Being born long after the last world war I used to feel quite safe in the two countries I've lived in most of my life, Iceland and Germany.
I felt safe in spite of I having heard many painful stories from the older people in my family how horrible the war had been, how they had lost loved ones, barely survived bombings, had been forced out of their homes and unto death marches, where others did not survive. And eventually after finally reaching a safe place they had to live for years under near-starvation conditions.
For a long time I thought these were all things of the past and we had learned from our mistakes, and something like this could, at least in Europe, never happen again.
Until the internet came along I thought that wars in other countries happened, because the people there were so underdeveloped, that they hadn't learned to live more peacefully.
I did not realize, that what was happening all over there, was rarely caused exclusively by the people of those countries, but rather by the arrogant Western nations, which pretended to be better than the others, more democratic and civilized.
But in reality it were exactly these western nations, which were most often deeply involved in those wars via their intelligence agencies and via their financial support and weapons transfers toward their armed proxy fighters inside.
With this new knowledge came the sudden realization that we are not safe here either.
In this militaristic age another world war can start again any time, one with even worse consequences than the one before, and this time its our generation who will be the victims.
Real war is not a computer game where you fight a virtual enemy defined by the rules of the game, and when you lose you just reboot.
Real war is pain, loss and fear, suffering deceases, hunger and death.
Real war is NOT just part of human life, as someone commented here on steemit.
War is an aberration of life, it is worse than having to live through a school massacre, or worse than when an amok-shooter shows up at your work, worse than if a serial killer chooses you or someone you love as his next victim.
War is not normal, it is not something you should have to live with. It is something any normal person should try his or her best to avoid or prevent.
To claim that war is and will always be a part of human existence on earth presumes that the majority of human beings are psychopathic.
But that is just not the case.
It's assumed that between 1% and 4% of the population are psychopaths, which means at least 96% are not.
And all of those 96% all over the world have the normal wish to rather spend their life in peace .
So why are there still wars?
Wars happen because we allow those 4% to push the rest of us into them by manipulating us with lies and deceptions.
Wars happen because we 96% are too distracted or too afraid to reign in those 4%, and we neglect doing so with dire consequences.
Wars happen because we are afraid to go out beyond our comfort zone of constantly having to fit in the artificially created consensus. We avoid talking about uncomfortable truths, for fear that somebody might call us bad names or we might lose out on something or other.
Although we peace lovers are the vast majority, we still allow the war lovers to rule us politically and financially, to the point that they can decide what we are allowed talk about and how.
Supporting NATO and all its wars, though they are illegal by international law, is still considered to be the normal attitude in life.
Ignoring and never mentioning NATO's war-crimes, even while we know about them, is considered to be the polite thing to.
Speaking out against those crimes is considered impolite or even radical or somehow crazy.
And we must always be polite, mustn't we.
Wars are not stopped by a small bunch of people marching down an alley way one Sunday afternoon while holding up a few anti-war signs.
Wars are stopped and prevented, when the vast majority, most all of those 96% no longer support the military and the war-mongering government and when they no longer believe the media lies by which we are manipulated into fear and hatred of our fellow human beings in some other country or in some other party or in some other religion or culture.
If we want to reach out to the rest of the 96%, helping them to get away from the manipulating influence of the 4% we must become committed anti-war activists online and offline, peace-mongers instead of war-mongers.
This means a bit of courage in overcoming our own fears of being ostracized and also a lot of work, work we rarely- if ever- will be paid for. It's a work we do for love of the next generation, for love of humanity, and out of hope for the future.
Once again here is the 10 Steem challenge:
Help start a steemit peace-movement by taking part in a contest of writing anti-war and pro-truth articles.
The first challenge is to write on the subject of mass-media manipulations leading toward war.
All relevant articles will be read, upvoted and resteemed, the most informative one will receive the 10 Steem reward.