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You could easily substitute these pictures with any others from any other war or violent conflict. . .These are perhaps the “easiest” to use because they remain on the political minds of many, including of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Of course, these conflicts/wars are no more “important” than others that have, are, and will go on around the world.

See it doesn’t matter who is fighting or the reason, war is too much for humankind.  Its effects are devastating in eons of ways, and recovery is painfully slow.  No one ever fully heals.

The problem with war is that both sides think their right.  And to some extent, they may very well be.  And yet at the same time, if they are both engaged in killing, they are still both wrong.  Unfortunately life circumstances create a situation that is between a rock and hard place.

The Holocaust, for example, was a horrific affair.  The Jewish people suffered terribly.  The Axis forces had no right to kill anyone, let alone on the basis of religious faith, and hair and eye color.  But to sit back and not stop the problem would be equally wrong. To let genocide run lose would be shameful.  Yet the conundrum in engaging in war is that even more people have to die.  War is so paradoxical; sometimes you engage in it to stop killing, and yet to do so, more must die.

This posting is not to make any type of political statement about the Iraqi-American war , the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , the tribal wars of Africa, Hindu-Muslim tensions of India and Pakistan or any other specific war.  Rather, it must be simply said that war is never the solution, and yet sometimes, circumstances seem to twist our arm to the point that there seems no other.

Sometimes we can justify war, self-defense, and the like but we can never justify the act of killing. . .Perhaps William Tecumseh Sherman captured it best, when he simply said- “War is Hell.”

- IgniteTheMind