Sunday 10 March 2013

Make Peace Not War

When I was growing up, in the 60s, the in-thing to say was "Make love not war" ... and we certainly did the former, albeit not the latter.   An innocent world we had; no Aids, no globalisation, no realisation that when one superpower sneezes, we all get the flu, so no global financial crises either.   But as I have grown older, and maybe wiser, I have come to realise that love alone will not arrest the all-pervasive, terminally destructive effects of war - only peace itself can prevent this, and (almost) peace at any price.

I say "almost", because if your life is truly intolerable, then anything which offers you a way out, however tenuous, will take you with it, and this is not always peaceful.   So people suffer, especially the ordinary people, their homes are destroyed, their families, their livelihood.   The leaders urge them on, but very seldom share their miseries.   They sit in some safe place, with access to the media, and broadcast their 'encouraging" messages, their rhetoric of hatred and violence. 

But the ordinary people do not have access to safe places, to family villas in the mountains, to underground bunkers, to aid and assistance in neighbouring countries, to expatriate communities in the West ... no; they must live and die where they are.   Their little children must cry alone, prodding at their dead parents to wake them up.   Some do get away, but are then doomed to live in dreary tented cities, utterly dependant on aid and charity.   And the leaders continue to resist a solution to the conflict, continue to exploit their fellow citizens in the name of some ideal, or their own selfish well-being.

One day, usually years later, the war ends with two groups of men from the opposing sides sitting across from one another at a table, with flowers all along the middle, usually in some neutral place like Paris, and peace is agreed upon.   But at what cost?   And to what end?  None of the combatants gets exactly what they fought for, and no one can erase the destruction of the very fabric of society, on both sides.  

I have purposely not linked my thoughts to any particular conflict, because we all have emotional attachments to one side or another, and if we are influenced by them, we will miss the point.   Ultimately all these conflicts are the same.   Whatever pretext is used to rally the troops, religion, racism or fear, one conflict is virtually no different from another.   (It's usually simply economic, about land, about greed; but that's another conversation.)   War is the evil personification of all that is bad in Man, all that is the complete antithesis of any life-affrming, nurturing culture.   Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier from World War I, said words to the effect of "War is legalised murder, and nothing else."

So, at the start of what is likely to be a very long journey, in my quest for a solution to this most hideous of phenomina, I ask my readers, how, how can we "make peace not war"?   There has to be a way.    Coming as I do at the very back of a long line of peace makers, from Jesus to Gandhi (without in any way presuming to have my name said in the same breath as theirs), I am a little daunted when I survey the task ahead.   But in my own life, in my own back yard, I shall work for this ideal, and I know I will be joined by others.  Together we shall start to make the difference.   We must.

  

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