I’m declaring war on war. Who’s with me?

The bombs and rockets that once razed parts of London are falling still – in Ukraine and Gaza. Are we humans in love with war?

An Israeli tank moves a long the border after leaving the Gaza Strip. Picture: Getty

Are we humans in love with war? We declare new ones constantly. Here a War on Drugs, there a War on Terror. In the mid-1960s, US President Lyndon Johnson boldly announced a War on Poverty. It’s time, perhaps, for a War on War. The conflict we call World War I was proclaimed to be “the war to end all wars”. But no sooner had we built monuments to the fallen in every Australian town and city than we had to build new ones for new wars. And in Canberra there’s a tomb that accommodates the remains of two unknown and nameless soldiers – to represent all the other anonymous bodies. On both sides, on all sides. As if masons weren’t busy enough mass producing marble crosses and angels for civilian cemeteries.

When it comes to the war dead, business is always booming. From Arlington in the US to the vistas of war graves in France. To the most awesome cemetery I have ever seen – outside what was known as Leningrad – remembering the Russians who died in the Siege. And then there’s Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland – the most monstrous mass grave, war crime, call it what you will, in human history. If ghosts exist the air must be thick with them at Auschwitz, where so many innocents were “sent up the chimneys”. In that place is horror beyond horror, beyond explanation, comprehension, imagining. To have lived through that place is to know the reality of survivor’s guilt.

Woodrow Wilson, father of the League of Nations, hoped WWI would be the war to end all wars. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-Bomb, hoped his weapon would make war unthinkable, impossible. Yet nine nations now have nuclear weapons, including the US, UK, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea and Israel. At the last census, 12,500 nuclear warheads. (Warheads? Bizarre term). Other wars, it seems, are best forgotten. We celebrate, mythologise and worship war every Anzac Day, deeming the date sacred, as the birthdate of our nation. We are proud to be a country christened in a font of blood. Yet monuments to the Frontier Wars are MIA. The slaughtered First Nations men, women and children? Erased from memory.

Endless wars. WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. For whom the bell tolls. The bombs and rockets that once razed parts of London are falling still – in Ukraine and Gaza. Putin talks of using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and “Rocketman” Kim Jong Un in North Korea is adding to his arsenal. In a few months Trump may be back in the Oval Office with, once again, his finger on the button. And what happens if/when the Israel-Gaza conflict engulfs the region? The Doomsday Clock is seconds from midnight.

In the meantime, military brass and theologians debate the definition of a “just war”. And military brass and international authorities debate the definition of “war crime”. How many atrocities can dance on the head of a pin? For those bombed, for the women and children killed, mutilated and maddened, every moment is a war crime. Only the dead see the end of war. Two armies that fight each other is like one army committing suicide. We all lose in every conflict. As Bertrand Russell said, “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”