War Disease

A pattern that permeates almost all history is that ambitious warmongers are the real enemies of humanity even as they incite violence against imagined enemies abroad. Again and again, this type of human has managed to make average men and women believe that some external foe is a great threat or has sold war as a great tonic. Bloodthirsty figures like Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt are celebrated rather than excoriated.

In our recent history, the neocons, the heirs to the jingoists of late 19th century America managed to whip up a frenzy in the wake of 9/11 that enabled a disastrous string of wars that cost the United States trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, wrecked entire countries and killed or displaced millions of civilians throughout north Africa and the middle east. The cadre of pundits and political figures responsible for these disasters paid no price. They're barely challenged. The wreckage and carnage wrought by their folly is ignored.

Some think war is a civilization level problem that only has religious solutions. That is, stopping war is more like the problem of keeping weeds out of a garden than protecting a farm from a small pack of dangerous predators, but lately I'm thinking the predator analogy is a good description of the problem.