What if we finally decided to be done with wars and militarism, once and for all?
Of all human behaviors, the stupidity that disgusts me most is war. Attitudes have shifted enough over the years that you’d expect us to be done with this tragedy by now. Nope! Just the opposite: humanity has poured colossal resources into modernizing the barbarism, to the point where we can now wipe out our own planet.
Our societies are so soaked in wars, past and present, that war has almost turned into a kind of fate. Or even something ordinary for anyone an armed conflict doesn’t touch. But nothing about it is inevitable. A solid dose of political courage would be enough to finish off this practice from another age for good. Like every collective solution, it starts with individuals waking up. That’s what we’re going to look at here, and the goal of this piece is to prove one more time that another world is possible.
When the horror of war hides behind numbers
Some movies look like they’re showing you the horrors of war… except they’re nowhere close! Because if a movie really showed those horrors as they are, with nothing censored, I can tell you every military recruiting office would be in serious trouble.
So why all this modesty about showing the real face of armed conflict? Maybe because if mainstream media actually showed what a town looks like after it gets bombed, people would finally think: this is the kind of butchery a big chunk of my taxes pays for? Those same outlets could also show the terror of a population living through a war. Me, I don’t want to get into the details, it makes me sick just thinking about it.
Sure, there’ll always be a tiny percentage of full-blown psychopaths who feel nothing in front of the unbearable. Unfortunately, that’s the type of sick bastard people keep putting in power, because they mistake authoritarianism for crisis management skills. Because yeah, dragging a country into a war takes a psychopath who’s also incapable of talking things through.
The leaders who pump up their egos by spreading devastation on a mass scale will use any manipulation to sell their slaughter to their own people. Simply because everyone still carries the horror stories of the two world wars and Vietnam, which got covered with a lot less deference than other conflicts. So obviously, after all that, not many people sign up for a quagmire nobody walks out of in one piece.
So to get around that, they sell you easy adventures, wars you win in three days. To move the product even faster, you call it a special operation, or you slap a dumbass name on it like Desert Storm. Then there are the wars that supposedly aren’t wars, because the enemy is so weak in conventional terms that the whole thing gets sold as a walk in the park. And never mind that it’s been dragging on for decades, as long as enough people still find the situation acceptable.
But the top prize for cynicism goes, once again, to the United States, always first on the podium of stupidity. To see why, go back to 1991 and the first Iraq war. Back then, Bush Sr.’s “masterpiece” got sold to us under the oxymoron “clean war.” They showed us green lights on TV and explained that the plan was going off without a hitch. Except the tab for that “clean war” came to more than 100,000 Iraqi dead, plus the people maimed for life and the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure a country can’t live without, hospitals and drinking water treatment plants. Worst of all, the US used depleted uranium rounds that contaminated both sides. Sorry, but I’ve seen cleaner!
Ever since, a war has to be declared “clean” to be acceptable. So they package it like a video game. A plane or a drone flies across the sky. It drops its bomb. A day or two later they show you a wrecked building. Maybe a quick shot of people crying over their dead. A few seconds, tops, so it doesn’t spoil your appetite for the commercials coming up next.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. (Howard Zinn)
So that’s where we’ve ended up: treated like idiots! And worse, drafted into a mass desensitization campaign we never signed up for. How does it work? They throw numbers at you with no context. They announce 10,000 dead in some war… Does your outrage move at all between 10,000 and 10,001 and 10,002 and 1,000,000? Not much, because in your head they’re just numbers. Same as the number of people sleeping outside, the number of AIDS deaths, the number of people starving… Now picture yourself dropped into the middle of one of those tragedies for a single day. You’d be cured for life of stopping at the numbers. So the manipulation runs on distance, keeping us as far from reality as possible, getting us so used to the unacceptable that it stops meaning anything. And if you’re unlucky enough to question the setup, plenty of people will call you a killjoy.
