Is Peace Dead or Buried alive under the rubble of continuous conflict and war?

IS PEACE DEAD OR BURIED ALIVE…?

UNDER THE RUBBLE OF ENDLESS CONFLICT AND WAR?

A SEARCH FOR THE ANSWER

JAY MITCHELSON

Smashwords Edition

Is Peace Dead Or Buried Alive Under The Rubble Of Endless Conflict And War?

Copyright © 2012 Jay Mitchelson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.

A copy of this publication can be found in the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 978-1-742841-82-3 (pbk.)

Published by Book Pal

www.bookpal.com.au

Contents

CHAPTER 1: THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Is peace a myth? Why do we choose conflict? What is the brain up to?

Emotions—hate versus sanity—ingrained memories.

The Twin Towers—reactions.

CHAPTER 2: KEYNES on INJUSTICE

1919: The Treaty of Versailles—huge financial burden and shame on Germany.

This empowers tyrant Hitler. He instils and uses fear and hate—leading to WWII.

241 BC: Carthaginian Peace. 1898: Spanish-American War. Both akin to 1919.

Cultures of war or peace: Germany in the ’30s or Costa Rica, 1948.

CHAPTER 3: The POWER of the OPPRESSOR

Submissiveness in the presence of power.

Tyrants are bullies and bullies are cowards.

Oppression destroys hope, respect, dignity and justice, and therefore peace.

People power used wisely and therefore devoid of anarchy.

CHAPTER 4: PUFENDORF (1632-1694)

First political theorist to precisely define a ‘system of states’.

1648: Treaty of Westphalia and the end of Thirty Years War in Europe.

Pufendorf believed that a sovereign ruler should serve his citizens.

Today’s globalisation has damaged that concept. Self-interest is rampant.

CHAPTER 5: THE FATAL FLAW

League of Nations, 1919. The United Nations, 1945.

Set up by major victors of WWI and WWII.

The faces of Janus.

Nuclear Age.

World Bank—International Monetary Fund—World Trade Organisation.

Blix Report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, filed 27/01/2003.

Iraq invaded 20/03/2003.

CHAPTER 6: THE GREATEST KILLER of ALL: WAR

Military Industrial Complex.

CHAPTER 7: POVERTY is NOT the PROBLEM. INEQUALITY IS

Measured by the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% of citizens.

The bigger the gap, the greater the discontent.

Greatest discontent: shortages of water, food, income, shelter, medicine, etc.

Eco-migration—urbanisation—megacities.

CHAPTER 8: WHERE is JUSTICE for REFUGEES?

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 2008 report. Tactics and target.

Afghanistan: Kilcullen, military advisor and UNHCR 2008 Report.

Sudan: UNHCR 2008 report.

Long-term refugee camps: an overwhelming task.

CHAPTER 9: WHY DO WARS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE to END?

Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. Afghanistan and the Durand line.

Harking back to Pufendorf.

CHAPER 10: WAR in ALL its CRUEL FORMS

Just war? International humanitarian rules of war.

Jus ad bellum and jus in bello, Byers 2005.

Fallujah, Iraq, 2004. Rules of war according to Bush.

CHAPTER 11: HUMAN RIGHTS and the UDHR, 1948

International Criminal Court (ICC).

Impunity, complicity, individual and collective human rights.

1215: Magna Carta. UDHR called the Magna Carta for all humanity.

CHAPTER 12: THE THIRTY ARTICLES of the UDHR

Thirty case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, Arctic Circle, North and South America, and Europe. Each under three headings: reality; case study; what should be done?

CHAPTER 13: WHO SHALL BRING JUSTICE to OUR SHARED WORLD?

Concluding with a question for us all

Summing up on justice.

The cost of war; the cost of peace.

There are different reasons for why we each respond the way we do to the situations in which we find ourselves.

For example: vested interests, seeking fame and/or status; being consumed by fear.

I Paid Hitler. Rise and fall of Thyssen.

Violence and conflict: the vortex to destruction.

There must be another way.

Working as a co-operative in order to nurture equality.

Responsibility to Protect, Gareth Evans, 2008.

Peace: the impossible dream depends on our determination to shoulder and work together for—and believe in—universal justice.

This book’s thesis: peace without justice is dead.

A global culture of war has been indoctrinated into the communal brain and is accepted as a genetically embedded human trait.

A paradigm shift to a culture of peace is therefore almost impossible to achieve.

War is embedded into both the League of Nations, 1919, and the United Nations Charter, 1945.

The concept of laws/rules of war is nonsense.

Individual and collective human rights are indivisible. There cannot be one without equal consideration of the other at all times.

Rights will find their natural place in a just world.

