Silly Reason For War / Literature

• Played for Drama in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The three superpowers are quite literally fighting a Forever War over nothing; they have all the resources they could ever need, no intention of holding any of the territory they capture, and they're constantly switching "sides". The entire conflict is an elaborate Genghis Gambit for each superpower to use their citizens' (enforced) Patriotic Fervor to prevent them from ever achieving free will again, with the only things they actually get from the conflict being a steady stream of slave labor for the economy they built around perpetual war. They have no real intention of winning their War for Fun and Profit, and do everything they can to protect the delicate balance of power with each other at the expense of 98% of the human race.
• In Against a Dark Background, this is essentially Golter's "hat", coming up on the ten thousand year anniversary of an apocalyptic war that all but hit that reset button on their whole civilization... having fought any number of minor wars in the intervening time with the idea that they would stave off greater conflicts, or would usher in a new order that would prevent any future war — but they were bloody all the same, and rendered large swaths of the planet's surface all but uninhabitable. Protagonist Sharrow herself fought in one of the more recent conflicts: the Five Per Cent War, implied to have been fought over a tax hike.
• In the Animorphs book The Ellimist Chronicles a race called the Capasin receives a transmission from another race (the Ketrans) about a videogame they had made that's about creating new species of creatures and making them fight. The problem? Capasins don't have videogames and thus think the Ketrans are really creating creatures and making them fight. So the Capasins decide to wipe out the Ketrans.
• The Arends in The Belgariad tended to fight constantly for foolish reasons. Their civil war over which Duke would become King was fairly significant, but the fact that the fighting continued for an additional five hundred years after the issue was finally resolved, due to a legal technicality, qualifies. (The Asturians refused to swear fealty to the crown because they had already sworn fealty to their Duchess. The fact that the Duchess of Asturia and the Queen of Arendia were the same person was irrelevant. Once this is discovered, the Duchess arranges for her subjects to be released from their vows so that they might swear fealty to her in her persona of Queen — as well as to her husband, but only in his persona as King of Arendia, not in his persona as the Asturians' cultural archenemy, the Duke of Mimbre.)
• In A Brother's Price, someone complains that the so-called "War of the false Eldest" was this, as it was just about who should rule the country ... more precisely, which sister from the same family. To the population, this didn't matter at all, but the side-effects of the war, were, of course, severe.
• "C-Chute": Humanity and the Kloros went to war over the mining rights of an asteroid. None of the protagonists describe this in very positive terms, from naked nationalism and bigotry, to outright describing it as foolishness.
  "If it weren't for the stupidity of some of their people-and, by God, of some of ours-we wouldn't be at war."
• In The Chromium Fence by Philip K. Dick, a meek man is unsure of which side to take in a social conflict that seems to be leading his future-society towards a full-blown civil war. The issue at stake? Mandatory shaving and hygiene laws (up to and including minor surgery to reduce body odor and sweating for egregious offenders). As violence begins to erupt on the streets and even in his own home (between his hygienic son and his politically active, hairy, sweaty, and stinky brother-in-law), the main character refuses to take a side and can't understand why either side is taking the issue so seriously. He confesses to his less-than-helpful robotic psychologist that he feels like the Only Sane Man, but worries that feeling is a sign that he is the one who is really insane for not caring about it.
• In A Civil Campaign, it's mentioned that the Barrayarans once fought a minor war over whether the Emperor or his District Counts had control over a substance extremely useful in the terraforming effort. Since Imperial power is Serious Business on Barrayar, and since terraforming a planet with almost no technology is hard, this war isn't that silly—but since the useful terraforming substance is horse manure, the whole thing sounds kind of ridiculous to most readers. The way Miles tells it in-story, it was the sort of war that underemployed minor aristocrats start whenever they have a cashflow problem or feel like expanding their territory and think they can get away with it, but it seems to have ground to a halt quite quickly when the Barrayaran Vor ruling class became dimly aware it was a silly Pretext for War even by their standards.
• In Steven Brust's Cowboy Fengs Space Bar And Grill, the Sugar Bear conspirators' society is so terrified of Hags Disease that they repeatedly engineer nuclear attacks to try to exterminate the rest of humanity, fearing the other human colonies' inhabitants are carriers. By the time they're found out and stopped, said "rest of humanity" have long since found a cure for the disease in question, yet the conspirators have stayed so isolated from everyone else that they've never heard that their "quarantine" efforts no longer serve a purpose.