No war without propaganda
No war ever started with a people’s spontaneous enthusiasm. That’s why you always have to build them the scariest possible enemy first. And while you’re at it, an existential threat, an imminent danger that leaves no choice. Fear is the universal lever, and it beats every other political trigger for one reason: it short-circuits thinking. A frightened people stops weighing pros and cons and just looks for a protector, even if that means handing him pretty much any blank check he asks for.
Nobody explained the manual for manufacturing consent to war better than Hermann Goering. It happened in 1946, in his Nuremberg cell, a few months before they hanged him. When the journalist Gustave Gilbert asked him how you get a whole population to march off to war with a smile, the fallen Nazi answered with a detachment that still runs cold: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.” That method of mass manipulation still works exactly as well today.
The machinery of propaganda is very simple. You wave the fear around, you name the guilty party and you disqualify anyone who dares to doubt. Every pacifist becomes a traitor, every critical mind becomes a foreign agent. It works the same in every country, democracies included, the moment brute force is on the table.
That basic propaganda is only the visible floor of the building. The deep floor, the one that makes the rest possible, is the warrior culture we inject into kids from the playground on. Plastic soldiers in the toy aisle, shooters where you slaughter Russians, Chinese or Arabs depending on the boogeyman of the season. Then the history textbooks that glorify old battles while skipping every atrocity that came with them, the national anthems about spilled blood, the military parades that teach children to admire machines built for mass destruction. That’s how you manufacture minds that find war normal, even desirable, long before anyone asks them to go die in one, as heroes, ideally.
Once the machine is running, the propaganda barely needs pushing. It feeds itself, because every atrocity suffered justifies the atrocity handed back. Reprisals call for more reprisals. The hatred thickens with each cycle and every generation inherits the grudges of the last. That’s how you get conflicts that run for decades, where the original cause is a historical footnote buried under thousands of deaths to avenge.
War is about males and domination
Statistically, war is a men’s business. Men start it, the generals are men, the soldiers are overwhelmingly men. That’s no biological accident, it’s a fact worth looking at head on instead of tiptoeing around it the way we have for centuries.
Manhood, the way just about every civilization has built it, rests on three inseparable pillars. Physical strength, the ability to dominate and courage in the face of violence. A “real man” fights, conquers, defends his territory, spreads his influence and accepts death if that’s what it takes to prove his nerve. The whole warrior mythology, from The Iliad to Rambo and American Sniper, tells one single story: the man who fulfills himself through legalized violence. What holds for the stories holds even harder for military institutions. Armies are all schools of manhood that manufacture men in the patriarchal sense, through humiliation, brutalization and the erasure of anything judged feminine.
The logic of domination under war is exactly the logic under patriarchy. Assert your power by force, extend your control, crush whatever resists and humiliate the loser. When one state invades another, it applies at the international scale what the dominant male applies at home. Same mental springs, same compulsive need to impose your strength in order to exist. And the worst warmongering regimes in history have always been drowning in misogyny. That’s no coincidence, because war and the domination of women run on the same software. Which no doubt explains the sheer number of rapes in wartime.
This obviously doesn’t mean every woman is a pacifist or every man is a brute waiting to happen. There have been warmongering women heads of state and there are men who give their lives to peace. But as long as the patriarchal system stays the dominant mental horizon of our societies, war will always find its justification there. So ending war means, above all, dismantling the macho software that makes it possible and desirable.
The myth of triumphant heroes
The official story knows one trajectory. The soldier who comes home in glory, flower in his rifle barrel, after cutting the enemy down. Except that story has never matched reality, not even on the side of the supposed winners.
The numbers speak for themselves, if you bother to look. In the United States, since Vietnam, far more veterans have died by suicide than American soldiers killed in combat over the same period. On the British side, more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have taken their own lives after coming home than died in the field. In France, veterans of overseas operations show post-traumatic stress rates way above the national average, and the Ministère des Armées, the French defense ministry, refused for years to publish its own figures on military suicides.
