War: The Wrong Answer

(All characters, countries and events appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Or not. It's up to you.)

War can looked at in two ways- The religious and the objective. By going to war, we are challenging God's authority, by destroying something he had created. Or we could see it like this. The world is around four billion years old. What with all the nuclear war weapons, it could end in a second.

(I'm not religious. I'm also an atheist. I don't get the point anyway.)

XYZ was a completely medieval society. They had less money, less food, less resources and smaller bombs. They were, for the most part, a gentle, God-fearing and peace-loving people .However years of battle have stripped them off these very characteristics that distinguished their race. Young boys play with guns, girls dance to the tunes of bombing in the vicinity. Most of them orphans, they have not even experienced the comfort of family life. They are growing up in a society that has been devastated and ravaged by war. They are growing taller in a society where innocence, tenderness and ingenuity hold no meaning. Now the people no longer know how to treat their own people; killing, stoning and brutalizing has become the norm. The country's foundations and the cultural tenets it upholds are crumbling to fine dust by the second.

A certain event was the harbinger of this change in global power relations.

It involved aeroplanes, skyscrapers, suicide bombers and several shivers down one's spine.

Moreover, who were the bombers? Ordinary people whose absolute belief in a cause overrode their natural instinct for survival. They were but ordinary men who were manipulated and thoroughly brainwashed by very influential people. False promises of paradise after death were the seeds of the utter devastation they wracked. Yet ABC, one of the most well- educated nations in the world, failed to understand their pathetic situation and chose to retaliate with vengeance.

Terrorism, as I see it, is any act that spreads a feeling of terror or endangers the basic freedoms of people. That is exactly what the great state of ABC has done. It has plundered XYZ of all his wealth and integrity. But more importantly, it has sent out a very strong message. That it can do whatever it wants with the peoples of the world, and get away with it. It is taking for advantage the fact that it is the strongest, most powerful nation on earth. As aptly written in the essay ‘War is Peace’, ‘Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's resistance movements - or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognized government.’

The war has altered the very meaning of life for many. In XYZ, living has become just as scary as dying. In ABC, obesity, of ALL things, is the greatest threat to survival. Why doesn’t this superpower just use commonsense for once, and realize that it is futile to destroy an already destroyed land? Dropping bombs will only shift around some debris, dirty up graveyards and bother the dead. The idea that the world can be ride of evil doers and terrorism with more violence and cruelty is just absurd. Something even Einstein or Newton would not be able to bend their brains around. So why not they just start learning to love people of weaker nations and unlearn hating and ruling them?

And there I thought "change was all we need" was something that would be followed through.

War still on? Yes. Change? No.

War, and in extension, violence is not the opposite the peace. 

So, it cannot possibly be the correct answer, can it?