To those who support war, I have these questions. Do you not know that military action always has the consequence of death? The basis of war is the international use of force, coercion, and violence in order to acquire what all other means and methods could not. While that is an efficient definition for our purpose, it still leaves out a very important understanding of war. The human race is stubborn. We are willing to kill each other, or let ourselves be killed, in order to defend the earth where we were born to; the land that some of us would be unwilling to leave under penalty of death.
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Does the war advocate understand that by supporting a military conflict,To Those Who Support War Articles he is putting men in to combat with each other, each soldier expecting to kill or be killed? War is a process that affirms and upholds the most barbaric and most uncivilized traits of the human character. In all armed conflicts, people are rewarded and given medals for relying on violent instincts and satisfying cruel urges. When a soldier kills, murders, and slaughters without prejudice or inhibition under the guidance of a general, he is given medals, honors, and awards. If a person should ever take the role of a soldier in his civil life, if an individual should ever murder or loot from his fellow citizens, he would be dealt with very seriously. As a society, the actions of murderers and thieves are never taken light-heartedly. There are strong and bold men who are willing to defend the rights of all the innocent, sometimes even to their deaths; true heroes. It is the common opinion of all honest thinkers, that all humans have certain inalienable rights. And among those rights, we count the right to life. Should a civilian ever end the lives of the people around him, he would be taking the role of the soldier in an armed conflict. The contradiction of this scene of international affairs only strikes the most socially alert of the world’s people.
War always entails the deaths of combatants, of soldiers, of those who aid one side in their military efforts, no matter what station or position they hold. While this is the essential premise to battle, it is also admitted that in ending the lives of men drafted by their governments, armies are responsible for killing many innocent people. Collateral damage. Friendly fire. Civilian casualties. There are a million technical phrases that the governments of the world have applied to the situation where their troops are directly responsible for killing unarmed families and children. Much of the time, entire cities are engulfed in flames by extremely destructive tools. The homes of these unarmed and innocent people, their places of work, their museums and centerpieces of culture, are entirely burned to the ground. And this is all done under the guise of “military campaigns” or “strategic warfare.” Nobody will ever doubt you if you were to state that the military are responsible for tens of millions of unintentional deaths. Being able to react fast and quickly in a military conflict means having a higher chance to live. Those who are fast to open fire on an unarmed family scurrying from the conflict, are also most likely to be fast in opening fire on armed combatants. The natural order follows then, that those who open fire on civilians quickly, will open fire on enemies quickly, and therefore be more likely to survive and continue fighting. While it is true that innocent civilians often are slaughtered during combat, the governments are always hesitant to release the numbers or any cases that they are aware of when it comes to their troops murdering the innocent.
Rarely, though, do the governments or the world’s militaries ever admit that they intentionally killed innocent civilians. The generals, the presidents, the prime ministers, all authorities, will deny having killed people who they were unsure were civilians or combatants. Sometimes they will begin their speeches with phrases like, “In combat, things can become confused,” or “Who is your enemy? Who is your friend? You can never know.” But, they will never end their press conferences with, “Yes, we willingly and knowingly killed people who were innocent and completely uninvolved with combat or the conflict.” These are militaries that train their soldiers to wound, maim, kill, and otherwise destroy other people who are also called warriors. And once the curtain has been unfurled, once armed troops are thrown on to a battlefield with people they are expected to kill, there will always be the intentional murder of innocent civilians. Sometimes, a government will declare war not another government, but on an entire people, as it happened with the Nazi government and its hatred of the Jews, or as it happened with America’s rulers and the Vietnam War. In those situations, all people are considered the enemy, because they are workers, producers, consumers, and distributors in the enemy’s economy. They produce the food, the weapons, and all other necessities that feed themselves or fuel the war efforts; and in their zeal to win the war, armies will claim open season on all people, armed or unarmed, of the other side. Due to recently declassified documents, we are now aware that military authorities ordered the extermination of thousands of unarmed civilians in Vietnamese villages. We see the same kind of murders and mutilations in the history books, when it comes to the First World War, the Second World War, just about every war the United States government enacted, and the many military campaigns of ancient empires. The intentional murder of innocent families and their children is an unbreakable pattern that comes with every military effort.
In America today, we are on the very fringes of the Vietnam conflict. The great many who fought and witnessed the death of their comrades in combat are still with us today. And after losing their conflict abroad, not to superior forces, but to a people defending their homeland from foreign invasion, they came back to America to fight the United States government. Armies of soldiers had organized, this time not for the sake of waging war, but for the sake of defending peace. They protested their government’s activity in creating foreign wars and deceiving the public. These soldiers threw their medals that they had earned at their oppressors. To them, it was more important to uphold the life, the culture, and the independence of all people, instead of subjecting them to violence, tyranny, and cruelty. I’ve known many members of the underground and the subculture who listened to the confessions of the Vietnam veterans. As revolutionaries, we have always been the greatest and strongest enemies of military conflict. And many of us have listened to the sad and displeasing tales of Vietnam veterans. They confess to us in a way that a Catholic might confess to a priest, or the way a child might confess to a mother or father. They tell us how they bombed entire villages of innocent people. An entire village, scorching in the hot sun of South East Asia, and even though the American soldiers were far, far away, they could still hear the crying pains of unarmed people being burned alive.