Add the maimed bodies no ceremony really shows, the addictions that often follow the return to civilian life and the domestic violence that broken men end up dumping on the people closest to them. Plus the homelessness that hits a disproportionate share of veterans in every rich country. That’s the reality hiding behind the medals and the commemorations. The military hero has never been anything but a guy sent to kill other guys on behalf of a third category that stayed safely out of range. That third category is the politicians and the industries cashing in on the sacrifice of the human beings they shipped off to the slaughterhouse.
The giant scandal of military budgets
In 2024, global military spending passed $2.7 trillion in a single year. It’s climbed steadily for ten years and nobody seriously plans to reverse it. If anything, every geopolitical crisis serves as a pretext for another budget hike, and every hike becomes the new floor below which going back down would be “irresponsible.” The United States alone accounts for over $900 billion a year, China over $300 billion, Russia around $150 billion, France passed $60 billion and it keeps climbing everywhere on the planet.
Meanwhile the planet burns. Literally. The IPCC reports have piled up for thirty years to explain that we’d need massive investment in the energy transition, building insulation, reforestation, protecting ecosystems and adapting our societies to the climate chaos on the way. The sums a real environmental policy would take get costed out regularly, and they look enormous right up until you set them next to military budgets. Then you see they’re a fraction of what gets sunk, with nothing to show for it, into spreading death and devastation on an industrial scale across the whole planet.
Meanwhile, in every country, hospitals close wards for lack of funding. People die on gurneys in ER hallways. Public schools fall apart, teachers burn out, universities ration their budgets… Basic research is dying by inches because no ministry can find the few billion that would let it make brilliant discoveries. Social housing isn’t a real concern. Whole families sleep in their cars in the richest countries on earth. Food banks are overwhelmed, homeless people die in the street and nobody blinks… What a disgrace!
No money for the climate, no money for healthcare, no money for housing, no money for food security, no money for education, no money to fight poverty, no money for research… But $2.7 trillion a year to keep the option of killing each other on a mass scale! And barely anyone screaming about it! At this point it’s not a badly calibrated budget priority. It’s a moral shipwreck of insane proportions, and the only mystery is that a large majority of the population finds it normal.
Nuclear weapons are the crowning achievement of human stupidity
Nine states hold enough nuclear weapons to make the planet uninhabitable for centuries. Everybody has known this for three generations and hardly anyone gets worked up about it anymore. The threat has been around so long it just faded into the scenery, as if humanity had accepted the idea of its own scheduled extinction.
The official principle is called deterrence. The idea is that nobody attacks anybody as long as everybody can blow the whole thing up in retaliation. Fine, let’s say… Except even if that strange logic held up, two or three bombs per nuclear power would be plenty to talk anyone out of attacking. No rational leader launches an offensive against a country that can wipe out two or three major cities in return. So deterrence is reached with a handful of delivery systems. The threat should stop there.
Except instead of two or three bombs apiece, there are more than twelve thousand of them worldwide. The United States and Russia hold almost all of it, roughly five thousand warheads each. The other powers fill in the rest of the table. Set against numbers that insane, the rational case for deterrence ran out sixty years ago. So why do we keep this aberration going without one serious debate about it?
And as if the situation weren’t already absurd enough, we’re now letting algorithms into the decision process. Detection systems are being automated, threat analysis runs through AI, reaction windows are shrinking to a few minutes and the pressure to hand part of the decision chain to machines grows every year. For anyone who’s seen Terminator, this is starting to look a whole lot like Skynet. The difference is that in the eighties we laughed about it at the movies and today we’re building it in the basements of several defense ministries. Yet warnings from major scientists have piled up ever since the atom bomb was invented. And nothing moves! We let the Russian nuclear arsenal rot while other countries play sorcerer’s apprentice. Not to mention the US and China, who have nothing better to offer human civilization than the tools of its own eradication.
