The Inevitability of War

It is obvious that if it were possible, almost everyone on the planet today would choose to avoid war. Unfortunately though, one party always seems to start war in an attempt to make the rest of the world follow their same beliefs. According to their moral code, they do nothing wrong by starting war because their enemies were being 'bad' in their eyes. As an American, it's easy for me to say that terrorists or the Axis in WWII for example were the bad guys, since what they were doing isn't morally correct for me. But for them, they were the good guys because they honestly believed that Americans should die, or that the Arian race was superior. Who are we, the Americans, to say they were wrong? What gives us the power to decide? We could just say no more fighting or war, but then there's an issue if another country does something bad. If we fight them, we are saying that we are superior judges who are, for some reason, allowed to break the rules. This would give them reason to fight us, because then they can argue they're judges equally, and thus can break the rules as well.

Because of this, I believe war is an unavoidable thing, but I think we are moving towards a better way of managing it. Presently, the United Nations is a very effective way of managing war. Obviously we can't just ban war altogether, because then we would have no power to enforce the rules with. But we can make a list of common moral offenses (based on the majority of cultures' moral codes) that will have penalties. One country alone then does not have the power to decide if another country is right or wrong. Instead, conventions of many nations will decide, and thus hopefully be correct more often.

Kurt Vonnegut uses his novel, Slaughterhouse 5, to try to bring the idiocy of war to light. He doesn't write the novel to detail the atrocities of war. Instead, he writes it to show how pointless war is. I don't entirely agree with Vonnegut's view. I think war does have many atrocities that would preferably be avoided, but if someone violates the common moral code of many cultures then war is inevitable. There is a purpose behind a majority of wars. Without war, Hitler would have killed many more many more in his quest for dominance. You can look at all the deaths in WWII and say it killed lots of people on both sides for no reason, and reason that the war was pointless. In my opinion though, the war was fought to prevent many more casualties, and to keep the world a better place afterwards by removing things like concentration camps.