so.   In the book The World War – Its Relation to the Eastern Question and Armageddon by Arthur G. Daniells, (Copyright 1917) the Foreword states:

“The story of the world war is familiar to all.  Its daily-increasing horrors are heralded morning and evening with startling headlines in every newspaper in every country the world over.  It would seem as if civilization were committing suicide–that all the forces of knowledge and power in this enlightened age had contributed to a carnival of self-destruction.”

Nearly one hundred years later, what has humanity learned from that “war to end all wars”?  Considering that World War II followed around 20 years later, apparently not much at all.  The destruction of human life only became larger than life, with the first use of atomic weapons on fellow human beings.  The reasoning was that, the second war to end all wars, would come to a conclusion much sooner.  Were any lessons learned?   Then, there was a Korean War, Vietnam War and the list seems to never end with little wars and armed conflicts interspersed and breaking out across the planet.  Indeed, what has changed since the summer of 1914, in civilization’s apparent desire to self-destruct?

And yet, there are still those who wonder why the founding fathers placed the decision to go to war as so serious a matter that it would take an act of Congress to place any life of its citizens in harm’s way, in a war.  The act of war was considered so egregious, with all of its inherent horrors, that the decision must only be made by reasoned and serious consideration, by honest men of good will.

The horrors of war have only become worse with the technological advancements of ever more resourceful killing machines.  Oft repeated as a military/industrial complex.  Yet, the carnival of self-destruction has been thrust at ever-increasing warp speeds to new means of destruction, where man has never gone, but has a proclivity to get there as soon as the latest technological advance will take him. Reasoned thinking in accordance with the Constitution, has been replaced by wink and nod rhetoric, propaganda politics and war marketing furor.  Civilization is being held hostage, by a cabal of evil jackals that has reduced human life to a line item in a risk analysis for criminal enterprise.  It would seem as if civilization is committing suicide, but it is not civilization, as defined by a majority of people the world over who simply want a peaceful better life, who is the puppet master.  Civilization seems to have lost control of its destiny, as might the infirmed their incontinence.

Now, on the eve of another conflict the horrors of war are about to be inflicted again.  Like chess pieces on a global board, the machinations are taking form.  The names are biblical:  Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan.  And it would seem that in  the cradle of civilization, that the cradle is about to soon fall.  Not in carnival fashion, for the three-ring circus has long gone, having morphed into something much darker, that may portend the question of Armageddon surely to come too quickly.

These are the times for our Constitution.