"If you want to keep your friends and a happy marriage, learn to leave religion and politics for the preachers and politicians." We have heard those words of advice for thousands of years, except during those short periods of ecstacy and ambition when political correctness demanded open averment or aggressive re-education.

What exactly is "politics and religion". Is politics singular, or plural? Is there a thing which is a politic? Is religion singular or plural? It seems to me that quibbling over little terms is as stupid as warring over one or the other. In the end, the questions are unanswered and probably are unanswerable. Still, we fight and die, murder and rape to push one worn-out idea or another ahead of other suitable frayed rags of insanity. Politics is religion and religion is pure politics.

I have recently heard and read of people asking if there has ever been a war started by the population instead of by the handful who claim to speak for the multitudes. In less than civilized societies, I think it is possible that the People may occasionally go to war, instead of their leaders taking the people to war. The issues of a small people are comprehended by the people. If the rulers serve the thinking and deciding, then I think the people are merely tools, resources and victims for ambitious wars.

What makes a "Just War"? Can a war be "just" at all? Can there be an innocent bystander in any war?

Answer to question 1. I don't think so. Any Just war must be opposing injustice. One is the obverse of the face of the coin. The conflict of Justice and Injustice expressed in the term "just war" twists the term into an oxymoron. To be a just war requires a conflict in the individual definitions.

Answer to question 2. See answer to question 1.

Answer to question 3. Yes and No. What distance from the aggressor establishes innocense? It seems to me that all inhabitants of an aggressing society are not innocent. There is no such thing as an innocent aggressor. Ignorant, lazy, inactive, reluctant, disruptive, antagonistic and many less than helpful to the war victims, but innocent aggressor? "No."

Can a defender be innocent? Perhaps. Innocense is defiled by encouragement and incitement to attack. Lincoln incited, provoked and encouraged attack on Fort Sumter in order to claim that the fort had been an innocent bystander in a vile aggression by Southern forces.
 
During Sherman's march to the sea, the Cheyenne Trail of Tears and other monstrous campaigns, the men, women and children who were massacred as a "Lesson to those who would rebel or resist." were as close to innocent as possible, but were not bystanders.

The Founders of our country were not innocents by any mode of thought. They created a country and a process of self-governing that they could agree was not perfect, but which offered a real prospect for true social Liberty, evolving to be free of domination by the ambitious few and from the soulless insanity of the majority. They left the future to our hand and will and we will leave whatever remains of Liberty to our children to make of it what they will.

So, War. We, of the United States, are the greatest generators of War the world has ever known. Our victims in war number greater than any other empire before our time. There is promise in the wind that our cache of victims has been infected by an inflation nearly matching our worthless Federal Reserve "dollars". Millions have died at our hand to improve the Glory and Status of our government in the community of governments and to gather the wealth of nations into the purses of our elite and powerful.

The wars of three-score years past are preludes to greater ambitions of Empire. They have discovered that we are nothing more than willing and passive resources to create wealth that can be harvested from us, from our labors and creativity, from our bodies and organs and from our future and our progeny's far future. Bodies to feed armies and Wealth to feed wars.

We have now several forever wars inflicted upon our selves and linked segments of a forever war upon the weaker people of the world. We have more war anxious in the wings.

Our Law requires that we make the open declaration of war to commit our bodies, wealth and security to armed conflict. Do I need to add that nobody has asked our advice for almost a century? None of our wars without our consent can be just, no more than they can be called anything but treason. Treason in the Constitutional definition sense.

We hang traitors.