It’s easy to oppose the creation of weapons when you are at peace. It’s easy to condemn those that fight wars when it’s not your life that’s at stake. Yet, it’s just as easy to throw all of those principles out of the window when it is.
What are weapons, but tools to gain a competitive advantage over your opponent in a fight for survival. Given how comfortable most of our lives are, one might get the impression that the fighting has ceased. Yet, people from many places around the world will certainly disagree. Armed conflicts are still a common occurrence in the 21st century, I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. What people do disagree about is whether those conflicts are necessary. And you can usually gain some easy social credit by assessing that it isn’t. Unless you are talking to a direct stakeholder in one of these conflicts, “people shouldn’t kill each other” is a safe and uncontroversial opinion to have.
It may seem naïve, but it isn’t. It’s emotionally efficient. We don’t have to understand all the intricacies of a conflict, all the parties involved with their various motivations and capabilities if we can just fall back to a fundamental rule that says “armed conflicts are never justified”. If we understood all these things, who knows what cocktail of emotions awaits us. We might empathize with one side or, even worse, both. We might understand what caused that hatred for the opponent and adopt some of that hatred ourselves. We might get emotionally pulled into that conflict and that wouldn’t feel very good at all. So the position of “that war should end, no matter how” is not based in wisdom but just in ignorance. If you adopt it, your chances of being attacked are low but your chances of being taken seriously are even lower.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that armed conflicts are always (or even ever) justified. I’m just saying that it’s never that easy. Running around saying “stop making war” or “stop producing weapons” or “stop sending troops” will get you applause from anyone who is just as ignorant as you are, but it’s not going to help anyone suffering from war. You don’t solve problems by deciding that you don’t want to have the problem anymore. Safe for some truly degenerate people, most who are driving armed conflicts, even those political figures who are often demonized in the media, don’t really want to fight wars. They are stuck in a situation where they have to. It’s easy to say that they could just end it all, but that usually means you just haven’t understood why they can’t. Ending an armed conflict does not require a decision, it requires a solution.
That solution usually means new rules that are mutually agreed upon and it means that those rules can be enforced. Enforcing these rules usually requires weapons. Physical force plays as much a role in ending conflicts as it does in starting them. Weapons are effective guardrails to prevent anyone from crossing your red lines. As long as nobody does, nobody gets hurt. Of course it would be much nicer if that wasn’t necessary, but that’s just not how the world we live in works. Saying we shouldn’t need weapons is not an opinion, it’s a pipe dream. It’s like saying we should be able to teleport anywhere instantly. Of course I would also like it if it was a reality, but unless you have a concrete idea for how to get there, you don’t deserve any appreciation for stating it. I just wish society would understand that.
