The Insignificance of a War...

The Soccer War
Pg. 166-184

September 16, 2007
5:00 P.M.


....The Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador, represented the boiling point of their tensions; finally exploding into a cold blooded war. It's amazing how insignificant this war was to the rest of the world, however. Around the world, the war was known as the Soccer War because of the misconception that it was caused by a soccer match. In reality it was caused by much more than that: Latifundistas driving people away from their lands, an oversized country with not enough population to make up for it, and an overcrowded neighbor with few opportunities for its citizens.

....The world was more concerned about Apollo 11 and its accomplishment than the thousands of lives being lost in Latin America. The world rejoiced at the triumph of reason and how close man was getting to the stars. Lttle did they know, or little did they want to know, that man was getting buried in the ground more than flying to the stars. A similar case was lived by the world with the Cambodian genocide, where in the 1970's, delayed world reponse permitted a cold blooded massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. This apparent apathy for third world suffering in modern times has been fueled by an egocentric nature of the developed countries. American culture has this ideology firmly rooted. Many Americans do not even have passports because of their belief that America is the unquestioned center of the world and there is no need to travel or think about any other place. Globalization has slowly attempted to diverge this trend, and the growth of communication has made ignorance more and more difficult. But the bureaucracy of NGOs and government aid, as well as the unchanging apathy of civil society, has still slowed the process of response and kept the third world bleeding while the first watches MTV.

....War is only lived by its protagonists. No one else wants to get involved because then it will cause disruption to their own emotional stability. As long as the war doesn't affect their own business, then other people don't find the need to get involved. War is something very superficial. You go fight to get whet you want, but is all the blood she'd really worth it? This isn't only true with nations; humans beings do the same thing.

....Kapuscinski makes reference to a dying, twenty year old soldier that was fighting to live after receiving 11 bullet wounds. Everyone around him was more concerned about the fact than an older man would have died immediately but he didn't because he was young, than about who this dying soldier was. This is evidence of the de-humanization of war. This de-humanization is also a cause for the apathy explained previously, and is a metaphor for the growth of a statistic-oriented war. War is in modern times, a statistic. To a certain extent this de-humanization is necessary for a war to happen. A counter example is the movie Joyeux Noel, in which after the soldiers met and celerated Christmas together were unable to shoot each other.