In war everybody loses, nobody wins

Dear Editor,

Every citizen, particularly those who consider themselves humanist, would have no difficulty with sentiments expressed in our editorials and other articles dealing with the situation in Europe, and we all agree with the statement in one editorial published on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, after analyzing the situation in Ukraine, it said “Everyone loses, nobody wins.” Perhaps this is the unavoidable curse of advanced technology as we move from bows and arrows, spears and swords to ballistic and inter-continental missiles. How else can we explain this shared stupidity by so-called sane leaders of States over the past few centuries? Just over one hundred years ago, a brutal war named World War I, which destroyed property and sometimes priceless artifacts and took millions of lives. The cause, they say, was a spark ignited after the Archduke of Sarajevo was assassinated by a radical Serb on 28th June, 1914. The war ended in 1918 with promises by leaders everywhere, not to engage ever in similar disastrous barbaric adventure.  Two decades later, 1939 saw Europe at war with the vanquished Germany being the aggressor. When I visited the Berlin Wall before it was torn down, my guide explained to me that the Germans, because they were surrounded by the Netherlands, France, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Poland, Denmark and Czech Republic, always felt helmed in and were therefore, by nature, defensive and belligerent.

In the height of World War II, why did Germany try to seize and occupy Stalingrad in August 1941, the result, a brutal seven months campaign of fierce fighting which took well over one million lives and saw the Russians repelling the Germans? Why did Japan, in December of 1941, attacked American Ships at Pearl Harbor, destroying the American battleships and taking the lives of two thousand three hundred and thirty five servicemen, and injuring one thousand one hundred and thirty three others. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it as a day of infamy drawing the might of the United States into what some of us previously described as a European Civil War. At Hiroshima, Japan, 6th of August 1945 and Nakasaki three days later, the newly developed atomic bomb was dropped on these two cities claiming over sixty thousand lives. My generation remembers Vietnam, the Korean War, and Afghanistan etc. The issue seems to be that there is a fatal flaw in the brain-tissue of great leaders, east, west, north and south, once they have at their command, military might. The single exception of my generation are the two great Ks, Nikita Khrushchev of Russia and John F. Kennedy of the United States, after setting up a hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, avoided the unthinkable of a nuclear holocaust known as the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962. In each and every one of the above instances, the leaders did what they believed was in their national interest.

Sincerely,

Hamilton Green

Elder