I guess war has always been mass murder. After all, every war involves at least one group of human beings killing another group of human beings. In fact, if the killing was one way, just one group being slaughtered by another, then we’d call it “genocide”, but in war, both groups kill others who belong to the other group. Who wins? The group who kills the most? I don’t know. Maybe a historian could tell me, but, my hunch is, it’s either the group who murders most members of the other group, or the group which carries out such a horrifying mass murder that the other group says, “Stop” and “gives up”.
I was thinking about this in relation to two current conflicts – Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza. In the former case, as best I know (and it’s hard to know the truth about any war), most of the killing has been of “combatants”. Is that true? Do the number of “combatant” deaths exceed the number of “civilian” ones? Even if it is true, “combatants” are human beings too.
In relation to Israel/Gaza, this latest round of “war”, or shall we just call it “killing”, was sparked by the mass murder of “civilians”…….young people enjoying a music festival, families in their own homes, and so on. Since then, we are told, somewhere around 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis. A huge number of those killed in Gaza, are reportedly, children and adult “civilians”. How many “combatants” have the Israelis killed?
This is what set off my recent thought that war is mass murder, because, we now get reports that Israel identifies certain individuals as “combatants”, or, more likely, they call them “terrorists”, and then they either bomb their houses, or use a drone, to kill them, and, often several members of their family at the same time. There is no judicial process involved, as there isn’t usually in a war. I read that there are over 30,000 people on the Israeli database who have been selected to be killed in this way. They are named, found, and killed.
Will the Palestinians or Israelis ever “give up” and stop killing each other? In other words, will this war ever end? We don’t know. But, sadly, at this point, it seems unlikely.
In World War II both sides targeted civilian populations, carpet bombing and/or fire bombing whole cities. Did the “big bombs”, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bring the whole conflict to an end? In other words, did the “Allies” win by killing more people who lived in countries controlled by the “Axis” than the other way around? I don’t think all historians agree that the nuclear bombs ended the war, but they certainly horrified the whole world.
However you look at his, it’s pretty clear that war is mass murder. Will we humans ever evolve to the point where we stop doing that to each other? What are the chances?
In our lifetime I don’t think they will stop. And we might war ourselves into oblivion. But yes war is murder….and it hurts my heart.
For me, the ghastliness of it all was typified a few months after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. People in Ukraine had tried to protect vulnerable people like children from Russian bombs by putting signs on the roofs of schools, hospitals and similar places, warning that there were children there. The Russian response was to take one of their missiles, paint the words “For the children” on it, and lob it onto a railway station packed with refugees including children.
There was maybe a time – 18th century? – when warfare was supposedly a more “gentlemanly” affair, conducted between soldiers. Civilians got dragged into it during the last century – I understand that the overwhelming majority of the millions of victims of WW2 were civilians. Mass murder indeed.