Wars, a Necessity
There’s that famous line from Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s song, War , that goes: “ War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'! ”. A lot of such opposition to all wars comes right in the middle of a war (The lines above were written during the Vietnam War) or right after a major one ends. But does anybody subscribe to that view entirely? Does India’s war that created Bangaladesh qualify as a useless war? Or the first Gulf War that freed Kuwait? Or how about the dharma yudh of the Mahabharata? So what’s common to those 3 wars? They all had a purpose that was defined before the war started, not some noble cause associated after the event by the victors. Which is why I totally disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s stance (as described below by Benjamin Schwarz): “Emerging from the charnel house, (Ambrose) Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning. . . . For him the war was nothing more—could be nothing more—than a meaningless and murderous slaug...