A friend of mine came to dinner the other evening. She had been watching an old Second World War movie which left her feeling sad, but more than that, rather bitter.

She ranted about the injustice of war, how that war was fought to bring an end to wars. Yet, there has been nothing but wars ever since and the innocent are always the major victims of the fighting.

She shook her fist at the sky and demanded why God was letting all this happen. I reminded her that God gave humans free will, freedom to choose their roads and that there has been fighting and despoiling always.

There was a note on a program on the CBC, Radio 1, about the video game, released at the end of January, which is outselling every other game by far and is a war game, Call to Duty – World at War. It is about fighting in a war, specifically WWII. All around the whole world, this is the most popular new video game. Apparently, the violence is considerable and is considerably graphic.

Other really popular video games are about wars in space, wars in mediaeval times, killing dragons and monsters, killing aliens, killing scary animals, killing.

Murder is against the law. Killing is forbidden by the 10 Commandments. Every religion, creed, national legislation, school rules – forbids killing, as being a bad, immoral, criminal thing to do.

Yet the best, most loved, most played video games in the world are the ones about killing.

In the Cameroons, what was once a very beautiful jungle country in the centre of Africa – I have not been there for a long time, so I don’t know what it is like now – the censorship on movies was against violence not sex. In other words, kids could go to a movie with sex in it but not one with violence. I really enjoyed my stay in the Cameroons, but I wonder if they too now allow this pestilence of excessively violent video games into their children’s play stations or computers.

Barack Obama stood before the world, accepting his Nobel Peace Prize while assuring the world, not that he would do all within his power to bring peace, to dismantle the structure of war (although he theorizes about dismantling nuclear weapons – and don’t we wish it were only possible), but that war is unavoidable. With a Nobel Peace Prize in his hands.

War is not only avoidable, it must be completely stopped. This is the second decade of the 21st Century. When, oh when, do we grow up as a species? When do we finally address the fundamental cause of war, which is greed? Nothing noble, nothing to do with God or patriotism or making the world free. It is all about greed for wealth and for power.

Let me be clear: soldiers go to war for noble, patriotic, altruistic reasons. They lay their lives on the line and they do not do so for the sake of the few accumulating wealth. They go because they have been persuaded that they have to go.

Soldiers are heroes, but this does not make war acceptable. Those same fine young men and women could very well be spending their lives with their families in other, less life threatening occupations.

When the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended and, for a very brief time, we all thought there was the possibility of peace, true peace, with the only battles taking place amongst the diplomats.

However, the United States economy, a cornerstone of which is based on the sale of armaments, cannot afford peace. The structure The structure of the U.S. economy relies on there being wars someplace, all the time. And sure enough, not long after the fall of the wall, there was the first Gulf War, lead by the Americans. And the dream of peace ended.

As the drive to keep the majority of the world’s population in destitution continues, as the gulf between the tiny minority of obscenely wealthy people and those chained by poverty widens, so too does the heat of resentment and hate intensify.

Terrorism justifies itself to those with nothing to lose. And our leaders make a show of struggling among themselves with their own sticky determination not to change anything. They meet in one city and another; they confer; they designate studies; but they do not do anything.

They do not make a difference to any of the fundamentals: greed and poverty.

It is the same problem with climate change. Shifting to green industries, making a real difference to how economies are run and how the world is fuelled can never happen until the real issue is addressed: greed.

But what if young people suddenly woke up to this? What if they suddenly realised what is actually happening to their world and to them? What if they suddenly started to care? What if they suddenly began to insist on change, on peace, on “going green” and finding other ways to make airplanes fly?

The Old Dogs could never let that happen. So, what do they do? They see to it that even WWII is still relevant, that being part of that long nightmare is desirable. It is the most wide spread Machiavellian manipulation of youth in our history. This is not even the promotion of war as something noble, etc. It is the promotion of war, using the full weight of technology, to present the horrors in glowing gore, from a totally unrealistic place of safety.

Where is the force of youth that will bury these Old Dogs with their formulae of suffering and degradation and swing the governance of the world in a new direction of common sense and fairness? A world where greed would be a crime.