War

Wars are a distant thing to Malaysians. Our country is a small player in this globe, and perhaps it is a thing to be thankful about. The abundance of resources of a nation is as much as a blessing as a curse. The spoils of a weaker nation is divided among the strong, and always has.

I used to read with fascination the coverage of various wars in the tabloids. They show colourful pictures of powerful weapons, sometimes in action. The journalists write at length about the encounters, and with vigor they relate feeds from the battlefield. This is very true especially in the mainstream media; the reporters' style of reporting seem to slant towards bragging about how the superior military power beat up the weaker one nice and proper, or how the invaded nation is putting up a spirited defense and what a hard time the conquerors are having until they bring in their mother of all bombs and shatter everything in the way. Hoo-ahh. All these can be exciting to a young boy's eyes, and for a good reason found in a quote I came across:

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." - David Friedman

Yet, as logic begins to water down all the rhetoric and passion, people begin to die by crazy numbers. Men killing strangers of the same species. Who, or what, gave them such right and might, to do as they wish and they want? The imbecile majority, in their comfortable beds, only read from the papers and pass the verdict that the good guys are kicking the bad guys' arses, and together with it, give their moral support to generals and soldiers to keep doing what they're doing.

Though they have been around for a very long time, the imbecile majority does not realise the deployment of the press and language in moulding public opinion and hiding the truth. The battle is fought on land, in the mountains, in the seas, up in the blue skies, but the war is fought in the papers, influencing the house of public opinion of the nations. An embattled nation can afford to be fired at from all directions and still manage victory, but it cannot see fire in its own backyard in the manner of losing support from her own people.  The blame may not be on intelligence itself, but the eagerness to rush and immediately believe whatever a certain authoritative, prestigious paper has to say at the end of the day. My dad calls this the white-people fervour- being positive and enthusiastic about anything West or White- and most of us are guilty of it. It seems axiomatic to have to say that we should not take in whatever offered to us readily, and that we ought to think things over before reaching a conclusion, yet this is not always observed when people read papers using the length of their legs.

Wars, and their many instigators, cannot be claimed as  victories. Instead they are crimes by nature, no matter the uniform. They are the means to make the rich even richer, they are tools to maintain power. Wars should be seen as Man's greatest failure, and be seen as the heinous abomination they are, something to be opposed by humanity.

Because if you hold your tongue when another is being invaded, the same would happen when it's your turn.