Theories on War

Negativity comes to mind on the issue of war as it is heard to be brutal or fatal, especially on innocent people and one cannot help but to hope for an outcome of peace or prosperity. Some respectful philosophers such as Mo Tzu, Sun Tzu, Eugene Delacroix, Pablo Picasso, Margaret Mead, Kenzaburo Oe, and Jean Bethke Elshtain can be found writing about their theories on war and peace in the text book, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter by Michael Austin. Over the years the issue of war has not disappeared nor has it ceased from carrying on lethal acts. Two men among the respectful list are Kenzaburo Oe and mo Tzu, both of these men shared similar theories. In Kenzaburo Oe’s The Unsurrendered People, he writes about the horrible even that occurred in Hiroshima and of the “American intellectuals” (289), who committed the devastation. Kenzaburo Oe finds it difficult to perceive how the humanism in Americans can deal with the thought of dropping a bomb on so many innocent lives. He writes “if this absolutely lethal bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, scientifically predictable hell will result. But the hell will not be so thoroughly disastrous as to wipe out, once and for all, all that is good in human society. That hell will not be so completely beyond the possibility of human recovery that all mankind will despise their humanity merely at the thought of it…” (289). He continues to struggle in understanding how dropping an atomic bomb solves the controversies between the countries and almost wiping out Hiroshima is humanely conceivable. Similarly, Mo Tzu like Kenzaburo finds it hard how people can condemn killing others for the right of the country. Mo Tzu writes, if someone kills one man, he is condemned as unrighteous and must pay for his crime with his own life… if he kills a hundred men, he is a hundred times as unrighteous and should pay for his crime with a hundred lives” (254). In his writing, Against Offensive Warfare, Mo Tzu wrote with “analogies between war and