by Andreas Peglau[1]
(This is an partially unchecked translation by DeepL. Please excuse any errors that sure have occurred.
Here you can download this text as pdf.)
Since humans have existed …
“War is defined as an organized conflict involving the use of weapons and violence, carried out by groups acting in a planned manner. The goal of the groups involved is to assert their interests. … The acts of violence that occur in this context are aimed at the physical integrity of opposing individuals and thus lead to death and injury.” (Wikipedia)[2]
The proposition “War is the father of all” has been handed down from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (approx. 520 BCE – 460 BCE).”[3] In 1642, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote of the “war of all against all” as the original, natural state.[4] Almost three hundred years later Sigmund Freud picked up another saying, quoted by Hobbes from the Roman playwright Plautus, and maintained that “Man is a wolf to man,” a “savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien,” based on a “primary” — that is, a given, inherent — “mutual hostility of human beings.”[5]
Were this so, we wouldn’t have to mull over how wars come about or whose interests are transacted in wars: it is just in our genes somehow …. This would also mean that wars could hardly be avoided in the long run. And if they could be avoided at all, then that would be only at the cost of suppressing our true nature, our ‘natural disposition.’ Weiterlesen →
