OlekNetzer writes:

"Real Causes of War Discovered"

Olek Netzer

In July 1970, on the Syrian front, the army ambulance I navigated to a UN outpost was hit and all my companions were torn to pieces. Traumatized, I could not erase the sensory experience of those moments from my inner vision, as if it were happening in the present and projected on my mind's screen again and again. I wanted to get over it, but I became convinced — perhaps obsessed — by the thought that I would not be able to go on living without coming to understand, but really understand, why it had happened.I could not find the real causes in anything I had learned about the causes of war. My conceptual maps pointed in directions that stroke me as erroneous and irrelevant. Historical causes, economic causes, complex causes: two peoples clashing over the same territory, the Arab belligerence, occupation of that Syrian territory by my country Israel, all those together...

None of them directly caused the very real effect I experienced that afternoon. In addition, all those causes and myriad others seemed arbitrary, chosen arbitrarily, each an effect in an endless chain of earlier events, earlier "causes".

In my first new realization, the missile reached us at the end of a chain of causation beginning in Biblical times with the conquest of the Land of Canaan by the Hebrews — actually much earlier — propelled through endless links of causes turned effects turned causes, down to the causes for emergence of modern science that enabled some distant people to devise the chemical reaction and construct the technology that caused the explosive material in the missile to turn my companions into bloody splinters.

I got over my trauma when the real cause, so it felt, presented itself to my awareness. The real cause was the obvious one: the Syrian gunner on the other side wanted to hit us, his target, aimed well and pulled the trigger. Had he not wanted to hit us at that moment, he would not have to.

Why do I call that the “Real” cause? Because if there is any link in the chain of causation leading to war that is not abstract, that we can not just conceptualize but touch in order to break that chain, the living human link is the only one touchable. In the most real, concrete and functional sense, we could not have wars if people did not fight willingly being convinced that they should.

The 9/11 terrorists did it in full consciousness, feeling justified in face of their conscience, morality, history, religion, society. Otherwise, they would not have done it, would they?

If all other contributing factors remained equal but people would just not conceive shooting and bombing and burning and killing as an option to solve their problems with other people, there could be no war. Thus, by only describing events taking place in the nonverbal world, we arrive at an awareness that is very uncommon in our and other cultures: the real causes of wars are not abstract but living people.

Economic, Political, or Historical Causes are abstract constructs. In reality, all we can ever observe is some people sending other people to war because of what they, inside their skulls, conceptualize as their “Economic Interests” or whatever, usually their concepts about the malice of and danger imminent in the "enemy".

As long as we do not act consistently upon that simple truth, we could see or experience endless horrors and suffering, unable to touch their real causes.
This down-to-persons awareness of causation brought me to the realization that if anyone wanted to heal infectious societal diseases such as wars, they would need to investigate human thinking that causes it directly. Then I begun to learn all I could from reliable scientific sources about the processes by which warring people perceive and construct their political realities. Very soon I learned that this field was completely dominated by the multiple causation approach. It meant, that if my realization that the relevant causes for making a difference are the direct ones was valid — that multiple-causation approach was in itself the cause why research in the area is bound to be ineffective.