The Silencing of Antiwar Voices

The horrors of war we often don't truly think about

Introduction

War is an extremely glorified act. We obviously know war as a horrible thing, but we often do not think of it more deeply than that.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." 

- Joseph Stalin

This quote perfectly describes the popular view on war. It's hard to truly grasp how horrible war is because it's of such a large scale. It's easy to say "yeah! Let's go to war!" in order to achieve some political or social goal. But in truth, a war in the modern era would cause much more negatives through tragedy and trauma than any positives from any goal it could possibly achieve.

Many important wars throughout history are glorified. We think of the revolutionary war as creating the United States, we think of the civil war as ending slavery, world war II as defeating the nazis, etc. It is true that these wars did these things, and they are good things, but for every "good" war, there are 100 brutal and pointless ones we do not hear about.

Why Don't We Hear Anti War Voices That Much?

Going on antiwar.com, we see a website that is clearly underdeveloped and underfunded. It's not one that's very popular at all. Voices against war would seemingly be the most popular voice? Right? I mean nobody truly likes war.

But as I mentioned before, wars are historically glorified. The reason these voices are silenced could be one of two reasons.

One: These voices are hidden because people in power want them to be hidden. As citizens we have little to gain from war, but people in power have a lot to gain. Governments get to justify more taxes for military spending, and a win of a war leads to a lot of political gains. 

Certain businesses also see a large rise in sales during war time. Because of this, these people actually do like war. And ultimately the most powerful people in the world control what media the general population has access to. At least, according to the theory of agenda setting.

Two: Another explanation for why anti war voices are silenced is human biases. Human's have a propensity to only focus on specific parts of a larger whole. These are called confirmation bias/cherry picking, or tunnel vision bias/selective attention. This would explain why we often think of only the positives of war and not the negatives.