Why Wars Keep Repeating
A Teaching Story
Trauma begets trauma.
This time we find Mulla Nasrudin teaching history at an American university, full of international students. Of course his approach to teaching is quite contrarian. First he asks his pupils, “Who here wants to go to war with any of the other students present, or their country?” All students shake their heads vehemently no.
“That’s normal,” he says, “But wars happen anyway. Why? … Because,” he tells his large gathering, “… Trauma rules this world. Too often traumatised people will seek revenge upon those that hurt them, or any weaker new victim. They’ll feel they deserved it, because of their pain. Many leaders will promise this revenge or right to take back. He’ll get his people into a frenzy and lead them to war. And then bestows new trauma upon another people. This he’ll call a victory. And the losers of this war, now will wait for a leader who will exact revenge. ‘Our history gives us the right,’ so will their new leader claim.”
“And worse,” the Mulla continues, “in modern wars, there’s no clean victory ever. To traumatise another nation, you’ll need to traumatise at least part of your own. Some will commit war crimes that’ll haunt them, let alone get PTSD, others will be victimised through retaliations, or just die as ‘heroes’ for our cause. Of course many of these leaders spew ‘now it’s our time or right to take what we want’. But too often they’re just in it for their own power and wealth. They gain the most from using their own people as a gang, to steal from another gang. And other crime boss leaders, eh, I mean allies, will look the other way, when their friend commits war crimes. They just look at the prize to be gained from a victory. And all normal people, living in peace in villages or towns suffer. They suffer from false beliefs due to ‘anti them’ propaganda. They suffer losing sons to far away conflicts. They suffer from attacks because of a conflict they didn’t want.”
The students found this a very harsh approach to history. One of the students raises his hand. “All good and well sir, but aren’t there any good leaders, or just wars? And the way you tell it, there never can be heroes saving their own people or leading them to victory.” Many students get into discussions over this. They don’t want to let go of their own nation’s heroes, nor want to think about what cruelties they did to others. But they do want to contradict students from other nations and tell them what suffering their so-called heroes brought to others. Other nations heroes get reframed into things such as coloniser, war criminal, communist, imperialist or terrorist. The discussions get more heated by the minute.
“Silence!” shouts the Mulla, “When you have your diploma you can have your own opinions. Now it’s my time to rule here! I suffered a lot to get this position.”
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For more understanding on why wars keep happening, two articles I wrote on the matter (with a Medium friend link added)
