CRIMINALISE WAR CLUB
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# 3
A STUDENT’S TAKE ON WAR b y
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I am not a troubled refugee from a war-stricken country, nor am I a professor from a renowned institution. But rather, I am a student from Cempaka Schools, living in a peaceful country with little to no strife or hardship in my life. My name is Low Chuen Leik and I stand here today to give you my take on “War”. So today we stand here in this day and age, seeking to eradicate war. It is a crime, no doubt on that, so here’s a new take on it; how can we stop war before it even happens? For that, we have to attain a firm grasp on why there is war, and understand the very nature of conflict.
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CRIMINALISE WAR JUNE 2015
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We could...say, perhaps, look at it from a biological perspective. It is a common assumption that people are innately aggressive, that the urge to fight and wage war against a fellow human being is in our genes and something we’ve been doing ever since the dawn of our species. War is human nature, and as long as we exist, there will be war. This ideology would lead to fatalistic conclusions that perhaps all war and conflict is in fact, inevitable. No, it can only mean that war manifests as a result of rational human choices, each with their own motivations and reasoning behind them. In fact, recorded conflict between organized groups has only been
appearing in past few thousand years, approximately when civilisation first began. In John Horgan’s words; war is a cultural, not a biological phenomenon.War does not form as a result of resource depletion, financial profit, the opening of new markets, although they do play a part in lighting the flame. Our problem is simply a militaristic culture, a culture that glorifies war or even just accepts it, a culture that fails to renounce war as something as barbaric as cannibalism. War is a human construct, something we invented and created and brought to life. Just like any creation of ours, it can be eradicated. Sure, war taps into deep biological proclivities, which is one explanation for how it