What Causes War?

War is nasty and evil; it causes misery and suffering. War is also unavoidable. Given that human beings are what they are, conflict on this planet is inevitable; it is the distinctive goal of western civilization to make sure that wars are infrequent and short, and to try to minimize human suffering and death.

But what causes war? For every war fought, history books will give a complex narrative of political intrigue. But we can simplify this to say most, or perhaps all, wars are caused by a desire for land, money, and power. Political or patriotic ideologies, or religions, are sometimes wrongly blamed for starting wars.

By way of example, let us consider the wars of the twentieth century: WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam - to which we might also add the Spanish Civil War, Operation Desert Storm, and other lesser conflicts. The driving forces behind these wars was certainly not a domestic ideological struggle between two political parties inside one of the belligerents, nor was it religious belief.

In many cases, wars which are labeled as "religious" are in fact not at all religious. Three examples suffice to make this point: The Thirty Years' War (1618 to 1848) is often described as a religious conflict, but it saw the Roman Catholic French in an alliance with the Lutheran Swedes: the war was really about whether power in Europe would be centralized in an empire under the Habsburg dynasty, or whether power would be located with regional kingdoms. The so-called 'French Wars of Religion' (1562 to 1598) were not about religion, but about who should rule France, in which Henry I of Guise fought against the Bourbon Henry III; both were Roman Catholic. In the conflicts between northern Ireland and southern Ireland, which are often called religious, the real question is and always has been about role of the English: starting in 1169, Henry II made claims of sovereignty over parts of Ireland, and ever since, there has been fighting; but the English Reformation happened in 1532, so we see that both sides were Roman Catholic.

We see, then, that most wars are about land, money, and power. Even when history books label a conflict as a "religious" war, it actually is not a religious war, as our three examples above illustrate.

Soviet Agriculture

The world is still learning from vast experiment carried out between 1917 and 1990: the Soviet Union was a 73-year-long attempt to create some version of a Marxist or Communist state. In terms of vocabulary, the labels varied from Socialist and Communist to Leninist and Stalinist, with a few other words used or coined along way, like 'Trotsky-ite'.

In any case, as we sort through the debris that was Soviet Communism, we can learn from this long string of attempts to form a socialist utopia. The realm of agriculture is a good example. Author Michael Savage writes that

Prior to Stalin's tinkering with the system, the farms in the Soviet Union were individually owned and operated by small family farmers, much as you might have in parts of this country today. These farmers, known as kulaks or individual landowners, were the backbone of the agricultural industry for the Soviets, having worked the soil for generations. Before Stalin intervened, the kulaks were quite productive and the people were eating fairly well.

It is worth noting that the kulaks were left in place for some years after the Communist-Socialist takeover in 1917. Stalin didn't come into power until after Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, died in 1924. Why did Stalin want to re-organize the agricultural system, if it had been working fairly well for the first few years after the revolution?

Because he had embraced Marx and Lenin's view that evil capitalists were the antithesis of socialism. For socialism to work, the capitalists had to be weeded out. And, as Marx had taught, "The theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property." Since the farmers were landowners who sometimes employed a handful of others, that made them a threat to communism and, as such, Stalin said they had to go.

The mere fact that they owned land made these farmers 'enemies of the state' and they paid dearly for that: they were killed by the millions.

Stalin was of the opinion that the government, with the help of a centralized game plan, could run the farms better than the farmers. He figured he'd eliminate the profit motive of these greedy individual farmers and, by nationalizing the agricultural business, make it more efficient, increase productivity, and expand farmland output.

Farming takes two things: experience and hard work. There are a great many decisions and judgments to be made by a farmer: when to plant, when to harvest, which type of fertilizer to use, which type of grain is best suited for a particular field, etc.; such decisions require experience. Farming is also brutally physically demanding: strong farmers are exhausted at the end of a day's work. Guys sitting behind a desk in a government office have little notion of how to run a farm.

Let's not dwell on the fact that Stalin never planted a turnip and had no idea what was involved in running a farm. For whatever reason, Stalin placed his faith in the brilliant government bureaucrats in Moscow, believing they could do a better job than the kulaks who actually had dirt under their fingernails. Almost overnight, Stalin's regime swung into action, enforcing the collectivization of agriculture.

