In this 2011 statement, Julian Assange discussed a significant cause of war:

One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.

The media could have stopped it, if they had searched deep enough, if they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda, they could have stopped it. But what does that mean?

Well, that means, basically, populations don’t like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don’t willingly and with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we’ll also have a peaceful environment. But our number one enemy is ignorance, and I believe that is the number one enemy that everyone is not understanding of what is actually going on in the world. It’s only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans.

Now question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations to try to keep them secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false, or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media. It really is my opinion that the media in general are so bad, we have to question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them all together. There’s some very, very fine journalists and we work with many of them. And some fine media organizations. The vast majority are awful and are so distortive to how the world actually is, the result is we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.