Make Love not War this Season - a plea for peace

I shall not talk in this essay about any specific political circumstances. I will not argue about the rightness or wrongness of any particular war or battle. I will, instead, state my utmost reject for violence, for the slaughter of human beings by other human beings, for wars anywhere and under any circumstances. For as Erasmus said in the dawn of civilization: “War is delightful only to those who have not experienced it.”

People may think that there are moral justifications for the war on Iraq, for what happened in Vietnam, for World War II. But I believe there is simply no justification for war. Independences have been declared and accepted peacefully before. And non-violent battles, such as that of India against Britain, have also been successful. War is no way of showing who is right and who is wrong, only who is left. For nobody can convince anybody that those who win the wars are always the “good guys.” There are those who believe war is a fair punishment for those who somehow “deserve it”, or a good stratagem for revenge. I, on the other hand, agree with Thomas Jefferson: “war is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is to the sufferer” – ask the mothers of the soldiers who died in Afghanistan.

Unbelievably, at least to me, there is people who think war is, sometimes, the only way to peace. But, as A.J Muste stated, “there is no way to peace, peace is the way.” Even Albert Einstein assured us of an undeniable truth: “You cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war.” A poster I once saw sated: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.” It cracked me up, but I also nodded in wholehearted agreement. War is no solution, it only brings on more trauma – hate only provokes a vicious cycle of hate. Nobody ever put it as straight forward as Mahatma Gandhi: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Where do our personal, religious, and moral values stand? Don’t at least most followers of the three big monotheist religions believe in “Thou shall not kill”? “Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?”, said Blaise Pascal. Risking being morbidly radical, I will quote Abbie Hoffman: “I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war.”

The atrocities of war, especially in this nuclear era, should not even be a possibility in this time of “civilized” peoples and conscious evolution. Ever heard that slogan: War is Terrorism with a bigger budget? If you ever saw your city burst in flames under the bombing aircrafts, if you ever saw images of the Holocaust or from Hiroshima, you must agree. Plus, aren’t there so many better things we could be investing our resources in instead of waging war on each other? (How about the one that went: Buy books not bombs?) Wouldn’t it be better to try to find a cure for AIDS, or a solution for hunger and starvation? Dwight Eisenhower said it loud and clear: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed—those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending its money alone—it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Written in July 2006