My home is now rubble raised to the ground
I wander searching but peace can´t be found.
Red sunsets replaced with smoke blackened skies
war ravaged beaches where young men just die.
Oceans and deserts, just warships and tanks
guns on the high ground fire down on the ranks.
Rivers polluted fish dead from disease
they’ve killed all the wildlife cut down the trees.
This journey’s a nightmare of blood and screams,
War! So evil, it’s for peace that I dream. (TOM BALCH)
War is violent. It is deadly, expensive, destructive and wasteful. And even the justified wars are ugly.It is the greatest catastrophe that can befall human beings. It brings death and destruction, merciless slaughter and butchery, disease and starvation, poverty and ruin in its wake. One has only to think of the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war. A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world. There are, doubtless, people who consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that brings out the best man. But this does not in any way alter the fact that war is a terrible dreadful calamity and this is especially true of an atomic war. War is, without argument the worst collective experience of humanity. It has created new nations on the rubbles of destroyed cities and human’s dead. At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century. Estimates for the total number killed in wars throughout all of human history range from 150 million to 1 billion. War has several other effects on population, including decreasing the birthrate by taking men away from their wives. The reduced birthrate during World War II is estimated to have caused a population deficit of more than 20 million people. Between 1900 and 1990, 43 million soldiers died in wars. During the same period, 62 million civilians were killed. More than 34 million civilians died in World War II. One million died in North Korea. Hundreds of thousands were killed in South Korea, and 200,000 to 400,000 in Vietnam. In the wars of the 1990s, civilian deaths constituted between 75 and 90 percent of all war deaths. During World War II, 135,000 civilians died in two days in the firebombing of Dresden. A week later, in Pforzheim, Germany, 17,800 people were killed in 22 minutes. In Russia, after the three-year battle of Leningrad, only 600,000 civilians remained in a city that had held a population of 2.5 million. One million were evacuated, 100,000 were conscripted into the Red Army, and 800,000 died. In April 2003, during the Iraqi War, half of the 1.3 million civilians in Basra, Iraq, were trapped for days without food and water in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees. In 2001, 40 million people were displaced from their homes because of armed conflict or human rights violations. Refugees have been a concern throughout the twentieth century. Five million Europeans were uprooted from 1919 to 1939. World War II displaced 40 million non-Germans in Europe, and 13 million Germans were expelled from countries in Eastern Europe. Approximately 2.5 million of the 4.4 million people in Bosnia and Herzegovina were driven from their homes during that region’s war in the early 1990s. More than 2 million Rwandans left their country in 1994. In 2001, 200,000 people were driven from Afghanistan to Pakistan. In early 2003, 45,000 Liberians were displaced from their homes. More than 2 million children were killed in wars during the 1990s. Three times that number were disabled or seriously injured. Twenty million children were displaced from their homes in 2001. Many were forced into prostitution. A large percentage of those will contract AIDS. Children born to mothers who are raped or forced into prostitution often become outcasts.
War is a perilous affair with death and destruction converged it. With this destruction and death, it is quite surprising how often we go to war. From the beginning of time wars have raged on from generations to generation, shifting and changing from one reason to another. It’s easy to say humanity is a species that cannot do without it. With all the peace efforts, in the end only ruin remains. Most times it’s really hard to answer why these wars are fought. When the dust settles, the fire dies and the soil of the earth is no longer drenched with blood, we then ask why it happened in the first place. The simple truth is we only have bits and pieces. Wars, when prolonged like the World Wars, result in human brutality, mass extermination of races and intolerable atrocities on innocent civilians. All rules are kept on the backburner and what matters is victory or defeat. The 21st Century has seen the development of weapons, controlled by computerized systems, with pin-point accuracy and a million-fold increase in powers of destruction compared to our previous wars. Weapons and tactics have undergone total transformation in the last millennium but no deterrent has managed to quell human conflict. It may look totally different has managed to quell human conflict. It may look totally different for the war-mongers but no the common man it gives the same results – death and destruction. The totally of wars since 1945 right from Nagasaki and Hiroshima to iraq and Ukraine continue to grow without respite. The irony of the new millennium is that improvement in technology and scientific advancement have given us more options, leaving us with our major drawback, our primitive human failing – the fear of the other.The core reasons for fighting wars are about proving superiority, hegemony, competition for dominating the region or the world and for economic survival. The recent wars, to preserve the efficacy of the democratic system, may be a phase which is temporary. So, before we pick up our guns and bombs, let us think about the future, let us remember that death and destruction is all that proceeds from it and if we remember those, we love the most, we’ll realize that peace is the only way to keep peace. To keep the history between us clean, and still try to erase the darkness which we build between ourselves in the past. We only share one home, one planet and it’s all we have. Once we destroy it, we destroyed who we are.
(The author is Research fellow at United Nations world peace institute. Views are his own)
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