How can we stop wars? I ask because the US is spending billions on creating new military facilities in my island home – Guam. I keep thinking someone is going to say, that’s enough. Lets scale back the military – war isn’t helping anything. But they keep spending, building and train for war. Of course then they have to justify all that spending – by fighting.

- Shannon

April 22nd, 2010

Uh… I think you’ve answered your own question!

But that’s a gut reaction, based on my natural pessimism.  Do me a favour and give this a read: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

There’s some pretty good evidence that as the standard of living and the average life span have increased, we’ve become more peaceful.  This does make one wonder about the high levels of military spending, though.  And that “wonder” forces me to follow the standard investigative procedure for finding the truth: follow the money.  You don’t have to look far to realize that some people, companies and even countries are becoming very rich as a result of either arms sales or as a result of the power it gives them over valuable resources such as… oil.

Therefore, I reluctantly conclude that we cannot stop war because the “military industrial complex” is one of the many ways that money is funnelled from the pockets of the poor (via taxes) into the pockets of the powerful.

Organized crime likes to run something they call a protection racket (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket ).  If you think of the government as being the mafia, their Army is a key component to their protection racket — it is here to protect us from all the bad guys out here and every once-in-awhile they need to fight to prove that the threat is real.

There is, though, something larger than countries: religion.  With the mafia or government, their ultimate threat is that you will die.  Many religions wield an even scarier stick: their ultimate threat is that after you die you will spend eternity in Hell… and eternity is a very, very long time.

We may be past the era of large country wars, and just entering another era of religious wars.  Some people will become very, very rich and powerful in this kind of war.

I hope I’m wrong.

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