• German philosopher Oswald Spengler pointed out in his non-fiction book The Decline of the West that many wars in Real Life were started like this — more than one, apparently, because some courtier wanted to break up the developing relationship between some general and his wife.
• The first war depicted in the Deverry novels was between two nobles who were fighting over whose peasants had the right to forage in the local woods for pig fodder. It should be noted that the two families had been feuding for three generations at this point, and had already exhausted just about every other reason they could find to go to war with each other, including who owned the forest in question.
  Cullyn: Pity we can't arm the swine. Everyone will fight for their own food.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
  • Jingo: A twofer, in the main plot and an anecdote.
    • The war that nearly takes place in the book is over a small island with no usable resources, and no potential for any use economically or industrially, that suddenly pops up in the water between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch. While neither side actually wants the island, they don't want the other side to have it either, since both sides believe it belongs to them. Humorously, the war is ultimately prevented when Vetinari, after visiting the island, surrenders it to Klatch because he had determined that the island will inevitably sink again, making it even more worthless than it already is. This is a reference to an actual island between Sicily and Malta, called Ferdinandea by Italy, Julia Island by France, and Graham Island by the British. In mid-1831, the volcanic island emerged after an eruption, sparking a brief diplomatic row by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, France, Britain, and Spain over who would claim the new island, until the "island," actually made of weak tephra, washed away over the course of the next six months. The Italians (or to be specific, the Sicilians) recently renewed their claims in 2000 by inviting the heir to the defunct Bourbon throne out for a ceremony to plant both a flag and a plaque on the summit, by sending a diving team down.
    • There's also a story about two smaller nations nominally claimed by the Klatchian empire, who had only recently eased off on a centuries-old war, having run out of rocks to throw. The reason for the conflict is a one-word difference in their holy book, which one country translates as "man" and the other translates as "god". This trope is applicable because the difference between the two words, in Klatchian script, comes down to how a single dot is positioned over one letter ... and it especially applies if, as heretical theologians suggest, the dot is actually a bit of fly poo. Apparently if the dot was moved slightly more it would mean "licorice". This (well, the first part, not the licorice) is a reference to the split between the Eastern and Western Churches over a Greek word that could mean either 'of God' or 'of man' in the Nicaean Creed depending on if it differed by an iota (the smallest Greek letter). Hence the phrase 'not one iota of difference'.
  • Thud!: Commander Vimes discovers that the Battle of Koom Valley, which ignited a long-standing animosity between Dwarfs and Trolls, was actually caused by a misunderstanding. The dwarf and troll leaders intended to broker a peace in Koom Valley, but a thick fog caused their armies to mistakenly believe the other side was ambushing them. With the leaders washed away by a flash flood, the survivors spread the story of the "double ambush" and continued their racial feud. A group of conservative dwarfs tried to prevent this knowledge from spreading in order to prevent a new peace accord between the two races.
• Dr. Seuss loved this trope:
  • Inspired by Swift, The Butter Battle Book has two peoples fighting over which side of the toast should be buttered. It escalates to ridiculous extremes, becoming an obvious parody of the then-current Cold War, and ends with an ambiguous Mexican Standoff. Seuss himself liked to butter the crust.
  • The Sneetches: The presence of a star on their bellies is used as a sign of racial superiority by the titular Sneetches until Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up with a contraption that applies (or removes) stars, all for a modest payment. In the end, he has all their money, and the hopelessly confused Sneetches get the Aesop.
  • The Zax: A North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax happen to meet face-to-face, and they both refuse to budge "an inch to the east, nor an inch to the west" to let the other pass. Like The Butter Battle Book, it just ends with them at an impasse (also under an overpass).
• The Elenium:
  • The Lamorks are in a constant state of war, with the minor nobles declaring war on each other for any perceived slight. One war ended up getting started over a bee sting.
  • In The Shining Ones it is revealed that a man angry his betrothed was paying more attention to her sister than to him is the true origin of centuries of warfare and machinations in both the Eosian kingdoms and the Tamul Empire.
