No war, just war, or what?

Main idea: While some call to stop all war, I say that in the face of evil, war is sometimes necessary. Here under the sun, neither ending all war nor just war is easily implemented.


The topic of justice and war came up the other day and the Calendar of Wisdom. Tolstoy aims the day’s quotes toward a call to stop all war. I found myself chafing at this call and upon pondering, I realized why: evil.

There is real evil in the world, and it should not be tolerated. While economic and other isolations should be used first, when they fail to topple evil regimes, war may be needed. War exists because evil exists, and evil is worth fighting against. Unfortunately, our motives are rarely if ever pure.

Of course, this is fraught with danger. Who gets to decide what is evil and what is not? There is some safety in several nations declaring a regime evil. But the problems of groupthink and perspectival filters remain. So, in theory, there are just wars. In practice, we may only identify them after the fact.

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(C) Laura Springer

Musings of a peripatetic wannabe-sage by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License..