All war is failure

I am too distressed to blog about my everyday.

All over the world millions of ordinary people can see that a ceasefire in Gaza is urgent and necessary but apart from a few exceptions - Ireland and Spain - western politicians don’t care. 

Starving Palestinians are leaving Rafah to avoid the upcoming Israeli onslaught and travelling north, only to be turned back with gunfire.

Insufficient food aid is getting into Gaza, and now the US is more interested in Iran’s attack on Israel than on the starvation and famine in Gaza.

The west is rallying around Israel after they bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria, and Iran retaliated. Apparently it is only Israel who has the right to ‘self defence.’ Every other country’s actions are ‘unprovoked attacks’ or ‘retaliation.’

I care nothing for any of these terms. 

All war is a failure, whoever is perpetrating it.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy. Tony Benn

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal. Steinbeck

The ultimate failure of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Martin Luther King.

This is the 21st Century. You’d have hoped by now that politicians would see that instead of investing in more and more sophisticated and powerful weapons, we should be investing in diplomacy, and building bridges, not making war. It has to come to talking in the end. Why not start with talking and avoid the killing?