The world and humans for students and their parents

Why are there wars?

From the book by Andrey Sokolov and Tatiana Sokolova "The world and humans for students and their parents".

Why are there wars?

Wars are not much different from brawl, only more people suffer from them. And not only suffers, but also dies.

How do brawl arise? Someone wants to take something away from someone. Someone was offended by someone. And it happens just like that, for fun. Or to show who is in charge.

And this happens not only with children. The adults are the same. Only the result is not a black eye, but the death of many people.

People have been fighting since time immemorial. And they just can't stop.

Ancient tribes fought for prey. One tribe took food from another. Those who were taken from them armed themselves and went to take revenge. To fight again.

When countries and states arose, their leaders - kings, kings, princes - fought with their neighbors in order to seize more land, people, turn them into slaves and make them work for themselves.

Well, if not to capture, then to rob.

The robbers still exist - they get into other people's apartments, shops, banks and take what belongs to others. Usually, these criminals are caught by the police.

But there was no one to catch kings. If only to another king.

And now some king was gathering an army, promised him a rich booty. Those. promised that he would allow robbing the inhabitants of the country with which he was going to fight. And he went to war.

In ancient times, war, land grabbing and plunder were considered valor. Until now, history textbooks admire Alexander the Great or the warlords of Ancient Rome, who seized and plundered other peoples and countries. They admire Napoleon, who, for the sake of his glory and pride, destroyed both his own people and foreign peoples. After all, not only the enemy dies in battles. People are killed on both sides. Not only are those who are fighting on the battlefield killed, but also civilians who find themselves in the way of the troops.

It is curious that, while admiring Ancient Rome, Napoleon or Alexander the Great, the authors of history textbooks have a completely different attitude to such conquerors as Attila or Genghis Khan.

Although all of them brought death and destruction. All of them robbed and killed. Both those and others brought grief to civilians.

In the Middle Ages, another reason for wars arose - an idea. The Crusades and other religious wars were based on the idea that there is only one right God and the rest are false. And it is imperative to seize the land where people who believe in the wrong God live.

Of course, these wars were accompanied by the same familiar plunder. Wrongly believing people could be robbed, killed. Priests of all religions actively encouraged such wars, and sometimes contributed to their occurrence. In the last century, politicians took over this disreputable place of clergy.

Sometimes for such wars and robberies it was not even necessary to go to distant countries. The pogroms of Jewish homes, shops and villages that periodically occurred in Europe and the Russian Empire, the genocide of Armenians by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the extermination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu people in Rwanda did not require robbers and murderers to leave their country. And all these crimes, committed for the sake of ideas and profit, occurred in the last 100-150 years. Robbing and killing unarmed neighbors proved to be very tempting for people blinded by ideas and greed.

All sorts of ideas have become a very convenient excuse for wars in the past and even in our century.

The idea of the superiority of one nation over another, as well as the idea that there are some wrong people, faiths and peoples, led to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazis in this war killed Jews for being Jews, gypsies for being gypsies, people with mental illness for being sick. The Nazis considered the Slavic peoples to be inferior people, worthy only of slavery, because they are Slavs.

Of course, as before, any wars "for an idea" were accompanied by total robberies.