On fighting

I have always felt (still feel) some sort of uneasiness when I hear people talking of fighting ("for" or "against"). And I would then remind myself about how Kundera's insight had helped me identify the reason for my mysterious uneasiness. Recently I held in my hands a library copy of "Immortality" Lalitha had left on the desk, and was casually flipping the pages when I came across this convincing passage again..

“…As if it were an ostinato providing the bass accompaniment to a musical composition, she kept silently repeating to the rhythm of her motion: I will fight, I will fight, I will fight, and she was sure that she would win.
Just open any dictionary. To fight means to set one’s will against the will of another, with the aim of defeating the opponent, to bring him to his knees, possibly to kill him. “Life is a battle” is a proposition that must at first have expressed melancholy and resignation. But our century of optimism and massacres has succeeded in making this terrible sentence sound like a joyous refrain. You will say that to fight against somebody may be terrible, but to fight for something is noble and beautiful. Yes, it is beautiful to strive for happiness (or love, or justice and so on), but if you are in the habit of designating your striving with the word “fight”, it means that your noble striving conceals the longing to knock someone on the ground. The fight for is always connected with the fight against, and the preposition “for” is always forgotten in the course of the fight in favor of the preposition “against” ”
--- "Immortality",(1990), Milan Kundera,