It is each human being’s UNIQUENESS that must be acclaimed and affirmed, not the vague concept of our INDIVIDUALITY.

NATIONALISM is the opposite of UNIVERSALISM. Nationalism is a force for division of the global community. A force reinforced by SOVEREIGNTY.

Sovereignty makes true universality impossible. A paradigm shift needed?

The one thing that we all hold in common is our universal understanding of the concept of JUSTICE. It binds us all together. It is the glue of universality.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to all of you who have shared the coming into existence of this book; to friends and family who gave encouragement and advice and enthusiasm; and especially to Michael for his patience throughout, and for the steady flow of tea and snacks.

CHAPTER ONE

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Man is born, yet everywhere in chains.

One thinks himself the master of others,

and still remains a greater slave than they.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosopher, 1712-1778

Why are we forever at war with each other? Are we predisposed to be eternally in conflict? If so, there is no hope for peace. Is peace a myth? Is it possible that peace is the eternal impossible dream?

Years ago on a pristine winter morning I was walking across my city’s botanical gardens. The trees surrounding the lake were shrouded in soft mist. Black swans glided silently over the water. Nothing else moved. And I thought, this was how the world was before there were human beings. Peace exists, but we keep losing it.

The passing years, full of endless conflict, have forced me to shout in profound sadness, ‘We haven’t lost it. We’ve buried it. It’s inconvenient. It gets in our way’.

We mouth the words ‘peace be with you’ or ‘shalom’.

Do you know the conceptual meaning of these words, peace and shalom? They embody the concept of JUSTICE for all. Without justice, there will always be conflict. There will never be lasting peace. Injustice destroys peace in all aspects of our lives: personal, local, national and international. Yet, we keep saying ‘shalom’ and ‘peace be with you’. Rarely do we understand what these words truly mean. We tend to utter them with little thought and they sound out as hollow and empty words, words that are so easy to say. They drift away meaningless and useless unless they are carried on the powerful, all pervading breath of justice.

There appears to be an undeniable link between conflict and injustice. Let us explore this complex link. Let us share together this confronting and intricate journey. Let us dare to ask the painful questions and expose the ugly details. Let us throw a spotlight on the murky half-truths hidden in the dark recesses of secrecy and ignorance. We must force open the closed doors of secrecy and work energetically to exchange our own (and others’) ignorance for knowledge. We will need courage and perseverance to use the tools of exposure and education. Nothing will change and peace will remain buried if ‘we, the people’, the vast, ordinary masses of the world, do nothing. As Edmund Burke said, ‘Evil triumphs when good men do nothing’.

Why do we choose conflict and injustice, instead of the steady beat of empathy and compassion for our fellow human beings? Neuroscientists have learnt that there are specialised areas of our brains that control specific emotions and thought processes. Aggression comes under the control of the amygdala region of the brain.

‘Monkeys that were uncontrollably aggressive when approached by humans became completely tame and easily handled after their amygdala was removed.’¹

However, research noted by Dozier, indicates that the role of the amygdale is much more complex in humans. It seems that it deals with both aggression and the response to aggression. By reason of our ability to choose, we can decide to be negatively aggressive or constructively and creatively aggressive. Aggression is an energy force without which, it could be suggested, we would be passive and unresponsive to the world in which we live. We would be in a holding pattern, unable to avoid danger or take advantage of wonderful possibilities and opportunities.

It is at this point that it is imperative for us to search out the basic ingredients of hate. Dozier writes, ‘Hate is an extreme form of aggressive dislike that mirrors an extreme form of fear—the phobi.²

Hate, therefore, can be seen as an irrational emotion. What does the word ‘emotion’ mean? One dictionary states: ‘disturbance of mind; mental sensation or state; instinctive feeling as opposed to reason’.³

The implication is that in times of conflict, we need to be wary of our disturbance of mind and our impaired reasoning powers. I remember, as a child, being told to count to ten before exploding in rage. After all these years, that principle still comes in handy; that is, if I can rein in my anger before it became the dominant force in my brain. This is so difficult to do sometimes!

A simple hypothetical case study might be the quickest way to throw some light onto this complex issue of hate. For example:

Your family and mine lived together in the same village all our married lives. Our children went to school together, and played together. We were close friends and enjoyed a shared social life. However, one night in the local hotel, your nineteen-year-old son and our nineteen-year-old son fell into a heated argument. The two young men went outside in a rage and began to thump each other. Our son landed a punch in your son’s face, which caused him to fall backwards and land heavily on the back of his head on the edge of the gutter. He died soon afterwards. My son was horrified. The two fellows had always been very close, almost like brothers.

