# War of aggression

A war of aggression, or war of conquest, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, usually for territorial gain and subjugation.

## Quotes

* The kind of fraternal assistance that the Soviet Union is according to Czechoslovakia is exactly the same kind that Cain gave to Abel.
** George Ball, as quoted in Franck, Thomas M. (1985). Nation Against Nation: What Happened to the U.N. Dream and What the U.S. Can Do About It. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503587-9.
* Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
** Muhammad Ali, As quoted in Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (1999) by Mike Marqusee; also quoted in the International Socialist Review Issue 33 (January–February 2004)
* Even the majority of authoritarian regimes were quite content to persecute internal enemies and bicker with their neighbours over borders. Stalin had no strong interest in the acquisition of more territory; he already possessed a vast empire. Military dictators like Franco were more likely to wage civil war than inter-state war; as a conservative he understood that foreign wars ultimately helped domestic revolutionaries. Only three countries aspired to territorial expansion and war as a means to achieve it. They were Italy, Germany and Japan. Their dreams of empire were the proximate cause of the multiple wars we know as the Second World War. As we shall see, however, those dreams were far from being irrational responses to the Depression. Why did only these three authoritarian regimes adopt and act upon aggressive foreign policies? A conventional answer might be that they were in thrall to anachronistic notions of imperial glory. All certainly harked back to stylized histories of their countries, Mussolini invoking the memory of the Romans to justify his African adventures, Hitler laying claim to the 'lost territories' of the Teutonic knights, the Japanese imagining their 'Yamato race' as if it were more than a mere offshoot of Chinese civilization. Yet there was nothing anachronistic about the idea of empire in the 1930s. In a world without free trade, empires offered all kinds of advantages to those who had them. It was undoubtedly advantageous to Britain to be at the centre of a vast sterling bloc with a common currency and common tariffs. And what would Stalin's Soviet Union have been if it had been confined within the historic frontiers of Muscovy, without the vast territories and resources of the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia?
** Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 278-279