War of the Quotes

A new feature, in which a topic is discussed, with heavy bias, using Quotes.  In honor of this, today's War of the Quotes will feature the topic of... War.

Round 1: Albert Einstien vs George Washington.
Credentials: Genius and scatterbrained intellectual vs Brillant and charismatic general and diplomat.

• Albert: You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
• George: To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
• George: If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

Winner? GW, someone who held the reins of leadership and knew the realities of war firsthand.

Round Commentary by Thomas Jefferson

• It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

Round 2: Jean-Paul Sartre vs... a proven corrillary to his own quote.

• JPS: When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
• Me: When the poor wage war, it's the rich who die.  Evidence?  The French Revolutions, the Chinese Revolutions, the Soviet Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution... shall I go on?

Winner? Well, lets call this one a draw, since everyone knows that war and death go hand in hand.
 
Round Commentary by Salvadore Dali

• Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

 
Round 3: Artists

• HG Wells: If we don't end war, war will end us.
• Ernest Hemmingway: In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
• Ernest Hemmingway: Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
• Herodotus: In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
• Percy Bysshe-Shelly: Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

Winner?  Peace, of course.  How many artists actually think war is cool.
 
Round 4: Leaders

• JFK: Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind. (Proving he can crib as well as the next guy.)
• Robert E Lee: It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.
• Herbert Hoover: Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
• George Santayana: Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
• Stalin: The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
• Eisenhower: We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
• Churchill: We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Winner? The enevitability of War.

Round 5: Joan Baez vs Rommel & Euripides

• Joan Baez: If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
• Erwin Rommel: Sweat saves blood.
• Euripides: Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.

Winner? Not the silly and drugged up, if gifted, writer/singer.  Come on people.  Soldiers train how to survive, and if that means making them better killers, then yeah, that's what they'll train in.  Running is natural, but the best runners train.  Same thing.  Next!

Round 6: How can smart people be soooooo stupid?

• Cicero: An unjust peace is better than a just war.  (Really?  Tell that to the African-American slaves in the pre-civil war south?  Or the Jews in Germany prior to the onset of WWII.)
• Benjamin Franklin: There was never a good war, or a bad peace. (See above, then check out John Stuart Mill's Quote in Round 7.)
• Francis Fenelon: All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. (No.  They aren't.  Same species, sure, but brothers? Not even close.)
• JFK: War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. (Look, Gandhi's followers were no less warriors than uniformed soldiers.  They were fanatics who laid down their lives to win a war they couldn't win with weapons.  War doesn't have to be fought with guns or swords or nukes to be war.  Any conflict which has casualties is war.  The conscientious objector is a coward, fighting against the concept of getting his own hands dirty.  Its fine to be opposed to violence, but when you enjoy freedoms won in war, including the freedom to speak out against the government, you come off a little hypcritical.  And JFK had been in war and was no ConsOb.)
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery: War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. (This is analogy, not truth.  And in what way is War not an adventure?  Most adventures I know involve invading other people's land, risking death and dismemberment, and stealing their ancient relics.  War sounds a lot like an adventure to me.)
• Thomas Alva Edison: There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. (Can you say wishful thinking, boys and girls?  I knew that you could.)
• Henry Ellis: There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. (Yes, but would have actually acheived it?)
• Albert Einstein: He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. (Sure, he's talking about Nazi's and the Weirmacht, but do we also rag on the American Soldier, the British Soldier, the Australian, French, Dutch, Canadian, Chinese, Russian, etc. Soldier who fought to crush Axis tyranny?  Most of them, including the average German Soldier, were fighting to defend their homelands against unwarrented agression.  Faith and Zeal do not imply a lack of thought or reason or higher brain function.  In fact, they are not possible without higher brain function.  This is just bitterness and hatred for the military from a man who should know better.)

Winner?  Hard to say, but lets give the round to Peace anyway.  They meant well, even if they had nary a clue.

Round 7: People who know better.

• William Westmoreland: The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. 
• George S. Patton: The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
• Ulysses S. Grant: I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
• John Adams: I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
• John Stuart Mill: War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
• Herbert V. Prochnow: A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.  
• Colman McCarthy: Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.

Winner?  Ah, who cares.

Look, the point is this.

War is a fact of life.  Call it Conflict or Violence, or any other name that helps you cope, but War is part of nature.  Every living thing strives to take as much as it can for itself because there simply isn't enough energy in the system for all things to have as much as they need.  Population's would soar out of control and rabbits would ruin the Australian eccosystem (true story, look it up.)  We are not the only species to wage war.  Dolphins, Apes, Chimps, Baboons, Gibbons... they all do it.  Conciously.  Lion prides and hyena packs fight for territory.  Army ants lay waste to vast stretches of jungle.  Fire burns and consumes huge areas of forestation.  Tidal waves destroy coastlines.  Sure, the last two are stretching things, but the point is that destruction and creation go hand in hand.  We cannot have peace without war because both are part of our nature.  We are afraid, so we want peace (freedom from fear) so we destroy anything that threatens that peace.  Our desire for safety and stability makes our cultures more and more rigid, unchanging, unable to support themselves, so they collapse into violence and brutality and we rebuild.  Its the nature of life.

We cannot get rid of war and violence.  What we can do, what is far more productive, is to understand it, govern it, seek to guide it and control it, focus it in new ways.  But we must always be aware that it never goes away and it always has victims.  Our current financial crisis is a direct result of war, and not the war on terror or the war on drugs or the war in Iraq or Afganistan.  It arose out of Corporate Warfare, Ecconomic Violence that has left millions jobless, poor, starving, or enslaved all over the world.  Think about that next time you bash open warfare.  The current Globalized Peace has plenty of victims who are just as dead as those killed by bullets in WWII.

So, I leave you with one final quote.

John Paul Jones: I have not yet begun to fight!


War isn't bad.  War is a tool like any other.  Learn to wield it well.
PJ Grant.