At 12/31/05 09:23 PM, arz756 wrote:
Only if it is to survive. War was orginally created as a way for some groups of people to survive. Say one group of people didn't have a good harvest because of weather, crappy land, or whatever. People are starving and whatnot. Then another group have food. In an effort to survive it is justifiable to attack the other country. Now when it comes to recent issues, such as Terrorism and security, it is moral because as a human you have the right to defend yourself as well. Its not moral to read a book a thousand times and just because it says god wants you to spread your religion to go around and blow your self up to scare people.
This is a good point, I think. But it depends upon what you define as survival. For example, for the state of Israel to ensure the survival of large parts of their "homeland," they feel justified in making war on innocent civilian Palestinians, as well as Palestinian fighters and terrorists. For the Palestinian homeland and culture to survive, it seems justified that Palestinians defend themselves against Israeli aggression by any means at their disposal, particularly given the uneven balance of power in that region. So which side is waging the "just war?" Further, if a fascist state is to survive, today, it pretty much has to make war on its own people and probably eventually on most of the rest of the world. So would the fascist state be justified in fighting for its survival? Now, in the case of the U.S. war on terror, the enemy is so ambiguous ("terror" itself, whatever that is) that the war can never really end, and the "enemy," in the black-and-white, good-vs-evil world of the Bush administration, really becomes anybody who is not defined as "good," or those who basically espouse American morals and values. And the shape of those morals and values, under George W. Bush, are heavily influenced by evangelical Christian right movement and neo-capitalist and neo-liberal principles of "the good life." Anyone of another ethnic, religious, family, gender, or ideological background (i.e., most people in the world) are therefore at least under suspicion of being "evil." Because of the incredible global power of the U.S., many groups who don't want to be assimilated by the American/neo-capitalist way of life (i.e. devout non-Christian religious groups who see life as more spiritually centred than economically centred, even in regards to governmental politics) perhaps feel justified in attacking the U.S. by the means at their disposal in order to ensure their own cultural and spiritual survival in a heavily American-influenced (both economically and militarily) global order. Many Arabs, for example, tend to equate Israeli aggression against Palestinians and the violent U.S. presence in Iraq, particularly since, as it turns out, there really was no justification for the U.S. war in Iraq, nor any evidence that the U.S. government should have ever assumed that their would be any evidence. So why did they invade? Saddam was never linked to terrorism, except the terrorism he committed against his own people, including the genocide of Kurds--a genocide that was occuring even when the U.S. was backing Saddam, in fact supporting him militarily against Iran. Are any of these conflicts "justified" on the basis of survival? Again, that seems to depend ultimately on whose survival we are talking about at the time. /HD