Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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...

In reviewing the year that ended last night, there are two things that stand out in my mind as particularly significant for the world at large: the burgeoning refugee crisis and the environmental agreement that world leaders drafted at year’s end in Paris. One has been ongoing throughout the year (and decade) and is the direct consequence of the misery caused by constant war and violence, and it is now beginning to significantly affect the leader-nations in the West that, directly or indirectly, feed the source of the crisis—be it through proxy war interests, massive arms sales, political and/or material support for one belligerent or another, or simply through failure to seek a disinterested international humanitarian solution to the root cause of the problem.  The other is just beginning and is a manifestation of how world leaders are finally—very late in the game—waking up to the fact that their countries can no longer ignore the extreme damage that years of corrupt, self-int...

WORLD BEYOND WAR AND THE QUEST FOR PEACE Directed by author and international peace activist David Swanson, World Beyond War is an organization whose aim is not only to bolster world peace awareness, but also to actively inspire popular support for ending the scourge of war—an aim that I share and that is the thesis for my latest book. War: A Crime Against Humanity . Like me, World Beyond War has begun its research and activism by accepting the fact that war is not merely the occasional use of mass violence as the continuation of political and diplomatic processes, but rather—like torture and racism before it—a nefarious institution that has been incorporated, like an indelible stain, into the fabric of society. Therefore, it’s not enough to seek ways of preventing war—although that would at least be a start, instead of always taking the violent path of least resistance—but rather, it is necessary to embrace the need to abolish this pernicious institution entirely. And, I woul...

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 fr...