July 30, 2008 at 14:07:23

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Our greatest achievement: a third world war within one century

By Roland Michel Tremblay (about the author)     Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Roland Michel Tremblay - Writer

It has not been 100 years since the First World War, and the Third World War is upon us. We have not even begun the preparations for the celebrations of the 100 years since the First World War ended, but we are ready for another one. What an achievement! Does it not feel great, as a humanity, that our history can be so bloody and deadly? What is wrong with us? Are we not in control of our collective destiny? Or do we have a death wish, a secret desire to see this world end?

We are lucky that the Second World War ended with only one side having nuclear bombs. We are lucky that two of those nuclear bombs ended the Second World War. However, the Third World War will begin where the Second one ended, with nuclear bombs all over the place.

We will not be celebrating that Third World War in one hundred years, I can assure you, because there will not be anyone left to celebrate anything. Did you not realise what a Third World War was all about? If not, it is time for you to wake up. The Third World War will be the last one. You can always dream that a few will survive, but it will be so destructive, it is likely that none of us will survive.

The very first time I became aware of war, I was 5 years old, perhaps 4. It was right after the Vietnam War, a war I heard nothing about until I was much older. I had five years of blissful ignorance before I found out that in some parts of the world, people were killing each other by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, and that, for millennia.

I don't remember many specific events from that early age, however I remember my sister telling me all about war very clearly, as it was so shocking and stunning, I didn't sleep for a week. It might have had something to do with the way she described it to me. She simply said: "War is soldiers coming into our house with guns and shooting all of us dead right here!" As far as I could try to define war today, I find it so perfect a definition, coming from the mouth of a 7 year old little girl, that I will stick with it. This is what war is.

If she had been really bright, and had wanted to frighten me to death, she could have added: Who needs soldiers? One nuclear bomb and we are all gone!

War at its simplest level, is about human killing other humans, and that's it. So the immediate question that comes after that is: why? Why would they do such a thing? What could possess them to kill us all?

Try to explain that to your children, you will quickly realise that, on that topic, they are certainly more mature than you, because nothing in their innocent mind could justify such an action. Unless they were born right in the middle of a war, and then again, they probably wouldn't understand anything about it, they just know that soldiers come and kill their family and bombs are falling everywhere, destroying everything, killing everyone. At that point, I guess the reasons are unimportant, you have to run for your life.

As I grew older and got more educated, or brainwashed, I finally understood, of course, we have to go to war, we have to eradicate them all, they have to kill us all, it is in the nature of humanity to find reasons to go to war and take over power and steal natural resources of others. Or bring them freedom and capitalism, or Christianity, over some other weird and incomprehensible religion which would definitely take away our freedom.

I might have thought at that time that it would also be acceptable for me to kill all my neighbours and steal all their possessions, and convert them to anything I felt like, but it seems that there were many laws to prevent me from doing just that, and if I dared to try, I would quickly rot in a prison for the rest of my life.

Funny how we have all these laws to insure we don't decide to do personal wars against our neighbours, but once the government decides it is time to go to war, then it is permitted and you will be trained to do just that. So, it appears to me that governments are above the law they oblige us to obey.

I never understood wars, I was never able to justify them. Only when I was confronted with the idea that Germans were about to conquer the whole world and decided to attack us, I finally came to term with the fact that you cannot avoid war if your sudden enemy decides to declare war against you. In my mind, before I was even a teenager, I thought there were some barbaric nations out there who still believed in wars, whilst us, as pure and innocent as we were, would only go to war in self-defence.

The problem was that I came to meet many German people, I visited Germany a few times, and these people were as civilised as any of us. In fact, they were the nicest people I have ever met. I had to turn around and ask myself, how could these people go to war? None of them looked particularly threatening.

Then I understood that no nation decides to go to war, governments or a few lunatics decide for them. Unfortunately the population appears incapable of saying no to their governments, and so war is still inevitable at the time of writing these lines.

I also came to understand that my own country has gone to war when we started it, along with our supposed allies including mainly the United States and the United Kingdom. Under the pretence or disguise of humanitarian aid, keeping the peace and whatever, we went there, we killed a lot of them, we got contracts to rebuild afterwards and we took power.

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