On a journey this past week to East Asia, one of my goals as a traveler
was to visit that man-made wonder of the world known as the Great Wall of China.
Being there, seeing it for the first time, after reading about it and studying
its history while doing research on ancient China was a truly impressive
experience. And, I have to admit, since it coincided with the launching today
of my latest book, War: A Crime Against
Humanity, on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords, as well as in print distributed worldwide
by Amazon, it got me thinking. Not so much about the wall itself, mind you, but
about the effort that went into it, a centuries-long effort built entirely on
the premise of separation, isolation and division among peoples. 
More than a monument to human ingenuity, the Great Wall is that, a
monument to isolationism, to divisions among peoples, to the risk of invasion
and domination and to the meticulously expressed desire of one group of the
world’s inhabitants to shut themselves off from others. Don’t get me wrong, the
Great Wall is an incredible work of persistence, commitment and amazing
engineering. Construction of the wall began as early as the seventh century BCE
and it was built ever larger and stronger from then on, with perhaps the best
known era of ancient construction taking place from 220 to 206 BCE under
Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Few remnants of that wall remain, since the imposing
edifice has been rebuilt, enhanced and restructured over and over again
throughout history.
Much of what remains standing of the Great Wall today dates back to the
Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years, from 1368 to 1644 CE, succeeding
the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty following that government’s collapse. Some
historians consider the Ming Dynasty to have been not only a great era in
Chinese history, but also one of the greatest times for conscientious governance
and social stability in the entire history of humankind.
What the Great Wall is, in fact, is a series of massive fortifications
built in a more or less easterly to westerly direction all across the
historical northern border of China. The idea was for it to serve as a barrier
to keep out nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe lands that historically
raided, marauded through and invaded the Chinese states from the north.
Once built, however, successive emperors used the wall for other
purposes as well—as a sort of endless toll booth for the collection of duties on
goods transported along the Silk Road, as a control station for incoming and
outgoing migration, as a site for the construction of security watch towers, as
a transportation corridor through the rugged terrain of northern China and as a
place to garrison troops for use as rapid intervention forces.
During the Ming Dynasty, China’s Great Wall snaked its way along a
course of about 8,850 kilometers (around 5,500 miles). To give westerners an
idea of just how far that is, think of a wall 26 feet (8 meters) high and 20
feet (6 meters) wide at the base running the entire length of the border
between the United States and Canada. But the convoluted construction of the
wall over the centuries meant that it also ended up having branches off of the
main course so that, according to archeological estimates, if the wall and its
branches were laid end to end, they would actually have stretched nearly two
and a half times further (a total of about 21,000 kilometers or about 13,000
miles).
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| The fall of the Berlin Wall |
Needless to say, I was duly impressed. In fact, I literally marveled at
the unimaginable time, effort and resources that went into the building of this
amazing phenomenon of human culture. But despite my awe, I also couldn’t help
reflecting that some of the world’s greatest efforts continue to go into
separating rather than unifying peoples and into developing ever more powerful
defenses and ever more incredible ways of destroying each other. Nor can we
even write off the building of towering walls as a long forgotten ancient idea
aimed at preserving security, but more at “preserving cultures” by avoiding
diversity. We need only cite the post-World War II construction of the Berlin
Wall that stood until the late 1980s as a symbolic and, indeed, physical
barrier between the communist and capitalist worlds, or, still today, the
1,900-mile (3,057-kilometer) border fence erected since 2006 and still
maintained on the border between the United States and its southern neighbor,
Mexico.
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| US-Mexican border fence |
Such walls, however, are, despite their “practical” uses, mere symbols
of a much deeper malady. They symbolize the insistence of human beings on
rejecting a basic law of nature, that of diversity as the key to planetary and
human health and prosperity. They symbolize the misuse of our human free will
as a license to do as we please in detriment to other human beings and to the
planet itself. They are emblematic of Man’s persistently wrong choices to
pursue short-term, greedy interests and to impose the will of the strongest on
the ultimately enslaved weakest of our species, and to strip nature of its
diversity with no thought of what its carrying capacity will withstand or of
how it will recover what we use of its resources.
Today, there are at least 29 active conflicts worldwide in which between
100 and 50,000 people die per year. In the worst of these, the Syrian war,
200,000 people, many of them innocent civilians, have been killed over the
course of the past four years. But these
conflicts know no geographic boundaries and are taking place in Africa, Asia,
Europe, North America and South America. There are currently over 50 million
refugees of wars or human-related ecological disasters. And today’s war and
“defense” spending are costing the world economy nearly 10 trillion dollars,
roughly enough to feed to planet’s 900 million starving people for 200 years,
or to find scientific and diplomatic solutions to the ecological and political
problems that are causing the famines that are starving those millions to
death.
The premise of my book, War: A
Crime Against Humanity, is that the world’s people can no longer afford the
“luxury” of remaining isolated and at odds with each other. In a world in which
the very planet we live on is warning us daily that we have the option of
choosing peace and cooperation to find solutions to the problems we, as a
species, have created or face extinction (much sooner than later), war is no
longer a viable political alternative. Peace and worldwide cooperation are the
only sane choices for the future of Humankind.
And yet, on writing this book and receiving the first comments on it
from reviewers to whom I provided it in English or from those who read it in
Spanish in its first two editions distributed in print in South America, it is
disheartening to see how many people congratulate me on my “altruistic spirit”
but who are convinced that world peace is the mere pipe dream of naïve
idealists.
So let me ask you this: Imagine China’s Great Wall didn’t exist and,
even today, I brought you a well-planned project to build it. Wouldn’t you
think I was insane? You might think, “What ambition! What an incredible
project! But it’s nothing but a pipe dream.” But if you can imagine it and can
get others to imagine it and get others enthused and get them to cooperate in
peace and harmony, anything is possible! The Great Wall exists. At some point
it was the vision of a single person or small group of persons, and then it
became the vision of China’s first emperor, and it became a reality because no
one dared tell him he was crazy.
Standing on the Great Wall this past week, imagining it wending its way
five thousand incredible miles through the rugged terrain of northern China,
then, I couldn’t help also thinking of world peace and cooperation as a great
edifice that it is within our grasp to construct, for our own future and the
future of generations to come. All we have to do is each let ourselves imagine
a better world, believe that it can work and actively convince others of the viability
of such a worldwide project, convince others not to follow or empower the
war-makers and instead to actively support the peace-makers and peace-builders
while shunning and punishing the preachers of hatred and violence.
Standing on the Great Wall and thinking about the conviction and focus
it took to build it, I realized that this was the kind of conviction and focus
needed for world peace and cooperation to prosper, not at the service of
isolation and separation, but of unity and cooperation in pro of a common
cause: the survival of our species.
It’s time for all of us to start THINKING BIG!
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