Hegemony wiping its feet on international law
International law exists on paper. The UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, nonproliferation treaties and Security Council resolutions. A whole structure patiently built since 1945 to give states a legal framework and keep war off the table as much as possible. Sadly, in most cases it comes down to hot air.
Because in practice those guardrails get trampled every time a major power decides its interests require it. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, with no UN mandate, on the basis of lies made up from scratch, nobody was tried for it. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 in flagrant violation of every principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and still sits on the Security Council as a permanent member. China has trampled international rulings in the South China Sea for years. Israel keeps up its colonization and its military operations in continuous violation of countless UN resolutions, covered by an automatic American veto. The list of violations of international law could fill thousands of pages.
The central mechanism of that impunity is the Security Council veto. Five permanent members who can block any collective action against themselves or their allies. The United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom. In practice, none of those five can be held accountable by the institution supposedly guaranteeing world peace, because each one has a red button to cancel any decision it doesn’t like.
And as if that permanent sabotage weren’t enough, Donald Trump pushed the bullshit one notch further by announcing a “Peace Council” of his own design to handle the big international files while short-circuiting the UN. That farce is the peak of contempt for international institutions. Then again, what else would you expect from a megalomaniac mob boss.
In the end, as long as the UN veto system stands, no fundamental problem gets solved. Because every planetary problem demands real international cooperation, not lopsided relationships rigged from the start.
To avoid conflicts, we have to recognize the right of peoples to self-determination.
The map of the world we know today is nothing natural. A century ago it looked radically different. Most current borders were drawn with a ruler and a pencil by European colonial powers that didn’t really know the territories, the peoples living there or their historical, linguistic and cultural realities. In Africa there’s even a name for the disaster: balkanization. The word covers absurd carve-ups that scattered homogeneous peoples and forced together populations with no desire to share a country. You know the result. Permanent ethnic conflicts running since independence, killing tens of thousands every year in near-total indifference.
Self-determination, supposedly a pillar of international law since 1945, should let us fix these aberrations. Except in practice it gets applied backwards. It gets waved around when it suits the dominant powers and buried the moment it bothers their interests or their allies’. The Kurds have waited a century for their state. The Sahrawis have lived in refugee camps for fifty years. The Tibetans were drowned in the Han majority by a systematic settlement policy. The Catalans, the Scots, the Tamils and plenty of others are asking for the right to decide their own fate. All of them run into a flat refusal in the name of the “national sovereignty” of the country holding them.
And in the vast majority of cases, what would actually change if a people got its autonomy? Nothing essential for the rest of the world. The human benefits would be immense and the geopolitical downsides would come down to an administrative redraw and a few treaties to renegotiate.
Except for states that consider themselves the owners of “their” minorities, the mere idea of giving up a scrap of territory sets off wildly disproportionate reactions. Everything from routine police repression to civil war, by way of ethnic cleansing and outright genocide. Sovereigntist paranoia is a political pathology that has killed far more people than most wars between states.
The solution exists, and it’s disarmingly simple. Recognize internationally the right of any people to hold a self-determination referendum under UN supervision, with the results validated by the international community and the parent state obliged to respect the verdict. And to shut down the classic objection that this would shatter the world into thousands of unmanageable micro-states, remember that a referendum can land on several in-between solutions. A region can perfectly well choose not to go fully independent and become a federated state with broad autonomy instead, keeping institutional ties to the larger whole it belonged to. Most of today’s identity conflicts would find an acceptable way out through that door.
And when we talk about the benefits of a reform like that, you have to remember what war really includes. As we’ve already seen, it isn’t only the dead piling up in columns of statistics. It’s the systemic misery that hits displaced populations, the torture practiced on a large scale in conflict zones, rape used as a weapon by just about every army on earth whenever the chance comes up and entire generations of children growing up in camps with no possible future. Recognizing the self-determination of peoples isn’t diplomatic decoration. It’s pushing back an ocean of suffering that we stubbornly let exist out of pure political cowardice.
