Warfare and the expansion of evil

When discussing the question of war, it's easy to get mired in the self-righteousness of the warhawk and the flaccid protests of the pacifist. As in many other issues, worthless emotional impressions crowd out our conceptual thinking. In such cases, it is most useful to come back to basic moral principles. So let me state the moral facts plainly :

* War is organized murder, and thus immoral.
* War is also immoral because it favours the amplification of other evils (such as taxation, the police state, the draft). War is the health of state oppression.
* The capacity to declare and wage war is only given to some people and not others, making it invalid as a universal moral rule.
* The capacity to wage war is, like any other government power, manipulated for political interests. And I am not even going to start on the fascistic American imperialism, sponsored by ExxonMobil, Haliburton and Bechtel. Many, many people have written on this better than I ever could.
* War leads to evil consequences (this is merely a corollary of the first point).

Once we drop the collectivist delusion that politicians and bureaucrats are morally transcendent to private citizens, and transpose their actions in a realistic context, war looks less like the noble sacrifice portrayed by popular culture and more like thuggery and assassination on a global scale. The murder of innocents, the acts of torture, the hardships inflicted on civilians, then appear not as regrettable exceptions but as an expected corollary of the premise of unjust and unrestrained violence.

There is no such thing as a "just war", any more than there is such a thing as a "just gang war" or a "just mafia hit". The main difference between the two scenarios is that government commands the monopoly of force as well as virtually unlimited material resources (through taxation), and its existence is not predicated on the existence of specific laws, and thus it is infinitely more dangerous.

As the history of the 20th century has taught us, war does not have to be physical. The relatively novel idea of perpetual war has provided tremendous impetus for state growth without the need for messy conflict. Thus were born the Cold War, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, and all sorts of other wars that are fought by diverting more and more resources into useless government institutions build for that sole purpose, and inevitably only exacerbate the very problems they were supposedly set up to solve.

Why does the concept of war command so much inherent support ? War is a popular film topic because it evokes primal emotions : nationalism, violence and xenophobia. On a more intellectual level, the importance of war demands a total commitment. People accept horrible restrictions on their freedom in wartime that they would reject at any other time. So war is a perfect device to put people in a constant mindset of obedience.