I’m not a pacifist. I have some understanding of the logic of deterrence. Yes, perhaps I have lost sight of how personal war can be. I don’t truly understand the hatred involved. On the other hand what are my convictions worth if I don’t know what war really is? Without setting foot on a battlefield, I can understand the fear and raw intensity of human beings killing one another. All I know is that it is a hell on earth but I guess that doesn’t matter. War is supposed to be hell. Civilian deaths are seen as being regrettable but irrelevant. They have no direct relation to the prosecution or outcome of war. I’ve asked myself – what lies behind it? What does it truly accomplish? Why are men such bloody-minded creatures and why is it that I believe there must be a better way to solve problems?

Perhaps I have a too muddle-headed perspective of war. The pictures change my fundamental belief – I see the futility of violence and war. They also reveal to me something worse than war – or perhaps a new kind of war – a war of mankind upon itself. A self-consuming madness that can only end in complete annihilation! All I know is that a wise man should love peace better than war and a wise man should choose his battles if he can.

Yes, I believe in reason, in the essential goodness of man but I don’t believe we’ll ever conquer evil or that this world will ever live in peace. Perhaps I’ve come to know too much about the true nature of humanity through the pictures. We’ve made wrong into right and right into wrong so many times who is able to tell good from evil any more? Biological and chemical weapons are silent, invisible, and deadly; they are weapons with the power to destroy not merely cities but whole societies. I’ve read the words thoughtful men have spoken about their futility but compared to the pictures portrayals, such words mean nothing. They are merely aggregates of letters, symbols of the futility of language in the face of deeds. I keep telling myself that even in the crucible of human depravity commonsense will prevail and that some measure of hope of human integrity survives and such weapons will remain unutilised but sometimes I don’t know what to believe any more. All I know is that we seem to be headed hell bent for leather towards the frightening world foreseen.

How do you play it? Resistance? Retreat? Acquiescence? Conflict? None of them really work or have been seen to work previously have they? Thousands of years have passed and men seem to have learned little in the interim, seem doomed to repeat ancient mistakes. We once again mass arms, material and troops. What’s war about but killing and dying. Wars are not fought with guts or even with weapons. In the end they are struggles of consciousness. Whatever happens it is a choice that has to be made, made out of a certain consciousness. I ask myself, how do we know if the choice is right or wrong? I tell myself that peace can’t grow out of violence yet it did in Japan after they dropped the atomic bomb. They forced peace on the Japanese by clearing away the underbrush to make space and light but was it morally right?

Sometimes it seems to me that we go over the same arguments. Violence or non-violence, how to struggle, where to draw the lines. Debate after debate, while around us violence continues to rage unchecked. War is a great waster, much in the preparation as in waging it. The end never justifies the means. I’ve come to understand that the means shape the ends. Force seems so clear, so simple, so direct. But meeting force with force produces nothing but what is already known and planned for and expected. It’s what’s already been done over and over before. We become what we do. If we do this, how do we become something better? How can we make them build something together through the force of arms? Will it change things for the future? Or will not the same problems exist?