It might seem like a stupid question to ask, but how many people have really thought about it? How many people just pay lip service to the idea but would gladly drop bombs on a foreign country if someone told them to? And how many people extol the virtues of war?
I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the UK the Army actively tries to recruit people through advertising. We have CCF programmes sponsored by the Ministry of Defence; they say they're not a pre-services organisation, yet they dress youths young as 13 or 14 up in military uniforms and teach them to fire guns and obey orders. In the US as well as the UK, people (particularly politicians) tend to praise the military to the skies because they fought for our country against the Nazis, Japanese, Communists and terrorists depending on which period you look at; people like to conveniently ignore World War I on every day but one of the year, instead focusing on the glorification of the murder of people, sometimes particularly the murder of people of colour (because there is very much a racial element to some wars, particularly our War on Terror). Companies sell us media glorifying war. And I've had people come up to me and tell me that nuclear weapons contribute to peace.
Compared to this, what does the peace movement have? People telling us that the white poppies are disrespectful to the armed forces and thinking that our vision of a world without war is unrealistic, that it's the vision of a bunch of drugged-up hippies holding hands and singing kumbaya.
It's long past time for us to smash that image and to explain just why world peace is something we should strive for.
Most people would agree that the absence of war is a good thing, but even then you'd have a couple of hawks arguing that we need war to protect us from our enemies, to advance our causes (as in the case of "spreading democracy"), and to further scientific and technological progress - it is disturbing how much research is funded by militaries. (I'm not saying this because I'm anti-science; I personally was inspired by NASA as a child and now want to train as a theoretical or mathematical physicist. At the same time, it would be wrong of me to ignore the politics around research and so I have to help do my bit to kick imperialist, exploitative organisations out of science.)
Even assuming those three benefits (and as I'll show, all can be had without having to kill other people), war does far more harm than it could ever do good. War is murder on a massive scale, motivated by greed - for land, for people or for raw resources. It reaves communities apart and leaves nations - if there are any such things - in tatters. Pick up a history book. Read about what happened to Germany after World War I. This is far more typical of what happens to a country after a war than the sanitised storyline we're fed about the end of World War II - and even then, that was an utter mess. Look at what happened in Vietnam. And these are just a couple of relatively modern examples. It breeds resentment and scars the generations after it with the deaths of too many people, and the sufferings of far too many more. That is no guarantor of peace - but it is most certainly a guarantor of further fighting and instability. Now, that might be good news for armies, arms manufacturers, politicians and banks, but it's definitely not good news for anyone who wants an end to this cycle of violence. That would be most people. Most people don't want to lose their lives, their relatives, their homes, their jobs, their limbs or their minds to a greedy imperialist agenda. And I for one think they've got a point.
Now, as to the perceived drawbacks of a world without war...You don't need a huge world government to oppress people. You probably don't even need a government. You need to get people to work together, and that's not an impossible feat.
It's true that a peaceful world would not protect us from our enemies - but that's because a peaceful world is not a world that lies down and lets people trample all over it, it's a world that is united as one. I don't think that a peaceful world would have no concept of war or enemies - these ideas are too deeply branded in our collective consciousness.
Also, think about this: how many people from a different country are actually your enemy? How many people from a different country can you say have personally wronged you, and in how many cases would you say that justifies war? The answer is very few. The average [insert person from country we're supposed to be at war with or hate] may hate me; they may distrust me; but they have no personal quarrel with me and I would gladly help them out in times of trouble. The problem isn't down to ordinary people - it's down to the military-industrial complex, and even then if you put them in the front line I'm sure they'd be having second thoughts.
As for war advancing causes, the main cause it advances is greed. That's it. It may seem like I've been repeating this point a lot, but that's because it's quite starkly obvious, and it's what you're left with when you get down to basics. Moreover, wars cause instability. If you want to promote a high-flown cause such as democracy (actual democracy, mind, not the plutocratic farce a fair few so-called democracies have), making a country less stable and covering it in the blood of its people is not the way to go about it. This should be quite obvious.
Lastly, while war does often leave behind new technologies, this doesn't necessarily mean that we need war to make those new technologies - and indeed, some of them arguably divert funding from vital causes to projects used to kill. You can still pour resources into a project without war, and perhaps you can pour more in. Perhaps those resources can be used for learning how to cure and heal instead of how to murder.
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