• Andre Maurios's children's book Fattypuffs and Thinifers is set in an underground world where people are divided according to their weight, which is deliberately stupid in the first place. When the book begins, they are in an uneasy truce in a war over something, which is never made clear, to do with an island in the sea between their countries. At a hopeful peace conference, the Fattypuffs insist on calling the island "Fattyfer", while the Thinifers demand it be called "Thinipuff". And so the war resumes over the name of an island (of course, neither side asked the natives for their opinion). In a happy ending, the reconciled Fattypuffs and Thinifers agree to call it "Peachblossom Island" instead.
• Hari Seldon from the Foundation Series prequels once mentions a youth subculture conflict on his home planet between people who shave the left side of their head and those who shave the right side of their hair.
• In The Great God's War the nations of Amika and Belleger have fought a centuries-spanning Forever War because the founder of one of them was jilted by a woman in favour of the founder of the other one, and he killed them both on their wedding day as revenge. Everyone agrees on that much, but both countries insist that it was their founder who was the victim and the other country's founder that was the murderer. In practice, though, Amika mostly fights the war because its King wants to rule over both countries, and Belleger mostly fights the war because, well, the Amikans keep running over and attacking them.
• In Gulliver's Travels, the Lilliputians fought a long war over which end of a boiled egg should be broken (the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians). This was a metaphor for the contemporary conflicts over the eucharist, specifically the belief and disbelief in transubstantiation. This reason for war is actually discussed in The Adventures of Wishbone book "Gullifur's Travels" (an adaptation of the original story). In the original book, Gulliver does not offer an opinion on the cause, merely promising to defend their country from invaders. In this version, while talking with Reldresal, Gulliver brings up the possibility of breaking eggs in the middle. Reldresal (who personally agrees that the reasoning for the war is silly) nervously tells him to keep that thought to himself, because compromisers are seen as being disloyal and put to death.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • Higher-dimensional beings like playing Brockian Ultra-Cricket, a game so complicated that a complete compilation of its rules became a black hole. The more popular it gets, the less it is being played because almost all the teams (and substantial parts of the population) are now in a state of permanent warfare with each other over the interpretation of these rules. This is, however, all for the best, because in the long run a good solid war is less psychologically damaging than a protracted game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket.
  • The Vl'hurgs and the G'Gugvuntt fought a long war because the Vl'hurg leader was supposedly insulted by the G'Gugvuntt leader. After noticing that it was actually Arthur Dent (and a hole in the space-time continuum), they teamed up and flew thousands of light-years towards the Milky Way, only to be swallowed by a little dog.
• The Hobbit is the Trope Maker for Elves Versus Dwarves, yet the reason for the conflict provided in the book is remarkably petty. Apparently the elves commissioned the dwarves of Erebor to fashion some raw jewels into jewelry, but once the work was done, the dwarves refused to return it. The elves claim that the dwarves kept it out of greed, despite being fairly compensated. The dwarves, on the other hand, claim that they were never paid, and kept the jewelry as compensation. Then again, wars based on jewelry seems to be a recurring element in J. R. R. Tolkien's works.
• British statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote in Letters to His Son: "Such closet politicians never fail to assign the deepest motives for the most trifling actions; instead of often ascribing the greatest actions to the most trifling causes, in which they would be much seldomer mistaken." (letter 93)
• In Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, the two major powers in the Kingdom of Wisdom, Dictionopolis the City of Words (ruled by King Azaz the Unabridged) and Digitopolis the City of Numbers (ruled by the Mathemagician), were at odds over whether words or numbers were the most important aspect of wisdom. When the princesses Rhyme and Reason advised that both words and numbers were equally important, the kings ordered them banished, a move which turned out to be the last time they ever agreed on anything. Milo manages to Logic Bomb Azaz and the Mathemagician into agreeing to lifting their banishment and in the end the two appear to have restored peace, although there is still some bickering.
• Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock dramatizes a real-life incident that happened to friends of his, wherein a young lady's fiancé stole a lock of her hair without asking permission (again, "rape" here meaning "seize forcibly", as in the case of the infamous bucket, below). The brouhaha was so ridiculous that Pope turned it into a full-scale epic, complete with miniature gods and descriptions of coffee, card games, and petticoats that would make Achilles weep.
