War is Still a Racket

"There is no fate but what we make"

How does one bring up actual dangers in the world without slipping into fear-mongering? Today's reality is that we are closer to a nuclear war between Russia and the United States than we have ever been. Im not saying war is going to break out in the next year or two. Of course, that could happen but in the same way, I can die the next time I get in a car could happen. The real concern is where is this conflict heading. Few people show any interest in attempting a peaceful resolution, to the point that wanting peace is becoming a disqualifier to political power.

Before we go on I wish to state up front this is not a plea to enact a political solution of any kind. This problem is too important to leave up to politicians. While not biologically conscious in any way the state is an entity that self-organizes in its interest. There is an internal logic to it. When war is declared people tend to be more tolerant of it Government induced restrictions. At the same time, people become less concerned about restraining the state from acquiring powers that its almost certain to abuse at a later date. To put this concept into video game terms what mushrooms are to Mario and Luigi war is to the state. It supersizes it. Anyone who is embedded in this system trying to resist the momentum of war is almost certain to be ejected from power. Conversely, those who make war their god will be greatly rewarded, at least in the short term.

The only hope for peace comes from an elevation of consciousness among the people fighting. To realize no matter what side you are on the real enemy isn't the rival gang on the battlefield but the people callously gambling all your lives behind their podiums. The people who want peace must manifest their vision of the world with more enthusiasm and intelligence than the people who want to manifest war.

To my mind, one of the first and often neglected steps in manifesting peace is outlining exactly what criteria are needed to bring us to war. Many avoid this process because they erroneously believe just thinking about anything negative feeds it energy. It's true dwelling on negative subjects like war can bring us into a fear state which is fertile soil for war to grow out of. But problems aren't solved by ignoring them either. By having clear criteria for when war is justified it's easier to not get swept up in the emotion of the day when conflict arises. It allows us to soberly access the situation. Generally speaking, most people will set a better standard for when war is justified when they are not in a media-induced flight or flight response.

For this exercise, I will use the 7 principles of just war outlined by Tomas Aquinas in the middle ages. I choose to start here because it's one of the more well-known doctors of its kind and it's the one I'm most familiar with. I don't agree with it completely but it does offer a solid foundation to begin this process. If you have different criteria you wish to use, feel free to do. I suspect there will be much overlap.

1 Just Cause - The first principle states we can’t be going to war to reclaim stolen loot or valor, Likewise we can't go to war for vengeance, For a war to have a just cause we need to be protecting people. This one is a pretty low bar to clear. I think it would be hard-pressed for any historian to find any war ever recorded where someone wasn’t being helped in some way. So, so far Ukraine and Russia are justified in their war. But it should be noted that an invasion of Nebraska by Kansas could be justified.

2 Comparative Justice - The degree of injustice has to be disproportional. In other words, there has to be a clear victim and villain. This may or may not be true. How we answer this question has a lot to do with when we declare the beginning of the conflict. Did it begin with Russia invading Ukraine a year ago? Did it begin with the United States or Nato orchestrating a coup in 2014 inserting its puppet government? Good luck finding a consensus for this in the cacophony of propaganda. Furthermore, no one knows what happening except for the people there and they only know the parts they witnessed. There is no way to objectively determine this one way or the other.

3 Competent Authority - I'll refrain from making Joe Biden jokes here. Not because I think he's competent (I don’t think he is ) but because he's not the one in charge. I agree with Frank Zappa that "Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex". Joe Biden has no more control over what the military does than the guy who dresses up as a clown to trick kids into being obese has over how Mcdonald's conducts itself as a business. This is true of the Ukrainians as well. So let's also omit whether an actor who played the president before he became the president has the authority to declare war.

When asking about competent authority, we need to ask ourselves whether the same people who spent 20 years barking military orders in Afghanistan only to replace a poorly armed Taliban with a well-armed Taliban are competent authorities. The same people who fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan while aiding them in Syria. The same people who lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That the Lusitania did not carry arms to the English. That lied about Golf of Tonkin. I'd no more believe the state when it tries to justify war than I'd believe Ted Bundy said he had an unfortunate and coincidental series of bad dates that all required him to take drastic self-defense measures.

But we should go even further. We should ask ourselves even if we had a competent authority in the state would they be a legitimate one? Because of its omnipresence, it's too easy to just assume ideas the state is based on like the social contract hold any validity. Unless you personally agreed to be governed by a state it is as illegitimate to you as any other non-consensual relationship. So let's ask ourselves, did I sign the constitution? If your answer is no then as far as I'm concerned you have no obligation to obey anyone who uses it as their source of authority. So even if the state succeeded at being competent it would still fail to be an authority that has any right to send anyone to war.

