About a decade ago, I asked myself seriously why it was that if every
major religion preached peace, and if almost every major nation professed
adherence to one major religious faith or another, the world has lived in an
almost constant state of war since the dawn of organized society. Over the
course of my search for answers to this conundrum, I have come to certain
conclusions about war and peace that, with year’s end upon us, I’d like to
share with you.
1. War is easier to promote than peace.
Governments, and indeed the mainstream religions, have a long and
horrible history of supporting war over peace. Still today, the world is cursed
with not only political wars but also with “holy wars”, which in both cases
respond to ulterior motives based on power and greed rather than on their
declared “patriotic” or “religious” causes.
War is basically the path of least resistance. It is much easier to stir
up destructive feelings of hatred for “the other”, and to sound the clarion
call to battle in people (and especially in men) than it is to build serious
support for peace. War only requires an ostensible political or religious
objective, arms and equipment, and men and women so brainwashed with instilled false
patriotism or misguided religious fervor that they are ready and willing to
“die for the cause.”
Peace, meanwhile, requires prolonged, constant, hard work and
dedication. It also requires the education of whole nations to empathize with
others and to respect and promote the acceptance and celebration of diversity.
These are lessons that do not further the shallow political causes or the hegemonic
designs of the powers that be. That is why we have been brought up to find it
normal for our countries to have ministries of war (or “defense”) but not to
have ministries of peace.
2. The international organizations whose noble founding ideals are at
the service of peace are too often dominated by the very powers that promote
war.
The best example of this is the United Nations. Founded first as the
League of Nations and later as the UN, the raison d'être of this
pan-international organization is to lay the groundwork for a world of peace
and cooperation in which there will never again be a global conflict like the
two world wars that, in the 20th century, were responsible for death
and destruction like the world had never known before, with tens of millions of
fatalities, hundreds of millions of other casualties and the wholesale
destruction of entire countries—including, as unprecedented and unthinkable
horrors, an attempt to exterminate the “Jewish race”, and the dropping of
nuclear weapons on two innocent civilian populations.
Noble though this founding cause may be, however, the major warring
nations have maintained control of the UN through the creation of a supreme
Security Council and through the veto privilege that these leading powers have
awarded themselves. As such, the five most dominant military powers on
earth—which are also the most major of arms manufacturers and distributors—have
managed for the last 70 years to avoid a world conflict that would be
devastating to their own economies, while manipulating proxy wars in strategic
regions around the world, so as to further their own mutual or conflicting
interests.
This ostensible “peace” has served these powers well by permitting them
to avoid fighting each other directly, and by allowing them to build
mind-bogglingly huge military industrial complexes, but it has proven unconscionably
tragic for the countries where they have sold arms and manipulated strategic
outcomes while sowing mass destruction and murder among those nations used as
shills for the advancement their own strategic purposes.
3. War is not innate in or natural to Humankind.
Let me quote from my book, War — A
Crime Against Humanity:
“Contrary to what was formerly believed almost unanimously until just a
few years ago, it appears ever more probable that the first human beings to
inhabit the earth didn’t practice violence against one another, or at least not
in any habitual or institutionalized way. Their condition as nomadic hunters
and gatherers reduced their sense of property to the minimum, and so too their need
to defend what was theirs...Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey sheds
light on this idea:
“‘This point is certainly crucial in understanding what is perhaps the
primary implication of agricultural food production as against nomadic food
gathering: As soon as people commit themselves to agriculture, they commit
themselves to defending the land they farm. To run away in the face of
hostility is to face certain loss: A year’s labour may be invested in the
fields, and they cannot be given up easily.’
“It seems likely that the origin of war was, then, a social and
political response to a change in economic circumstances: What changed with the
transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture was the
nature of society, not the nature of Man.”
And let me just say that this remains just as true today—except that the
stakes are ever higher and the disregard for human life ever more pronounced
and accepted as so-called “collateral damage”.
4. Peace is improbable...but not impossible.
I have spent the last decade seeking to make the case for world peace
from my humble but fervently sincere platform. I must admit that this
self-imposed mission has often felt like “controlled folly”—a term coined by
the late Carlos Castaneda, to describe doing something and doing it well with
no assurance whatsoever that it will bring hoped-for results or that it is not
completely futile.
Admittedly, it has been discouraging to observe the recent rise of socio-political
movements that we thought had been rooted out forever following World War
II—the very ultra-nationalism, populist cultism and spurning of liberal
democratic principles that fed on the broken pride and disenchantment of the
working classes and ultimately led to the start of that global conflict.
That said, however, a grassroots, global movement for peace could also
rise up in much the same way as has this resurgence of authoritarian designs
has. Indeed, it happened in the 1960s, with the Flower Power anti-war movement,
of which I considered myself a part. And it extended well into the ‘90s with
the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, the fall of the Soviet Union.
But that will require the commitment of a generation, their rejection of
the status quo and their ironclad opposition to the current establishment. I am
encouraged, then, to see the impressive dissemination of protest manifestations
like the #MeToo and #NeverAgain movements and a new chapter in the women’s
rights movement as well, which are sweeping not only the United States but,
little by little, the world.
I am encouraged too by the Paris Climate Accord, which is an at least
minimal recognition of public concern over the rampant deterioration of the
environment. Nowhere is this concern more patent than in the younger
generation, which appears to understand that the world that it will receive
from the current ruling class will be a broken one, and that if it hopes to
save that environment for its own and future generations, it must drastically
change the rules applied until now by a selfish older generation that has
placed its financial, economic and political objectives over and above the
future of our planet.
5. One final thought, The Golden Rule.
In researching for another book, Short
History of World Religions, I discovered that every single major religion and
philosophy that millions upon millions of people worldwide profess—Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism—contains some version of what has
come to be known as The Golden Rule, this common idea most often being
expressed as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
These are simple but powerful words, and if we abided by, instead of
giving mere lip-service to them, peace and cooperation, rather than war and
devastation, would be a fact of life.
Comments
Post a Comment