• The Ravenloft novel Carnival of Fear was set in a country where criminals were transformed into circus freaks and mind-wiped, then gleefully mocked and abused by the ordinary citizens. Hating the odd-looking became so essential to their mindset that, when the Carnival's performers learned the truth and fled the region, the remaining citizens turned on one another: in the epilogue, a gang of children are seen throwing stuff at another boy because his eye color is different from theirs.
• La Secchia Rapita (The Rape of the Bucket) is a mock-heroic epic poem by Alessandro Tassoni first published in 1622. It tells of a war between the Italian cities of Modena and Bologna over the possession of a wooden bucket. It was a real war. Honest. See the Real Life section for some details. (That's "rape" in the archaic sense of the word, "carried off, seized by force", by the way, not a Cargo Ship.)
• In The Search for Delicious, the Prime Minister tries to compile a dictionary, but he gets stuck on Delicious because no one can agree on what food should be used as an example. People are getting in fights over the issue, so Gaylen is sent out to poll everyone in the kingdom to settle the question once and for all. But not only do no two people agree on what the most delicious food is, brawls keep breaking out among people outraged by each other's tastes. Then The Usurper Hemlock starts traveling the kingdom ahead of Gaylen, telling everyone that the King wants to ban certain foods. This causes the people to divide into two factions, the Squashies and the Crisps. Before long, the kingdom is on the verge of civil war.
• The Semantics War, a short story by Bill Clothier, has humanity arbitrarily divide itself into two factions, one declaring that THE WISTICK DUFELS THE MORADDY, the other that THE MORADDY DUFELS THE WISTICK. War and the collapse of human civilization ensues.
• Every major conflict in Separated at Birth: America and Drakia from the 1850s onwards occurs due to trivial incidents in the Levant involving pieces of furniture.
• In a Spellsinger novel, a tribe of prairie dogs and a tribe of gophers went to war periodically over possession of an ugly statue, which gave the victors exclusive rights to use the nearby hot springs' water. The springs produced enough hot water to meet the needs of both tribes, but their egos were too caught up in the competition to care (also they liked killing each other). Jon-Tom decides that obviously this means that they need a UCLA law student to tell them to stop fighting and destroys the statue so that they can "learn to cooperate and find common ground." He succeeded; they found the common ground of wanting to kill Jon-Tom more than they wanted to kill each other. Cue Jon-Tom and Mudge making a hasty exit.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • I, Q tells of a war between the Q and another race of similarly omnipotent beings, the M. These two impossibly advanced species both admit the real reason for their cataclysmic conflict is "there's just something about you that just really pisses me off." The war itself is kicked off when one of them blurts out, "Your mother!"; nobody now knows who said it or who it was directed at (and it's not like any of them even had a mother). Both sides also show near fourth-wall breaking Genre Savviness: they're both aware enough to realize that in their reality every race always manages to get balanced out by some other race which exists to be an opposing force and source of plot. If they make up with their obvious opposite numbers, it would inevitably lead to a serious threat to both of them showing up.
  • Another Expanded Universe novel, Imzadi mentions two feuding worlds whose centuries-long strife ultimately stemmed from the hard feelings caused by an unintentional diplomatic incident. Specifically, a dog analogue owned by a dignitary from one world ate a cat analogue owned by a dignitary from the other. When this was discovered, it resulted in the first ever peace treaty to include a section about leash laws, as well as a ceremonial gift of a kitten analogue from the former planet's ruler to the latter's ruler. Both sides were pretty embarrassed by how silly the whole thing was and more than happy to bring a peaceful end to it.
• The Star Wars Legends novel Planet of Twilight visits Nim Drovis, a planet inhabited by a species that has been in a Civil War for centuries... because one tribe thought the word "truth" was singular and the other thought it was plural. A Drovian queried on it by a New Republic officer says he doesn't care what started the war with the Gopso'o, he just wants to beat them.
• Averted in The Sworn Sword. Ser Duncan tries to convince Lady Rohanne not to invade his lord's land over a 'pissing contest' about who can dam the river. Lady Rohanne points out that these contests are how nobles judge each other's strength, and worse will happen if she doesn't put up a strong front.
