Maq Masi Blog

A man must wonder, if he still possesses a soul, why history repeats its sorrows with such mechanical regularity. We call it war—the ultimate breakdown of words, of reason, of grace—yet every generation inherits it like a birthright. It arrives not with fanfare but with justifications, clothed in language so ornate that the blood beneath it often goes unnoticed. One nation defends, another attacks. Borders are violated, skies darkened, and civilians buried under the weight of declarations made by men who never bleed.

In 1914, they called it “the war to end all wars.” By 1918, the trenches had swallowed a generation, and the survivors knew it for what it was: a prelude.

But what if the war we see is not the war that truly exists? Beneath the surface of every televised front lies another battlefield—the interior one, where interest hides in plain sight. This war does not begin when missiles fly. It begins long before, in boardrooms and embassies, in whispers between diplomats and energy brokers. It begins in decisions shaped not by morality but by mineral rights, arms contracts, ideological containment, or regime change disguised as liberation.

Think of any recent war—and remove the official explanation. What remains? Resources, leverage, fear of influence, or the rearrangement of global hierarchies. We are told of aggression, of defence, of necessary force. But these are the theatre’s front rows, obscuring the machinery behind the curtain. And we, the global audience, are left to choose sides in a play we did not write, where even the actors sometimes forget their lines.

When Iran is struck, it is not simply about uranium. When Ukraine is invaded, it is not only about territory. When Palestine bleeds, it is not just a question of religion. When Congo screams, it is not merely about tribes. Each conflict wears a local face but is shaped by global hands. And every government, east or west, builds its moral fortress atop the ruins of another’s humanity.

In 1968, as Vietnam burned, a U.S. military officer uttered the quiet part aloud: “We had to destroy the village to save it.” The paradox of war—its infinite capacity to betray its own purpose—has never been clearer.

This is not to say there is no evil in the world. There is. Oppression exists. Tyranny lives. There are regimes so cruel, so suffocating, that their fall would be welcomed by their own people. But when foreign hands seek to bring that fall not out of solidarity but out of strategy, they inherit the same moral vacancy they claim to destroy.

True liberation can never arrive by drone. It must be born from within, through awakening, courage, and a people’s own reckoning. To impose peace through war is to plant roses in ash and expect them to bloom.

So what then is the solution? How does one end a cycle that predates the printing press, the nation-state, the treaty? Perhaps not through might, nor even through diplomacy alone. But through a shift in consciousness—a refusal to believe that war is ever inevitable. That suffering is ever collateral. That history cannot be reimagined.

The real war is not between nations. It is between illusion and awareness. Between the lies we are sold and the truths we dare to seek. Between what power wants us to feel and what our conscience insists we must know.

To reflect on war universally is to accept that it is not always wrong to resist, but it is always wrong to kill without understanding. To act without love. To pursue justice by burning down its foundations.

The wise do not ask who fired first. They ask why there was ever a weapon in the first place.

And perhaps, one day, when the soil has absorbed enough memory, and the human heart has grown tired of inheriting old enmities, we might begin again—not with treaties, but with trust. Not with armies, but with honesty. And not with silence after the war, but with a voice strong enough to stop it before it begins.

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