Aiman

CRIMINALISE WAR CLUB by AIMAN SYAKIR ABDUL HARIS from SEKOLAH SULTAN ALAM SHAH

102

CRIMINALISE WAR JUNE 2015

# 1

First of all, I’d like to give my utmost appreciation to Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali, the guests of honour, and my beloved family at the back there. Before we begin, I’d like to share you all with some rather intelligent words from Ernest Hemingway :

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HOW WAR SHAPED US

c o n t e s t a n t

In war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

-

ernest

hemingway

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War is often associated with brutalities and terror. In fact it’s true, and it does affect who we are now. Let’s take a few moments to understand what sort of events are categorised as war crimes. Here are just some. Let’s say, war is always a crime. It’s never something good anyway anyhow. I’m going to pinpoint the three main reasons why the atrocities happen and how they shape us now. Firstly, because they could. Second, because they want to. And lastly, because everyone else was doing it. Or if you’d prefer fancier academic terms... Technology.

Ideology. And the escalating cycle of violence. Let’s see the first one. Technology. It wasn’t just machine guns and airplanes in the battlefield. Industrialisation producesmass munitions that’ll certainly lead to wasteful overkill. Oh, and urbanisation too. They gathered huge populations in a place for them only to end being blown up by our old friend Mr. Nuclear! Can we ever escape the clutches of technology?

So where do these modernity of weapons lead us to? The nuclear

bombings have been causing radiations, mutations. And a new level of weaponry, such as chemicals will certainly cause more damage and effects in the future.

So let’s move on to Ideology. Here are some of the few wars driven by ideology. You can see that religion is also a catalyst in ideological wars. Solzhenitsyn has stated – to kill by the millions, you’ll need an ideology.

Gruesome picture, isn’t it? Here are the death tolls “honourably” done by our past leaders. Note that every leader has his own ideology, leading to mass killings. The rapid rise of communism in the 50s did play a substantial role to the clash of ideologies, being a catalyst for war!

Religion, take the Muslim world for example, has divided into separate understandings, Sunni claiming to be the true Islam, then Shiite denies.

In a utopia, everyone is forever happy. In fact, many of us agree that it’s permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one.If it

40,000,000

40,000,000

40,000,000

20,000,000 17,000,000

4,000,000

Adolf Hitler

Genghis Khan

Mao Zedong

were a billion lives one could save by diverting the trolley, how many people would be permissible to sacrifice to maintain that infinite good? A few millions can be a pretty good bargain. These people.

They’re practically same. But what divides them? Religion. Ideology.

This “g” word is somehow the worst accusation you can point to a country. It’s somehow very very bad. Yeah because it’s a brutal thing. So here’s how they define genocide. I’d like to pinpoint a few weaknesses of these definitions.

Firstly, it is too broad in theory, and too narrow in practice.

Almost every conflict in history can be described as “intent to destroy by causing serious harm”. And so far, only the Holocaust, mass killings in Bosnia & Rwanda have been recognised by international courts

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Joseph Stalin

Timur

Napoleon

as genocide. These are some of the death tolls caused by genocides.

It is indeed that they don’t have the sense of humanity.No serious matter? Finally, we’re in the last point. The escalating cycle of violence.

Each killing creates orphans who would grow up one day to avenge their fathers’ death, leading people to fight and fight. No victory was ever final. It was only until the development of nuclear weapons that the cycle of violence ran into a brick wall and was forced to stop.

So we’ve come to an end. In a nutshell, we are said to be living in the most peaceful era of humanity’s existence. However, these atrocities have affected who we are until now.

So are we? I want you to think and judge.

...three main reasons why the atrocities happen. Firstly, because they could. Second, because they want to. And lastly, because everyone else was doing it.

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CRIMINALISE WAR CLUB

Then came radical organisations that are threats in this worldlike Boko Haram and recently ISIS. Everyone desires Utopia. A community possessing perfect qualities. This is an ideology that will cost us more.

Why? One of the reasons is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus.

DEATH TOLLS BY WORLD LEADERS