I hate wars.
Of course, I too was once fascinated by wars and battles. Like how back in grandma's village, I eagerly listened to what later turned out to be exaggerated accounts of an extended family elder's service in the military during the Indo-Pak war that birthed Bangladesh.
Later, as a teenager, I read fictional works, like The Eagle Has Landed, that were set in the context of the second World War. (Reading other writings about the war from the Soviet perspective turned out to be useful in the adopted land where tales of the victory over Hitler rarely include the importance of the Soviet front.)
And then I grew up. Suddenly, wars began to make no sense.
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi's pacifism appealed a lot more to me. By the time of the Iraq War during the first Bush presidency, I was a committed anti-war nutcase. And have been since.
Reading Ernest Hemingway and and others cemented my pacifism and with a clear understanding that war is hell. So much so that even war movies that featured violence appealed less and less to me.
But, there is no Department of Peace, there is no Secretary of Peace. Wars continue.
Even President Obama, who was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, loved droning the lives out of brown people all around the world. I wrote in 2016 that "the killing of people in other countries--sometimes even US citizens--without the politically hot "putting boots on the ground" is one awful, awful direction in which Obama has led as the commander-in-chief." When it comes to waging wars, Obama's legacy is that he is "the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered a dramatically dangerous and ethically dubious form of warfare." Obama became a better warring President than his predecessor was, and laid out the MO that I am sure will be followed for a long, long time!
The unfortunate reality is that wars are good for business and politics.
In order to placate wusses like me, political leaders and military chiefs present us with "humane" wars! In his review of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Jackson Lears writes that "the quest for humane war, whether by deploying smarter weaponry or making new rules, has obscured the more basic task of opposing war itself."
Lears quotes from the book, in which the author, Samuel Moyn, assays "the century and a half of US history" that preceded 9/11:
The notion of humane war would have been alien and baffling to most Americans for much of that period. “America’s default way of war—honed in the imperial encounter with native peoples and lasting into the twentieth century across the globe—recognized no limits,” Moyn writes. He records the consequences in sobering detail, ranging from the extermination of Native American tribes to the torching of Vietnamese villages. During the Pax Americana following World War II the whole world, in effect, became “Indian country” (as many GIs referred to Vietnam).
What about the United Nations? Didn't we create it to further the cause of peace?
If you were a permanent member of the Security Council, as both the US and USSR were (and the US and Russia of course are), you you could veto any resolution that labeled you an aggressor. If you were a country that made the rules, then you could make a rules-based order work for you, as the US demonstrated by repeatedly violating the sovereignty of other nations—Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile…—throughout the cold war without ever being held to account.
Russia the aggressor is a permanent member of the Security Council and, of course, vetoed resolutions against its behavior and actions.
Diplomacy to ease tensions and create peace became secondary. Lears also comments about Obama:
At home, Obama succeeded in making war seem remote and detached from the messy business of body bags and bitterly contested occupation, largely by reasserting America’s singular virtue, underwritten by a renewed commitment to humane warmaking.
As long as the rules of engagement are followed, as long as the wars are humane, we apparently have no problems with warmaking. We are particular that those who committed war crimes ought to be punished, and not pardoned. We have become less interested in the active pursuit of peace itself!
Michele Norris writes that "the ways and means — and words — of war are all around us" but there is nothing about peace.
But what about the language of peace? What about the concept of building bridges instead of walls, or bringing opposing forces to a shared understanding? Quick, name the catchphrase that’s in frequent use that speaks directly to peacemaking? (Example: Some used to say, “Make love, not war.”) I tested myself and eventually came up with “passing the olive branch.” Not exactly impressive.
In our everyday conversations we do use a lot of war metaphors. Norris has a solid argument that the words we use begin to shape the world in which we live.
Peace requires a focus on peacemaking. That is an active, constant process that takes effort and will and frequent articulation.
We again need to give peace a chance. And not be afraid to say so out loud. As that adage goes, the words you speak become the house you live in.
I, for one, am not holding my breath for peace on earth, even as I try in my own way to give peace a chance!
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