I always found when, in any discussion on war, inevitably in any discussion on war, at a certain point in the discussion somebody would say: "oh well...it's human nature."

Well first of all, from my own experience...and I still have to tell this to people because there's still people who talk about a desire of young men to go to war, the thrill it is for young men to be at war, to shoot their guns...to kill. I thought about my own experience in the Air Force. It was very clear to me that, looking around at all these guys around me who are dropping bombs, who are killing people...that did not come from inside. It did not come from: "oh God! How good it would be to kill some people today!"

No! It was no urge to kill even though they were the enemy...no, no. What it came from, is simply, we had been trained.

(There's a war going on outside, no man is safe from.)

And also we have been told that it's a good war. We've been told we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. It's bad if they won, it'd be good if we win, we gotta drop the bombs and so we'll do it and we'll do it as well as we can but there was no spontaneous urge to kill. My own personal experience simply recoiled at the idea that soldiers had this kind of killer instinct.

And then when I got away from my own experiences and just began to study history, the history of wars, something else became clear to me and that is: wars don't take place out of the rush of a population demanding war. It isn't the population that demands war. It's the leaders who demand war and prepare the population for war.

Well you have to do two things, really, in order to mobilize an army for war. You have to persuade them that this is a good thing to do, a noble thing to do. And you have to work very hard to persuade them because after all they're gonna risk their lives. So you have on the one hand, you have the propaganda campaign...

(It's similar to Vietnam)

And then on the other hand you have the coercion and the punishments. It takes in other words, powerful, powerful inducements and threats to mobilize the young population and the nation for war. And if you had a spontaneous urge for war, you wouldn't have to do that. It was clear to me from looking at wars through anthropology, there were some tribes that were fierce and some tribes that were peaceful. It clearly wasn't a universal quality. It depended on the conditions under which they lived.

And also the word aggression is a very ambiguous term, because you can take out your aggressions in many ways. You don't have to take it out by killing people. And they're all subject to environmental circumstances. So to me what was clear was that, there was a very, very important political consequence of this belief in human nature as the basis for violence.

(Tell them that it's human nature.....)

Because the consequences of believing that war has come as a result of human nature, is to place the blame for wars on individual people and to take away the blame from the leaders of the nation who are driving the country into war.