About War, Night Bombing and The Victors
“All is fair in love and war”
-John Lyly
When we go to war, gambling is the main rule in this game, we don’t know what we’re gonna get after the war comes to an end. Fairness is such a utopia that we are made to hypnotize people with illusions. They thought the enemy would obey the rule of war to not harm the civilian without caution and without strategic purpose. But, the fact says otherwise, every faction used everything they could to make great casualties on the enemy side and become the victors of war. The night bombing is a common method that was used in World War II, the Nazi used it in the battle of Britain, so the Allied used it to bomb every main city in Germany. Civilians became the innocent casualties from this event, children separated with their own parents, every family fled to the countryside or lived in tunnels to protect themselves from the cruelty of war and use anything possible to make their family safe.
Night bombing is hell in the world. When the air raid came, no one could expect what they could take away from us. People were falling asleep and they didn’t realize the end of their lives. War is recognized as part of human nature, conflict becomes something inevitable even in the modern age. Why did our ancestors use it to achieve glory, domination or something cliche like that? Was the life lost worth enough to gain the powers or rule other nations and tribes? Brave people risked their lives to protect their own family, the sacrifices they made seemed like just rigid statistics that displayed as data of war casualties. Even the victors, sometimes had to pay for it by losing almost half of the population. For the god sake of humanity, why Lyly compare something like this to love?
Doesn’t love contain beauty and pleasant things? Does love recognize cruelty and violence? Compassion and sincerity is the language of love, why do we compare that with the language of kill and torture? When I first heard about the sentences, I was a little bit confused and tried to analyze, how can the purity of love compare to the bloodshed of war? Then I realized, war and love have been part of human nature since our civilization began. If I interpret the sentences with my own language and based on my observation, Lyly tries to explain the game of love and war. There is no real judge and court in the game of love and war, everything happens based on interest and the law of nature. So, if love and war doesn’t have a fair play condition, why do we go to war and try to love someone? Human nature has a complex behavior, we have desire and lust that directs us to act and behave, love and war is directed by desire and lust.
If night bombing in war manifested with ammunition targeting the enemy vital building and asset. Night bombing in love manifested with memory, shadow and thought about our beloved one. Attacked in the middle of night and an unexpected place deep in our heart & mind. Sometimes, these things are burdening us. But, there is a difference between love and war. We don’t recognize our beloved one as an enemy, we voluntarily do that and engage in the situation of love, no one could blame in this situation, because that is the cost of love and the most important is no real victors in love, if we succeeded we get the person we love and if we failed, we got ourself back. Is it fair? Well, as Lyly said “all is fair in love and war”.
