Кузнецов Михаил Юрьевич
"War Is Peace" The Structural Aims of Forever Wars and the Impossibility of Peace under Capitalist Rivalry

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  • Аннотация:
    This essay was wrote for CENFAD symposium Peace in the Age of Forever Wars (April 3-4, 2026). ///. Orwell's "1984" links endless war to totalitarian control. Kant and others envisioned "perpetual peace" through domination, echoing colonial and classical hierarchies. Malthus, Smith, and Darwin saw conflict as a natural check and catalyst. Today, geopolitical rivalry over resources persists. Lasting peace demands dismantling systems of domination, not repeating cycles of preparation for war.

  George Orwell"s "1984" distills the paradox of perpetual conflict into a chilling slogan: "War is peace," endless war sustains totalitarian control by exhausting resources, stifling dissent, and unifying the populace against a fabricated enemy. This fictional mechanism mirrors historical and philosophical attempts to rationalize "forever wars" as instruments of order. The central question: can such wars aim at or produce peace?
  Immanuel Kant"s "Perpetual Peace" envisions a federation of republics enforcing global law, with enlightened Europe acting as "world policeman" (gendarme mondial). Yet Kant echoes earlier thinkers- Plato, Pierre Dubois, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, William Penn, Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Johann Fichte, who projected peace through hierarchical domination. These "Pax Romana" blueprints rested on chauvinism: the "white man"s burden" to civilize "inferior" races while regulating population for optimal resource distribution. Plato"s Republic and Aristotle"s Politics, rooted in slave-owning societies, could not transcend their era"s productive relations (produktivnye otnosheniya). Each epoch"s "eternal peace" was thus forged in blood, steel, and gunpowder, from the French Revolution to colonial conquests.
  Thomas Malthus reinforced this logic, arguing wars, epidemics and famines are natural checks on overpopulation. Adam Smith and Charles Darwin later framed competition as progress: destruction clears space for renewal. Post-war booms after 1918, 1945, or even localized conflicts lend empirical weight. Yet this Darwinian optimism ignores moral, ethical, and legal regressions. The "rollback" in human development after cataclysms is not mere speculation, but a pattern.
  Today, nearly 200 states orbit the UN Security Council"s five permanent members: USA, UK, France, Russia, China - each imposing its worldview ex positione virium. Slogans of "unipolarity" or "multipolarity" mask a singular truth: advanced capitalism, per Marxist historical methodology, clings to crises of overproduction, anarchic distribution and imperial rivalry. Wars in Ukraine and Gaza exemplify this: arènes, where geopolitical blocs proxy-fight for resources, markets and influence.
  Can war between humans cease? Only a global federation, hypothetically, might reduce interstate conflict. Maslow"s hierarchy suggests a minimal "cement": steady food, energy, and Lebensraum. Without it, competitors ensure perpetual tension. A Third World War, potentially nuclear, may be humanity"s last, as some predict. Time will tell. What Malthus, Smith and Darwin proved is that after ruin, societies rebound-technologically, demographically, but at what cost to our shared humanity?
  III World War seems improbable today: all sides are roughly equal in destructive capacity, like boxers in the same weight class and no one risks a suicidal bout. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the five UN Security Council powers have been gearing up for a "global redistribution" of resources and influence.
  Friedrich Engels calculated 30-40 years of preparation for World War I, it materialized precisely. The interlude between the first and second wars shrank to 22 years (1917-1939). For a Third World War, two conditions must align: first, one bloc"s confidence in 70-90% odds of victory, second, 10-15 years of buildup of its military potential and preparation of personnel and population. History accelerates: each cycle of preparation shortens, compressing the fuse toward an ever-hotter powder keg.
  True peace requires dismantling the architecture of domination, not refining it. Until then, "war is peace" remains the ruling elite"s most enduring lie.
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