How do we reform the UN?
Pretty much everyone agrees that the UN in its current configuration doesn’t work. Bad diagnoses have piled up for decades, reform commissions come and go and the reports gather dust. Nothing moves because the very people with the most to lose in a reform have the system locked down. Obviously the five permanent members of the Security Council aren’t going to vote away their own veto.
But that dead end only holds if you keep thinking of reform as concessions to be gently extracted from the dominant. The way out is to flip the perspective, with a deep reform of the UN coming from below. A revolt of the majority of states who’ve had enough of the permanent blockage and could decide, together, to force it through.
Of the 193 UN member states, five hold the veto. That leaves 188 countries on the receiving end. Most of them have decades of grievances against a system where their interests get swept aside whenever they collide with those of the permanent five. All of Africa has no permanent seat despite its 1.4 billion inhabitants. Neither does Latin America. Neither does South Asia. India, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia weigh far more, demographically and economically, than France or the United Kingdom, and they have absolutely no say in the decisions that structure the international system. The frustration that creates is massive and old.
The real balance of power heavily favors a reforming coalition. A qualified majority of states pushing together for a rewrite of the UN charter would carry crushing demographic, economic and moral weight. Against that, the United States, Russia and China combined, nuclear arsenals and media noise included, add up to around 1.9 billion people. The rest of the world counts more than 6 billion. So the question isn’t whether such a coalition could impose a reform. The question is whether it’ll find the political courage to organize.
Either way, at some point somebody has to tell the great powers to fuck off. If the United States won’t come along, they can go fuck themselves! If Russia sulks, let it sulk. If China threatens to walk out, let it walk. The diplomatic and economic isolation the rest of the world would impose on those states would cost them enormously. Far more, and it isn’t close, than keeping their current privileges inside the system. Because no economy, Chinese or American included, can thrive in autarky against 6 billion people cutting it off from the resources it needs to run.
So UN reform won’t be a gift handed down by the powerful. It’ll be a collective takeover launched by the countries that are done being kept in the junior seat. That takes organization and accepting a standoff that’ll run for years. But it’s the only realistic road, because all the others have been tried and they failed.
Coordinated disarmament and an international force
We’ve just seen that ending the UN veto would already have very positive effects. But no reason to stop there. If we really want to be done with war, we need a real reform that makes it structurally impossible.
That starts with getting rid of national armies outright. They’d have no reason left to exist once international law is actually enforced. As long as they’re around, the risk of one state attacking another stays intact and institutional reform is useless. So they have to be dismantled, which takes coordinated disarmament on a planetary scale.
The principle is simple. Every member state will gradually cut its armed forces on a negotiated timetable, verified by international inspectors with full, unannounced access to every military installation. Conventional arsenals will shrink in stages, nuclear arsenals will be dismantled under independent control and defense budgets will converge toward a residual level covering nothing but civil protection and crisis management. After a few decades, national armies as we know them will simply have stopped existing as instruments of geopolitical aggression.
Of course guerrilla-type armed conflicts could still break out. That’s exactly why we’ll need a permanent international intervention force under the direct authority of the UN. Activating it will run only through a majority vote under the strict rules of the new charter. The force will be made up of contingents supplied by all member states on a fair distribution. Its use will be framed by precise rules of engagement that make hijacking it for private interests impossible.
The force will have two main missions. First, imposing an immediate ceasefire and securing civilian populations as soon as a conflict threatens to erupt. Second, stepping in against regimes that violate UN decisions. And understand that in this new frame, the “country that wants war” argument falls apart. When a leader wants to go to war, it’s never his whole population wanting it with him. And facing that isolated leader, there aren’t just a few nervous neighbors anymore, there’s every other state on earth committed to enforcing international law. With that balance of power, dialogue will be the only way to settle political disputes anywhere in the world.
