Howard Zinn, who wrote A People’s History of the United States, once gave a speech where he made an important distinction between a just cause and a just war. If you think about it, it’s kind of obvious. Manspreading is an injustice that deserves to be addressed, but nobody is advocating we drop bombs on city buses to prevent the expansion of radical spreadism.
Zinn said in the speech
There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
There’s lots of other options that never even get discussed.
And I think this applies to the war Canada has been helping to fight since 2001, the so-called “War on Terror,” a.k.a. “The Forever War,” aka “CHA ching!” (Only weapons manufacturers call it that).
A new study was released by the Physicians for Social Responsibility that concluded that the War on Terror has directly or indirectly killed around 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s like half the population of Toronto, dead. The square tonnage of pain and suffering caused by 1.3 million deaths is inconceivable. Maybe imagine how distressed you get about the dismal selection of Canadian Netflix, and multiply that by…. just add 1.3 million deaths.
So that’s the cost, to which Canada is adding daily with the bombs we’re dropping in Syria and Iraq, assuming the bombs aren’t filled with magical justice dust that only kills people who are pure evil. For this War on Terror to be a just war, for it to have been worth it, the benefits need to be bigger than that cost. So are they? That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is no. It’s for sure no.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
