(click on the image for a larger version)

‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is ultimately a pessimistic one – war is so endemic to the human condition that we can’t hope to eradicate, only to alleviate it.

That rather hobbesian world view is underscored by this world map composed of soldiers, warriors and fighters of every colour, creed and continent, a veritable United Nations of War, all placed as geographically correct as possible: from loinclothed tribes armed with long sticks or bows and arrows make up much of South America, while the north of the continent is lined with belligerents in Pilgrim dress, Revolution-era garb, Civil War uniform and even the Ku-Klux Klan costume. And so on for each continent, mutatis mutandis.

The map depicts many recognizable masters of war, among whom just three of the previous century’s bad boys stand out: Hitler, Lenin, Mao. The arsenal depicted ranges from stone-age sticks through medieval armor to ironclad battleships and tanks… The longer I look at this map, the more depressed I get. What is it about war that makes it both undesirable and unavoidable?

Here are some ‘pro-war’ quotes that extoll, or at least excuse some of war’s qualities:

• “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.  The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” (John Stuart Mill)
• “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it” (Robert E. Lee; statement at the Battle of Fredericksburg, 13^th December 1862)
• “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” (Ulysses S. Grant) 
• “Against war one might say that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In its favor, that in producing these two effects it barbarizes, and so makes the combatants more natural. For culture it is a sleep or a wintertime, and man emerges from it stronger for good and for evil.” (Friedrich Nietzsche; ‘Human, All Too Human’)
• “War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.” (Benito Mussolini)
• “Everyone’s a pacifist between wars.  It’s like being a vegetarian between meals.” (Colman McCarthy)

• “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.” (George Patton)
• “We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
• “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” (George Orwell; ‘Second Thoughts On James Burnham’, 1946)
• “War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.” (Milan Kundera, ‘Immortality’)

Is war a ‘natural’ state of things? Not according to everyone. There are those who see it as an aberration, only possible through lies, (self-)deception and the suspension of common sense: