The Magnitude of War

The Lambs of Israel by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

"Thou shall not murder" would not be one of the Ten Commandments if human nature was simply benevolent. Indeed, the Sixth Commandment suggests that murder is a common tendency of mankind. If so, we should expect war to be the norm of international relations. This was the conclusion of Pitrim Sorokin, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University in 1941, one of the profoundest students of Western civilization.

In one of his monumental studies, Sorokin investigated all the known wars of Greece and Rome, as well as those of the Western Europe from the year 500 before the common era to 1925. This involved examination of some 967 important wars from the standpoint of duration, size of armies and casualties. Considering the casualty rate per million of the corresponding population, the war magnitude was as follows:

Greece: 29 for the 5th century BCE; 42 for the 4th century BCE; 26 for the 3rd century BCE; and 3 for the 2nd century BCE.

Rome: 12 for the 4th century BCE; 63 for the 3rd century BCE; 33 for the 1st century BCE; 5 for the 1st century CE; and 14 for the 3rd. (If we take the whole Roman Empire during the Pax Romana, then the respective indicators are much lower.)

Europe: 2.5 casualties for the 12th century; 4 for the 13th century; 7.5 for the 14th century; 9.5 for the 15th century; 15 for the 16th century; 45 for the 17th century; 40 for the 18th century; and 17 for the 19th century.

When we turn to the 20th century, the indicator for the first quarter alone stands at 52, thanks primarily to World War I. If we then add the casualty figures of World War II, it will be obvious that the 20th century, the century of triumphant secularism, was the bloodiest in human history. Today, however, it is not secularism but a religious creed, Islam, that has removed all moral restraints on the conduct of war. Muslims use their own children as human bombs. But I am getting ahead of our story.

Despite the inhumanity of World War I - which witnessed the bombing of cities and the use poison gas - humanists and pacifists, enthralled by the League of Nations, were predicting "the end of war." Less than a generation later, and despite the ascendancy of Adolph Hitler, they intoned the disarming slogan "Peace Now." World War II followed, crueler and bloodier than ever. More Germans were incinerated in Dresden than the number of Japanese who were reduced to radioactive dust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Summing up, during the last 2,500 years, there have been some 1,000 wars in the Western world alone; which means that "peace" is little more than a preparation for war. To all but fools, therefore, it will be obvious that war is indeed the norm of international relations.

Now, we are in the 21st century, stamped by 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists symbolizes not a war between nations, but rather a clash of civilizations. Hence, this century promises to be bloodier than the previous one. Indeed, we face the mother of all bellicose creeds, Islam. Among its 1.2 billion believers, countless are those who, contrary to the Sixth Commandment, deem murder martyrdom.

Yet, we still hear the pernicious slogan "Peace Now", most vociferously in the embattled State of Israel. And if this self-destructive slogan was not enough, behold: while Jews are being reduced to human debris by suicide bombers in the name of Allah, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon still blathers about "peaceful coexistence" between Jews and Arabs.

Instead of waging all-out war against the enemy, Sharon builds a security fence. To compound his timidity, instead of disregarding a Supreme Court whose president, Aharon Barak, has the audacity to rule that the convenience of Arabs trumps the security of Jews, Sharon caves in and reroutes the fence as if Justice Barak was Israel's Commander-in-Chief. Finally, instead of having Jews like Yossi Beilin indicted for collaborating with the enemy, Sharon adopts Beilin's "peace" plan - which means he, too, aids and abets Israel's enemies.

And so, Israel, confronted by Arab Nazis - the cruelest enemy known to mankind - is led by a warrior morphed into a super-lamb, leading other lambs to the slaughter.