Young Writers Society

When we speak of wars we of course understand them as whirlpools of destruction set off by a sequence of events.
However, when we speak of the things that ignite an armed conflict, are we truly discussing the true heart of conflict both in general and particularly?
when the subject of what I call "a Thematic War" is brought up, I noticed that most commentators focus more on the overarching theme of the War instead of ALL of the details leading to its ignition.

for instance, when a "Holy" War is fought(in very much the same way a "normal" war is) commentators focus on the mechanics of the religions the war is themed after, but I've noticed that they never really go into all of the anthropology working within the warring societies behind the scenes of the "theme". what's with that?

Are holy wars noticeably different from other wars. is killing,stealing and destroying for faith worst or in some way entirely different from conquering lands, taking loot, and destroying relics for the glory of Nationalism or racial superiority?

does a somehow more humanistic theme to a war somehow make it "better"?

I really want to know what you guys think.

I say that the only difference is that religion is without borders and doesn't change as often as nations do therefore conflicts last longer, but that's no different than a clash of cultures. I don't think religion is the cause of most wars,but rather militarism itself.

it's militarism that's behind all wars. it not the faith oven the national pride but a warlike culture that has gained through force and lives through force. Most people are peaceful, their lives just become entangle in that of militaristic movements.

The way I see it, all war is about the same thing, regardless of how you label its motives, and it goes something like this:

"Those people over there have stuff that we want. Let's go get it, even if they don't want us to have it."

The "stuff" can be and has been anything. Most often, it's land. One bunch of people wants the land where another bunch of people already are, so they attack them in order to get that land. Of course, there are lots of ways of packaging that, such as religious and nationalistic motives. It's an easy PR step from "We want that land" to telling the general populace "We DESERVE that land! It SHOULD be ours!"

That's true. Economic factors will always be an issue. there's currently no way to work around the geographic distribution of resources people and stability.

I don't think wars are simple because you can't just say, " Let's stop fighting and bring the troops back home." If you do that, then we get a war over here because the other side's not done fighting. If it was as simple as let's end war, then it would be over, but I don't believe it is. I believe war's bad, and I believe it should end, but I think we need to think of all the factors that affect wars.

I probably wouldn't say that a holy war is different to any other war as they all require 'faith' of some kind, whether that is in a religious ideology or the government's ambitions. For example, Britain and the US went into Iraq with the soldiers 'believing' they were there to stop the production of WMD's and remove an increasingly powerful dictator (admittedly this is a very simplistic way of putting it but I think the point makes sense).

The issue with analysing any war is that there are so many different machinations and behind the scene's tinkerings that there are numerous possible reasons or claims for war as well as numerous reasons for why the war may have started. Again look at Iraq or Afghanistan. It has only been in recent years that we have begun to see the truth behind many of the civil wars that took place in Chile, Argentina and so on.