Imagine a swarm of government agents showing up at a farm, summarily removing the family which had operated and owned that farm for generations, and installing an official with several hired hands to run the farm - people who had never farmed before, following a set of instructions written by someone who had also never farmed before. It was a recipe for disaster.

In the early 1930's, Stalin proceeded to steal the land from the people - ordinary men and women like you and me - arresting those who refused to go along with the program. Millions of kulaks were exiled to distant corners of Russia. Many landed in Stalin's Gulag labor camps, and more than twenty thousand who resisted were executed. Yes, there was widespread resistance because, in simple terms, as musician Frank Zappa once quipped, "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." What was the fruit of Stalin's takeover of the farming industry?

As the resistance to Stalin grew stronger, he ordered that more and more farmers be executed or shipped off to a labor camp. When other farmers saw what was happening, they, too, resisted. To stop the cycle, Stalin knew that something massive would be needed. Michael Savage continues: "Russia experienced widespread famine of biblical proportions." But it was worse than that - these were deliberate famines, manufactured food shortages. Stalin saw that if he could starve several million of his enemies to death, he could blame the deaths on the few farmers who remained. A brilliantly evil plot: create a famine to starve half of your enemies to death, and then blame it on the remaining half, so that you have an excuse to execute or imprison them.

An estimated ten million Russians died from starvation because Stalin's promise of government efficiency and increased output turned out to be nothing more than fiction, a product of Stalin's fertile yet warped thinking. In fact, "the people who grew the grain were dying at a rate of 25,000 a day."

As late as the 1970's, people from Moscow would drive out to the countryside to see the 'ghost towns' - farming villages in which everyone had died, and the buildings had simply been left. These were eerie reminders of Stalin's habit of starving his own people - the houses still had clothing and personal possessions in them, left as they were the day the last person in the village died. At the time, there were too few remaining people to bother packing them up.

Prior to 1917, Russia had always been a significant exporter of grain. In fact, Russia was the "most important grain exporting country" in the world. After Stalin's communist takeover and the practice of a state-controlled agricultural industry, Russia's grain export business ground to a halt. In fact, in order to meet its own needs, years later Russia was forced to import upwards of six million tons of grain annually. This embarrassing situation continued until 1994 when Russian farmers were finally able to begin modest exports of grain.

The socialist government managed to ruin the world's most successful grain-growing nation.

This loss of productivity and massive, unnecessary loss of life occurred because Stalin put socialism into practice, bringing it out of the theoretical realm in ways that neither Lenin nor Marx himself had ever tried on such a large scale. What's more, this dictator and disciple of Marxism-Leninism became one of the worst mass murderers in history.

The lesson is clear: any large-scale intervention by government into the lives of ordinary humans will lead to misery, loss of freedom, and loss of life.

Why Communism Failed

Communism and socialism were powerful influences in various parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. In the first half of the century, only Russia fell prey to these ideologies. But as the decades rolled by, China and other parts of Asia fell under their spell, as did regions in Africa; Central American and South America also were victims of various socialist schemes.

The vision presented by socialism and communism was indeed enticing. As William Duiker writes, it can seem "fair" to wish for the goals which Marx, Mao, Lenin, Castro, and Stalin presented:

According to Marxist doctrine, government control of industry and the elimination of private property were supposed to lead to a classless society.

Historians have noted that trains in the Soviet Union still had tickets for "first class" and "second class" - so much for a classless society! In more significant ways, there was a privileged class in not only the Soviet Union, but also in Marxist dictatorships from Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua to Pol Pot's Cambodia. Duiker notes that "the classless society was never achieved" in any socialist or communist state.

Instead, a new class system appeared. An aristocracy composed of party members and scientists, technocrats, and athletes who would bring fame to Marxist dictatorships:

Another aspect of the social structure in the Communist world: the emergence of a new privileged class, made up of members of the Communist Party, state officials, high-ranking officers in the military and secret police, and a few special professional groups. The new elite not only possessed political power but also received special privileges, including the right to purchase high-quality goods in special stores (in Czechoslovakia, the elite could obtain organically grown produce not available to anyone else), paid vacations at special resorts, access to good housing and superior medical services, and advantages in education and jobs for their children.