4 Right Intention - Does anyone seriously believe that anyone organizing this war is motivated by helping people? Politicians like mass shooters want the legacy that violence will bring. They also want the money that will be donated to them by contractors who will receive exclusive privileges to rebuild after the rubblization. Weapon manufacturers want the spike in sales that will accompany the immediate destruction of their product on the battlefield. If people are killed in this process that's just how it goes.

I'm sure many people fighting this war have good intentions. If however, they act under their chain of command then their intentions don’t matter as it's their orders, not their intentions that drive their behavior. So I'm going to say we fail this criterion as well.

5 Probability of Success - Like comparative justice, I think it's difficult to know what's anyone's probability of success. Other than going to war with a country you just got out of the war with there is no way to know for certain what will happen. If such a case does arise it's likely to go as it was going before the ceasefire. But there is no way to know what degree of success we have against Russia. Militaries like to keep the capacities under wraps. We have no idea what they can do against us. Many people will proclaim we have an unrivaled army but that could just be propaganda for all we know. Did I mention we spent 20 years fighting the Taliban only to leave them better armed and trained when we left? No one would have made that bet in 2002.

But all this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to modern warfare. War is no longer quarantined to soldiers on a battlefield. We have entered into the age of 5th generation warfare This is marked by a shift from trying to outmuscle your opponent militarily, to blitzing the mind of their population with propaganda till they become obedient to your will. Why force your enemy into chains when it's easier to convince them to forge their chains? If one remembers all the talk of "winning hearts and minds" during the early stages of the Iraq Afaganston wars That is what they were talking about.

I don't think we were that successful at it. Nor do I think we will be any more successful at defending ourselves from people waging a similar attack against us. And this is the type of war we are engaging in with Russia. Well, it will be if the psychopaths in charge of all this decide not to dispatch nuclear warheads in which case we are all screwed. So another no.

6 Last Resort - All options must have been tried. Has any other action besides provoking the war even been tried? So far escalating tensions have been resort 1, resort 2 resort 3, and so forth. Surprise surprise another no.

7 proportionality. It must be reasonably anticipated that more good will come from war than harm. To do this we need to know what the worst-case scenario could be. That's nuclear war. Then we need to know what the best-case scenario is. That's prosperous trade between all the countries involved in the conflict. We also have to know what the most likely good and bad situations will be. We all will have different ideas about what that is and is impossible to know for sure. But whatever your answers are we then need to do the math to figure this out. For me, the real threat of nuclear war outweighs the promise of harmonious trade which has a greater chance of occurring when there is peace anyways. So to round it out another no.

So adding all this up I get 1 yes, 1 I don't know and 5 no's. Hardly any justifications for war under this system at least. But then what is the alternative? Here is my idea of what could happen.

The people in the disputed area decide whether they want to be Russian or Ukrainian. By this, I don’t mean we cut up the map based on elections. I mean that the people in these areas get to decide as individuals whether they wish to live under the Ukrainian flag or the Russian one. Then they put their differences aside as much as possible and live peacefully with each other. They don't have to be friendly with each other but they both must create a culture where violence against the other is strictly prohibited by both groups.

Many people reflexively believe this is not possible. It would not be easy of course, especially not now. But we should not confuse the difficulty with the impossible. Not so long ago Protestants and Catholics waged war against each other throughout Europe over their differences. Much blood was spilled Now, these two groups interact with each other with hardly any violence. There is nothing especially unique about this happing. If people made different choices there would still be people waging war over their theological differences. Is there really any difference between people of different religions occupying the same space as there are people of different nationalities?

Anyone living in a city of any kind already lives with a plurality of options to conduct their business. People who identify as Russians can seek out Russian grocery stores, schools churches pubs, or whatever. People who identify as Ukrainian likewise should be able to patronize Ukrainian services. Maybe some crafty entrepreneur types will find a way to cater to both markets.

Likewise how people identify will determine which government they pay taxes to. On a side note would it not be nice to have governments have to compete with other governments for your tax money as any business does? The governments of Russia and Ukraine can work out how the resources will be distributed. No matter what compromise they have to make they will be both better off without the destruction of war.

Infrastructure could easily be outsourced to companies that are hired jointly by the Russian and Ukrainian Governments much the same way the business that shares the same space might jointly hire security or janitorial services. We will finally answer that age-old question that always stumps libertarians; who will build the roads without the government? This could prove to be an interesting experiment. Maybe companies that usually profit from rebuilding after wars will now be incentivized to maintain roads. Maybe Ukraine and Russia will both be flooded with the innovator class. In addition, Russia would benefit from having a relatively small piece of land to experiment on to tighten up its infrastructure. Maybe governments extracting taxes out of the same region will give them more incentive to work peacefully at least with each other.

Of course, giving people this choice weakens the power the state has over people. This is the real last resort for those in power. These ideas have to come from the bottom up by people who want to actually reclaim their land from those that turned it into a battlefield.