Inspiration - Is there any valid justification for war?

2025-07-01

Why do modern states have to devote so much effort and resources to building up armies and training human beings to kill their fellow human beings? Of course, it’s intuitively understandable that a state should be forced to maintain an army, because if it were attacked, it would have no choice but to defend itself. In fact, war of aggression is considered a crime reprobated by international law^[1] which is so serious that the only war considered “just” would be one waged by a state forced to defend itself.

 

So the question remains: why are there still states that practice war of aggression with the avowed aim of conquering another country or reducing it to powerlessness? Why do they make themselves the outcasts of humanity?

 

And to what advantage? How many examples can be cited in modern history where a war of aggression has ended to the advantage of the aggressor? On the contrary (if we consider the sad end of empires such as Napoleon’s, the Third Reich’s or the Soviet Union’s), we may well ask why certain states nevertheless pursue aggressive militaristic policies that will inevitably lead to disaster?

 

What irrational element could be found deep within certain men that would lead them, sometimes through a political regime they had set up, to want war, as well as the destruction of their fellow human beings? In the Iliad, that ancient Greek epic poem about war and the violent emotions it generates, the warrior Achilles laments the death of his friend Patroclus as follows: “… so may strife perish from among gods and men, and anger that setteth a man on to grow wroth, how wise soever he be, and that sweeter far than trickling honey waxeth like smoke in the breasts of men; …”^[2]

 

Writer and airplane pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, not without bitterness: “War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”^[3]. This theme of war is not new; Diderot’s Encyclopédie contained this sentence: “War is the fruit of man’s depravity; it is a convulsive and violent sickness of the body politic, which is not healthy, that is to say, in its natural state, except when it enjoys peace …”^[4]

 

In today’s terms, what is the cause of war, that collective perversion of human nature that the ancients called the passions? Exploring the hidden workings of the human mind in 1950, the philosopher L. Ron Hubbard defined what an aberrationis: “Any deviation or departure from rationality.”^[5]

 

Is war just an aberration? Here’s what led him to this conclusion:

 

“There is no national problem in the world today which cannot be resolved by reason alone. All factors inhibiting a solution of the problem of war and weapons are arbitrary factors and have no more validity than the justified explanations of a thief or murderer.

 

The farmer of Iowa has no quarrel with the storekeeper of Stalingrad^[6]. Those who say such quarrels exist lie.

 

There are no international concerns which cannot be resolved by peaceable means, not in the terms of supranational government, but in the terms of reason.

 

[…]

 

No self-interest can be so great as to demand the slaughter of Mankind. He who would demand it, he who would not by every rational means avert it, is insane. There is no justification for war.”^[7]

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