Not only was there a strict class structure in these societies, but gender roles were also imposed (instead of voluntarily chosen). Women in Marxist states were not living in a feminist paradise:

Ideals of equality did not include women. Men dominated the leadership positions of the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

By contrast, in Western Europe, we see Margaret Thatcher elected as the most powerful woman in the world in the 1980's. In the Soviet Union, women were consigned to drudgery and exploited:

In the Soviet Union, women comprised 51 percent of the labor force in 1980; by the mid-1980's, they constituted 50 percent of the engineers, 80 percent of the doctors, and 75 percent of the teachers and teachers' aides.

Not only were women relegated to working, but at lower pay:

Many of these were low-paying jobs; most female doctors, for example, worked in primary care and were paid less than skilled machinists. The chief administrators in hospitals and schools were still men.

Women in the Soviet Union got the worst of both worlds: they faced the daily grind as workers, and at a lower wage than those men who were consigned to the same daily grind:

Nearly three-quarters of a century after the Bolshevik Revolution, then, the Marxist dream of an advanced, egalitarian society was as far away as ever.

Ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe, were resigned to being "lower class" in a "classless society" - and the women were not only forced to enter the labor pool, but at a lower wage than those men who were also dismissed to a life of work.

Difficult Times in Chile

The South American country of Chile was ruled by General Pinochet from September 1973 until 1989. Pinochet had come to power in a coup, killing his predecessor Salvador Allende, who had come to power in 1970. Depending on one's politics, there is a temptation to see one of these two men as "the good guy" and the other one as the bad guy. But in reality, the situation is more complicated, and more bleak.

General Pinochet was the 58th commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. (Unlike the United States, the commander-in-chief is not the same as the president, although an individual can inhabit both offices at once.) For there to have been 58 men in this office in Chile's history, from 1813 until 1973, illustrates a very high turnover rate in this office. By comparison, from 1942 to 2011, the United States has had 18 Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not only is the tenure in office shorter for the Chilean military commanders, but many of them ended their tenures by being assassinated by rival officers.

The intrinsic instability of Chile's system is also seen in the presidency, which - while not quite as unstable as the commander-in-chief's office, has had periods of time in which average tenure in office was rather short.

The individual personalities of Pinochet and Allende are symptoms of an inherent problem in Chile. Neither of them was able to govern with consistent success: according to historian William Duiker, Allende

began to move toward socialism by nationalizing the largest domestic and foreign-owned corporations. Nationalization of the copper industry - essentially without compensation for the owners - caused

distrust among both the Chilean citizens and foreign powers. Allende's radical moves were designed to address Chile's chronic economic problems of inflation, debt, and unemployment. Allende's actions didn't do much to fix the problem, and generated enough ill-will for Pinochet to topple him.

Pinochet, for his part, tried a different economic strategy: he moved to

restore many nationalized industries and landed estates to their original owners.

This move did create a modest upswing in the economy, but was implemented with a heavy-handedness that cost Pinochet some of his popular support:

Although Pinochet's regime liberalized the economy, its flagrant abuse of human rights led to growing unrest against the government.

Ultimately, neither Allende nor Pinochet can be seen as successful. Chile lurched from dogmatic socialism under Allende to Pinochet's "crony capitalism" that lacked a truly free market. The underlying social and cultural factors are inherited traditions and views of leadership, common in Spanish-speaking cultures, that do not provide a welcoming environment for either democracy or free-market creativity. The free exchange of opinions, and the inventive use of capital to create opportunities for wealth, are ignored in favor of institutional power and cronyism.

These same problems face many countries in both South America and Central America; these are, in part, inherited echoes of the same cultural and social patterns which have kept Spain from being a leading power in Europe. The last several centuries have seen Spain fail to be at the center of the political and economic trends of Europe.

Geographically, Chile is situated for excellent economic opportunity, and in the post-Pinochet era has begun to grow some of its export potential. Will Chile be able to break free of its past, its cultures, and its traditions? Will Chile be able to avoid both heavy-handed militaristic authoritarianism, and also avoid doctrinaire socialism, and find that middle route to a free society and a free market?