After all the enquiries and court case, the accusations, and the blame game, your family and mine never spoke to each other again. In fact, we moved away soon after, and we heard that you and your wife left a couple of years later.

You, our dearest friends, now hated us. Our son had destroyed your son. Now we were perceived as your enemies, the destroyers of your world. It was a very understandable emotional response that resulted in this shocking reversal from friend into foe. We tried to reach out to you, but you were hurting and hating so much. Your hate led you blindly down the path of revenge, of payback. You did not kill our son. Instead, you did little things, like reminding the locals about the time that I lost my job and how your family had paid our bills for a month until I found work again. You said that we were bad managers. Perhaps we were. But that did not kill your son. We left town. Peaceful co-existence had died. So, we sought refuge from the conflict between us. The war was officially over, but peace had eluded us.

This example is loaded with potential questions and answers, lengthy debates, and even a potential war of words. There are many, many possible ways by which that dreadful situation could, or should, be approached. Even such a personal conflict is extremely complex. There is no set of rules with which to work through it. The only certain ingredients demanded in resolving any conflict are LOGIC, SENSITIVITY, EMPATHY and the ability to be QUIET and LISTEN to the other side. This is much easier said than done when the flow of emotions are on fire, and running swift and high, in the race towards the destruction of any future peace. Reconciliation is buried under the uncontrollable emotion of hate. In addition, there is an up-surging emotional tendency in us all, seemingly magically, to conjure up hate, and to hold onto it like a savage pet dog. We then feel compelled to nurture it so that it grows so uncontrollably strong that it breaks away and takes off in directions we had never planned or expected and becomes the monster that destroys peace.

The horror of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001 seized everyone in the USA, and flowed with the speed of electronic communication to the four corners of the world. A close friend of mine was living in the USA and, because of his work, he could have been in New York or anywhere. After twenty-four long, long hours, he was finally able to reply to my frantic email, which read, ‘Love to you all. Please let me know if you are OK’.

His reply was full of the mixed emotions and of the shock of all those in his work location. He explained how they all sat glued to a radio, listening in fear and disbelief, and comforting and being comforted by their closeness to each other in that smallish space. Feeling ran fast, fear led to apprehension, especially when the word went around that someone who had been unable to stay relatively calm, had shouted out his anger over President G.W. Bush’s Administration’s attitude to the world outside the USA. He was sharply told to ‘shut up’ and that it was not an appropriate response at such a time. Half a world away, I was so pleased to know that he and those around him were safe for the moment. It was obvious that it was almost impossible for anyone to be unemotional, and yet it was essential at such a frightening and enraging time that instinctive emotions were kept in control and overridden by the cooling calm of reasoning. The future of global peace demanded reason to over-ride instinctive negative emotions embodied in fear and hate.

Globally, opinions and facts were, all too often, emotional and distorted. Lies became accepted, unquestioned truths. Fear quickly led to hatred of the (as yet) unknown other. The world coalesced in shock and support for the USA. The perpetrators had used heavily fuelled passenger planes, not nuclear bombs, to target three emblems of US hegemony: the Trade Centre Towers, the Pentagon and the White House. They failed to hit the Washington home of President G.W. Bush because some courageous passengers took on the attackers on that doomed plane and caused it to crash far from its goal. All on board died, as indeed they would have had the plane hit the White House. We have no idea if those on the other three flights had such opportunities to thwart their captors. However, the vast majority of human beings grieved for them all. Most of us did not know them personally, but we grieved their loss. The greatest wish and longing of the bulk of humanity is for global peace. How are we going to turn this planet we share away from this culture of conflict?

What caused those who wanted to attack the US to hate this global superpower so much? What thoughts possessed the minds of the planners and perpetrators? This thesis will return, from time to time, to the point that all actions, both beneficial and destructive, begin in the minds of human beings. All plans and actions are conjured up in our brains.

It could be suggested that the living brain is like a booted up computer. Both the brain and the computer are ready to function but are useless objects until they are instructed to work. What triggers the operator to give either the computer or the brain the signal to start functioning? It would appear that a stimulus is the signal necessary to set either in action. For example: you suddenly feel very ill—that is the stimulus to activate the neuron pathways in your brain that control your body’s ability to seek medical assistance. Your brain is able to harness a numberless array of positive and negative emotions and ideas. The future of global peace depends on which emotions and ideas we choose to activate. Thus, the consequences depend entirely on the choices we make, or allow others to make for us. Each of us has much more power to guide our world away from conflict and war than we allow ourselves to accept. We each have access to wisdom, even though there is a tendency for most of us to shy away from slowing down, just a fraction, so that wise thinking can be activated. It can make a world of difference to the consequences. As Gene Sharp⁴ explained, way back in 1973, there are many ways to thwart the dangerous dictates of immoderate global leaders. It is called non-violent action and it works very well if ordinary people work calmly and wisely to plan and persevere together to thwart the crazy ideas of some, apparently, powerful people. We have a beautiful world; let’s make it peaceful too.

