Report on MUKONO-SO philosophy café in English & Japanese Theme; Why do we have war in the 21st century?
Date and Time; 10th November, ’13 Sunday 14:00-16:00 Place; IDEAL English Conversation School in ITAMI-city Participants; 8 (male: 6 female: 2 )
We had 3 English native speakers and 5 Japanese native speakers. I would like to thank everyone for participating in the session. Both English and Japanese were spoken and the facilitator translated to all members.
Here are some of the many opinions and thoughts shared in the group. Some of these opinions may not be fact and may be the result of guess work.
◆Who benefits? ・War is a business for financial and political gains. ・War is made purposely for the financial benefit of weapons and war materiel suppliers. ・leaders who control the people create fear to make the people to rely on to them more and create hostile mind set towards other nations. ・Powerful countries try to infiltrate less powerful countries. ・One particular country’s war budget could be around 300,000,000,000dollers a year, so the government must spend this amount of money to maintain this big budget. ・Some munitions companies may force governments to adopt new war technology. And both munitions companies and governments want to use those technologies in war time to see their efficiency.
◆Superrich people make the decisions to go to war or not and the average person has no say. ・If it is real that all royal families are connected, why do royal families fight each other and for what? ・Perhaps royal families decide together to create war to reduce of the population of the country and gain wealth. For example the Japanese royal family was able to acquire lots of gold from Asian countries and perhaps British royal family was able to rich. ・There are innocent people on both side of war so we must be careful when the entertainment industry for example movies, books, and T.V. Shows class a certain culture or race as an enemy. This could be a kind of brain wash to make going to war easier to except by the public when time comes. ・To think of start war was less meaning than why do we have war. ・Instead of thinking who start wars and why we have wars, it is better to think about how we can avoid war and how we can prevent ourselves moving in the direction of war.
◆One member said that ”The machinery of Law needs power. (by Albert Einstein)” ◆Every person believes his own justice. Thus this is the cause of war. Human beings are always selfish. ・Developed countries dominate undeveloped countries. On the contrary developing countries with an inferiority complex are eager to be equally advanced and powerful as the leading countries. In addition, intermediate countries are pressurized by both sides because they are anticipated to help. ・One of the dominate countries, there are must be a scapegoat. This is an effective way to unite a country or even a class in school. ・In the case of failure, a person will tries to blame another person for his mistakes even though it was his own responsibility. To always take the easy way is human nature. ・Countries need outside enemies to unite their society in times of hardship. Leader turn people’s attention towards outside conflicts to avoid the country’s internal problems.
