Wars Don’t Have Rules, Prime Minister: WHOPPER WATCH

Published 10/17/2023 · Updated 10/17/2023

whopper.watch .12.26

“Wars have rules.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the bombing of a Gaza hospital.

No they don’t.

Sure there might be some rules written on pieces of paper here and there. And those rules might be applied by the victors … or not.

There are rules against all kinds of genocide and murder and torture. They make for wonderful holier-than-thou speeches for politicians to lean on.

Society has rules. Some people follow them. Some people help. Most don’t. But in the end, you’re on your own. Some of your most trusted friends and people you love can let you down. Society doesn’t have rules, let alone justice. It has words written on pieces of paper. They are broken often, without thought or conscience.

I remember being shown a picture of an explosion during the terrorism that followed the formal war in Iraq. I won’t tell you the details because they are too appalling for public consumption. That photo would never run in the media because people would throw up their breakfasts. I wish I had never seen that picture. It stays with me now. I’d like to lose that image.

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The photo was in black-and-white. Imagine it in colour. Think of being there. Think of it happening to you. War is worse than you can possibly comprehend. You avoid war until you can’t. Talk is better than war. Talk is much easier than war. But often we choose war.

Wars never turn out the way they were supposed to. Canada fought in the Second World War to battle Nazi tyranny. And we stopped Nazi tyranny but traded it for Stalinist tyranny. Ideology doesn’t mean much if you are dead. Tyranny is tyranny, right or left. We killed 60 million people to get more tyranny. Wasted people.

Who won the war? Nobody.

We sanitize war. We never ran that horrible picture from Iraq. Our movies depict people being shot but with no blood, dead immediately with no suffering. War isn’t like that. Life isn’t like that. Dying is a horrible thing. A bullet doesn’t just go through your chest as in the movies. A bullet doesn’t care what it hits. A bullet doesn’t have a brain or a heart. Most of all, it doesn’t have rules.

In sanitizing war and, for that matter, life, we make war appear that it has few consequences. But there are consequences. That bomb in the Gaza hospital. Those bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed everyone, even people in hospitals. We try to systemize life which has never had a system. We live, then we die. And we do some things in-between.

Wars kill soldiers and civilians, the elderly and the babies, good people and bad people. Wars don’t care. They don’t have rules. Wars are a bludgeon when a diplomatic scalpel is often a better choice. Wars are to be avoided unless they are absolutely impossible to stop. Wars are often worse than the problem they attempt to solve. Sometimes they leave larger difficulties than before the war. Sometimes the outcomes are unexpected and terrible. War is inhuman but then many, too many, humans are inhuman.

Wars are not fair. Wars are not just. Wars achieve little and often don’t achieve ends.

Wars are gruesome beyond our collective imaginations and to be avoided. That’s why soldiers come home in agony, mental and physical. They have seen and experienced too much. They have wounds you can’t see.

So Justin Trudeau, live in your little dream world of words and privilege. Of ethics and no ethics or situational ethics. Condemn inhuman acts. You have no idea.

Wars don’t have rules. They have death, suffering, agony, terror. Things beyond our imaginations that are unfathomably ghastly.

Prime minister, wars don’t have rules. They are pure, unmitigated evil. There are no rules in hell.

Ken Gray

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