However, our world is plagued by the eruptions of conflicts and wars, just like a teenager with out-of-control acne. Both need a remedy. Acne seems much easier to fix. Wars, once started, are fought and eventually end. War leaves permanent scars.

Winning a war does not remove hate, distrust, pain, despair, loss of face, or loss of hope. The losing side, especially, carries all these emotions far into the future. Memories are embedded deep in their hearts and minds. They linger long after the generations involved in the war, and its aftermath, are dead. The memories reappear in books, poems, songs and plays, in children’s games and nursery rhymes, in paintings, videos and CDs, in sculptures, in museums, in dusty diaries and letters to loved ones, in emails and text messages, and in row upon row of headstones in the quiet cemeteries of the fallen—but not forgotten—war dead. It does not go away. War does not die. In addition, developing technology is increasing the spread of this lasting memory. Memories are wrapped in all kinds of emotions, which also may include hate.

CHAPTER TWO

KEYNES on THE CONSEQUENCES of INJUSTICE

We began this journey with the premise that peace is dead and buried because injustice is its gravedigger. Let us now look at the relationship between war and peace and injustice.

There tends to be a simplistic view that peace equates to the absence of war. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wars begin for a reason, or, in reality, a number of reasons. In examining the concept of ‘peace is dead’, I am asking us all to face the painful truth that wars/conflicts begin in the minds of human beings. Wars do not just appear; they do not just pop out of nowhere or nothing. Without human beings, there would be no wars or conflicts. We plan and invest in them.

Germany’s Fuhrer (leader), Adolf Hitler, sought world domination. His plans and preparations for the militarisation of Germany began years before the launch of World War Two in 1939. Why and how did this uninspiring young man rise from obscurity to become one of history’s most influential characters? How did so many Germans fall under his spell? How did Hitler brew-up this intoxicating spell? What sort of people did he use to spin his magic? Why were they so obliging? What was there in it for them?

Gene Sharp, in his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part One, Power and Struggle, clearly defines the human characteristics that help us to answer these questions. He quotes the sixteenth-century French writer Etienne de la Boetie in speaking of the power of a tyrant:

He who abuses you so has only two eyes, but two hands, one body and has naught but what has the least man of the great and infinite number of your cities, except for the advantage you give him to destroy you.⁵

In other words, a tyrant is a basic human being just like us all. The only difference is that the tyrant has been allowed to have an advantage over us. We have allowed ourselves to become subservient to the tyrant. We have become unequal members in the situation.

Sharp lists six sources of power that we bestow on our leaders in government, business and social situations and other relationships. He states that they are authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions.

It is some of the intangible factors that relate most to this part of our discussion. Sharp states:

Psychological and ideological factors, such as habits, and attitudes towards obedience and submission, and the presence of a common faith, ideology, or sense of mission, all affect the power of the ruler in relation to the people.⁶

Hitler was given authority from the moment the people agreed to make him their Fuhrer in August 1933. The people voted him into power. He was vested with the right to give orders. He had authority over a sizeable population. He therefore had a labour force with a variety of skills and knowledge and physical strengths.

Germany had certain material resources and access to some others. So, he set about building his military machine. He was a dangerous man with a dangerous plan and a few people spoke out against him. However, it was only about 1% of the population of Germany that protested.⁷ What happened to the other 99%? They gave Hitler the power to silence any protestors. 99% chose to ignore the warnings of the 1%.

There are a number of reasons why this happened. Stewart Wood’s Treaty of Versailles article in the 1996 edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics states:

Signed on 28 June 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, seven months after the armistice ending the First World War… It ascribed ‘war guilt’ to Germany, and imposed on them huge reparations payments, territorial and colonial losses, and restrictions on military power (SW).

The unreasonable dictates of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War One, 1914 to 1918, arguably caused the citizens of Germany to show all the signs of an abused, oppressed, financially crippled and shamed people, causing them to abandon collective wisdom and for most of them to ignore the long-term consequences of the rebellious reaction into which they had been propelled by the WWI victor’s treaty. That revengeful treaty gave rise to reactive anger and shame and played right into the hands of Hitler, who sought personal glory. Ultimately reactive anger led to reactive response and by September 1939 the world was at war again.

It is at this point that we need to examine the formation of the Treaty more closely. The brilliant Cambridge economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)⁸, was asked to go with the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, to the post-war discussions in Versailles