Why wars of aggression?

Why wars of aggression?

Peter Kopa, Warsaw, August 16, 2025

In general literature, it is said that wars always have very diverse motivations, such as the need for survival, the search for good farmland or other natural resources. However, throughout history, the main trigger for non-defensive wars has been the abuse of political or military power.

One thinker said that all wars of aggression, in the final analysis, have been unjust, abusive, and criminal. This is brutal. Just think of the great hegemonic peoples who have always wanted to conquer more and more. There is Egypt, Greece, and Rome. And in the last century, there were both world wars.

It is sad to see the absurdities of the first World War, in which, like children, two European alliances fought each other at the cost of 14 million lives. Worse still was the second, which cost the lives of at least 60 million people, always treated like toy soldiers, subjected to the will of petty kings who played their games from their luxurious palaces.

The inexorability of wars can be seen as something systemic, as something purely structural. But the truth is that the ultimate cause lies in the human soul, which has a tendency towards good and evil. We have published an article that explains this: https://thinktanklatam.org/la-moralidad-en-la-guerra-de-ucrania/

If a person is born into a good family, where they are loved and taught the values of common sense and Christian faith, they will normally do the same when they reach maturity. Unfortunately, however, there are so many who have been raised in an environment of indifference, neglect, and even abuse that cries out to heaven. This explains why a person who has been beaten and abused in the early stages of life tends to return all the evil they have received.

Another problem is the desire for money and wealth, which can be a temptation that so many righteous people have fallen into. However, none of this ever nullifies individual freedom in choices of moral significance; it only predisposes, but never determines. This explains so many cases in which the burden of a disastrous childhood and youth has not prevented admirable men from emerging, and vice versa.

Human greatness and baseness

War is the meeting point between human greatness and baseness. The underlying pattern has been repeated constantly throughout history and across the world: the fascination with aggressive warfare as a means of becoming king of the world. This vain dream has driven peoples and nations to attack others, seeking power and glory, increasing their resources and the size of their military legions. This delusion continues to possess warmongers to this day.

However, it must be borne in mind that this violence, throughout history, has shaped the current political geography with the Roman legions. Spain is a special case because its colonization of the New World was carried out with the noble intention of spreading the Christian faith and expanding the boundaries of the kingdom.

Then, in the execution of this good intention, human ambition emerged, and here and there the colonizing enterprise could not escape the ambition of some. No human organization can avoid this problem, not even the Catholic Church. In this sense, it suffices to compare the behavior of the Spanish with that of the English/French, who committed genocide by killing twenty million indigenous people.

Current wars of aggression

The underlying motivational pattern is repeated here once again. One of the leading authorities on the subject, Jeffrey Sax, professor at Harvard University, tells us about Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbNvagE7BcM&t=22s&ab_channel=TheHill, explaining why Russia had to invade Ukraine. The professor tells us that US arrogance is the cause of the war, not only in Ukraine, but in all the other wars currently taking place in the Middle East.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the US sacrificed 1.6 million soldiers to break the Nazi occupation of Europe. This was followed by major military interventions in Korea and Vietnam against communism. Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin were also arrogant.

The war for control of the soul

https://thinktanklatam.org/5708/

Parallel to physical battles, there has always been an effort to manipulate the human soul in such a way that the people are willing to go to war. In the past, this was done with flags waving, military parades, fanfare, and all the trappings under the pretext of love for the homeland. We still see this every year in Red Square in Moscow and in other countries. It is a show of force that the people must see in order to believe that they are invincible, and therefore less afraid to enlist in the army and go to war.

Years ago, I found an anthology of German poetry from 1936, printed in Gothic script, in an antique shop in Prague. Most of the poems from the 1930s extol the ideal of avenging the defeat of 1918. Hitler is presented as a providential figure sent by God at a time when the German people were being stirred up to regain the honor lost in World War I. In the 1933 elections, the Protestant or Lutheran vote in northern Germany was decisive, thus enabling his victory.

Today, digital resources and AI are partly used maliciously to turn citizens into docile sheep, who give up their wool all their lives (the taxes that maintain the power of those who manipulate them) and, in the end, give up their lives in some absurd war. Today, few want to enlist in the army: https://thinktanklatam.org/el-sindrome-antibelico/