In the end, quitting the cult of national armies is exactly like kicking a hard drug. The first years will be rough, because centuries of warrior reflexes don’t wash out in one generation. Then comes the moment when humanity looks back at its militarist past in dismay and wonders how it stayed hooked on something that stupid for so long.
Countries without an army already exist
The idea of a world without national armies usually makes reactionaries snicker. They all think it’s pretty on paper and can’t work in the real world. Except it’s been running for decades in several countries that are generally doing much better than their militarized neighbors.
The emblematic case is Costa Rica. In 1948, this Central American country simply abolished its army. Seventy-seven years later, nobody has invaded Costa Rica. The colossal savings went massively into education and health care. That made it one of the most stable and best developed countries in the region. While its neighbors sank into bloody civil wars fed by oversized armies, Costa Rica turned into a peaceful, prosperous democracy. The Costa Rican economic miracle owes an enormous amount to that decision. Nothing surprising about it, it’s just good logic applied to running a country.
Costa Rica isn’t alone. Panama abolished its army in 1990. Iceland never had one. Liechtenstein dissolved its own in 1868. Several Pacific island states have run without armed forces since independence. Nobody has invaded them. Nobody is seriously thinking about it. The proof is in. An army isn’t a driver of development, it’s the opposite.
While we’re here, look at the monumental hypocrisy of the Swiss, who spend their time selling their “neutrality” as a moral virtue while keeping one of the most expensive armies in Europe per capita and hosting a flourishing arms industry. Swiss neutrality is a marketing gimmick, not a pacifist policy. The truly neutral countries are the ones that abolished their armed forces, not the ones arming themselves to the teeth while swearing they’ll never use force.
The other classic objection to abolition says a country without an army would be standing there “buck naked” in front of a possible attack. That apparently unanswerable argument is completely hollow. To see why, ask what the armies of most countries are actually for. Belgium, Portugal, Romania or Chile have exactly zero chance against a real great power that decides to invade them. Their armies would be flattened in weeks, maybe days. So the real function of those armies isn’t effective defense against a major attack, since they can’t do it. It’s extremely expensive theater and cheap national prestige. Their actual protection rests entirely on international alliances and on the fact that nobody really has the interest or the urge to invade them.
And there’s a weak signal that deserves a mention, because it says a lot about where things are heading. For a few years now, armies around the world have run into unprecedented recruiting problems. United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia… Same story everywhere, the armed forces can’t hit their targets and keep lowering their standards. Younger generations are massively less interested than their elders in putting on a uniform and risking their skin for causes whose legitimacy they doubt. The traditional lines about honor, homeland and duty slide off them like water off a duck’s back. And there’s a good chance that’s the early warning of the end of the big military circus. Not by UN decree, not by some grand international conference, just by the human fuel running out. And by the massive drop in support for war from one generation to the next.
Conclusion: antimilitarist and proud of it!
Sorry for spoiling the surprise, but at the close of this piece I’m proud to announce that I have absolutely no aspiration to fight for any country whatsoever. Which leaves me no shot at a medal. Honestly, that’s more of a relief. And if anyone wants to call me an antimilitarist, thanks for the compliment! It proves I have a brain, unlike certain people who get by on a spinal cord, obeying orders blindly and swallowing political lies.
If you think everything laid out in this article is just pretty words, sure, we can all sit still and in ten years we’ll be at the exact same place, or worse. Or we can act intelligently. Politics, in the noble sense of the word, is a first-rate way to do it. So you can vote for candidates who claim pacifism. They exist in a few countries, you just have to look a bit. And if there aren’t any? Then nothing stops you from starting a political group in your country that defends this cause alongside other progressive proposals. Maybe it’ll come to nothing, but maybe it’ll work. It all depends on the energy you put into it. Personally, all I know is that when you throw your whole heart into a project, there’s a very good chance it ends up producing good results.
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