Is war just, moral, or humane?

After September 11, the "clash of civilizations" became the justification for modern days conflicts. This has turned tensions and rivalries in the world to banal processes of civilizations getting in touch with each other and fighting over natural resources. In this explanation, the end justifies the means and the history of colonialism and settlements repeats itself.

There is no doubt that throughout history and still in our modern days, countries clash over natural resources such as water, oil, minerals, strategic passageways or capes but this has nothing to do with civilizations conflicting with each other.

The basic definition of civilization is "a human society having its own highly developed social organization, culture and way of life, which makes it distinct from other societies." Thus the main characteristics of a civilization are an organization, a culture and a "mode de vie" never a territory or a richness of any kind. When we speak today about ancient civilizations, we rarely focus on their geographical location but rather on their legacy such as their arts, literature, wisdom, sciences etc. We speak about Greek theatre, sculptures, philosophy or mythology but we never speak about a geographical location or wealth of any kind.

Keeping this definition in mind, when studying historical conflicts, we do not speak about a clash between the Persian and the Greek civilizations but rather between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states. Thus the clash was between two political structures rather than two ways of life or two social structures. Of course each political structure has values of its own but the reason and the main core of the conflict was politics and wealth rather than art and philosophy.

We can thus say that civilizations do not clash; they rather interact during wars and conquests. For instance, the crusades were the most important source of interaction between the Muslim east and Christian west in the medieval age. The same is true for the Arab invasion of Andalusia. These modes of interaction vary in many ways. For example, the French language includes many words of Arabic origins. The orient adopted the western mode of clothing…

Even when campaigns of evangelization, islamization, russification or turkization took place it was always for political and economic reasons. The era of the great sailors or that of the 19th century colonialism, the European colonial powers never tried to impose their values on colonized populations. They simply weren't interested in that. Of course the English for example, ruled and taught and practiced their values in India the way they did it in the UK and, the Indian people were affected by those values and practices but the English never cared to have Indians adopt their social organization or way of life. It would have been too dangerous for them.

When Stalin launched his russification campaigns on all the populations of the Soviet Union, it was for bridging the gaps among the workers and peasants of the country i.e. to stress on what unifies them because, simply, any dissimilarity was not tolerated.

During the cold war, the eastern and the western blocks both used their civilization traits as means to intensify the conflict and to demonstrate supremacy. They both used music and literature to fuel their conflict but neither of them tried to make the other adopt his art or his social structure.

Never throughout history there was a clash of civilization in the way defined after the 9/11 events. Using such an explanation to justify the brutality of imperialism is simply unacceptable.