The Evils of War

“The time has come to talk about the evils of war. It is not true that the existence of wars proves their necessity. The history of mankind says that such things should not happen.”

Today’s entry in A Calendar of Wisdom was all about the horrors of war, including an extremely graphic description of the carnage during a naval battle of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904. There is no glory in war, and war is never needed. The lesson is that we should shun war, not embrace it.

Interestingly, I think this has changed in the modern world. I don’t think anyone kids themselves about the glory of war any more, not even the warriors. And among the world powers, I think this is the longest stretch of relative peace in the modern era. I do realize that using peace in this instance is very relative in this instance, as my own country has been involved in Afghanistan now for twenty years, as Russia occupies the Ukraine, as Israel and Palestine continue to burn; I think you could equally argue that we as a species have been in a state of continual warfare for the longest time, with a conflict raging somewhere on the globe.

Hmm. I seem to have changed my mind on this mid thought. I was going to say that the great powers of the world turned from war to diplomacy, but now I feel like they just shifted their targets, from each other to the less powerful, and even where diplomacy is applied, war is often employed by proxy. My initial reaction to today’s lesson was that it was out of touch with the way we view war now, and I think that’s still true, but it was arrogant of me to then think that the modern world is somehow more peaceful than Tolstoy’s audience.

I think it’s more that war has lost its cachet. It’s harder to sell people on war now, so instead, we just hide it.

Excerpt From: Tolstoy, Leo. “A Calendar of Wisdom.” Scribner, 2010–05–11. Apple Books.