• C. S. Lewis started but never finished a story about The Trojan War called Ten Years After. In the story Helen's jilted husband, King Menelaus, is bewildered and distressed by the assumption of his advisers that the real reason for the Trojan War is to do with securing food supplies. As far as he is concerned, that is a silly and ignoble reason for war, whereas war to take back the most beautiful woman in the world is something that any true warrior can get behind.
• In the Shel Silverstein poem "The Generals", two enemy officers, General Clay and General Gore, confess that they find the war between them to be silly and boring, and try and think of something else to do instead. General Gore suggests going to the beach, but they both realize they're afraid of drowning. Deciding that they have nothing better to do, they restart the war and are both killed in the next assault.
  Said General Clay to General Gore,
  "My bathing suit is slightly tore.
  We'd better go on with our war."
  "I quite agree," said General Gore.
• In The Three Musketeers, the Duke of Buckingham was willing to go to war with France if diplomatic relations broke down... because it would keep him away from the Queen of France that he was in love with.
• Tristram Shandy has a chapter-long aside about a war between France and Switzerland that starts when the countries disagree about what to name the French heir.
• In The True Meaning of Smekday, the Nimrogs were an alien race who were driven to the brink of extinction by three hundred years of civil war that started over a parking space.
• In Use of Weapons, part of The Culture series of sci-fi novels, one of the many, many, many military conflicts the protagonist took part in was an unending and brutal war on an ice planet. Ostensibly, the war was for control of the constantly shifting iceberg masses that made up the only land surface on the planet. But since these icebergs are inevitably destroyed/melt as they move towards the equator, no victory ever means anything for more than a few months, but the war continues on and on, as both sides had grown to hate each other too much to admit the whole thing is pointless...
• Played for drama in Warrior Cats. Following a string of betrayals and tragedies, Bluestar, the leader of ThunderClan, becomes paranoid and fearful that the other Clans are plotting to destroy her Clan. When her warriors find remains of dead rabbits on their territory, Bluestar assumes that the culprits are WindClan (who regularly eat rabbits), assumes that they have been stealing prey, and plans to attack them, despite her deputy Fireheart pointing out that the rabbit remains were most likely left by a dog. When Bluestar refuses to back down, Fireheart sets up a peace talk with WindClan behind her back in order to prevent needless bloodshed.
  • Earlier, a flood shifted the course of the river, transferring a barren, prey-poor piece of land called Sunningrocks from the RiverClan side to the ThunderClan one. Cue generations of bloody warfare over it, only ending when all the Clans were forced to leave by human activity. Ironically, they actually gather there before evacuating, because it's the last place that hasn't been bulldozed, chainsawed, or littered with traps and poison.
• In Welkin Weasels, the protagonists come across an island that is home to a pair of dodo tribes. They apparently hate each other because of the color of their eyes, and over ownership of a bunch of little models made of fish bones. Apparently, whenever they go to steal the other tribe's, the other tribe gets the same idea and they're back where they started. They manage to solve this by the protagonists having them burn all of the models. It doesn't really work, though, as the chieftain of the tribe they first met recommended that the group leave before the darts started flying.
• These are the kinds of wars medieval Japan is presented as waging in one Where's Waldo? where Waldo is wandering around various eras of history.
• Eyrbyggja Saga (Unbuilt Trope): The formerly friendly relations between the leading clans of Snaefellsness, the Thorsnessings and the Kjalleklings, break down when the Kjalleklings refuse to honor the traditional ban on defecating on the headland of Thorsness, the sacred assembly ground for the people of the region. The issue leads to a fight which leaves several dead and many wounded on both sides. Though the issue that leads to bloodshed seems comical, it is transparent that the real cause is a latent rivalry of prestige, as the fact that the assembly takes place on the land of the Thorsnessings, and that the Thorsnessings insist on imposing their rules on all others attending the assembly, makes clear that they seem themselves as the senior clan in the region, and this in itself is provoking the Kjalleklings.
• In Wet Magic, the children eventually learn the reason for the Forever War between the Mer-People and the Under Folk. 3,579,308 years ago, an Under-man accidentally trod on the tail of a sleeping merman and didn't apologise because he was under a vow of silence. Rather than wait for an explanation, the Mer-kingdom declared war.

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