[Peace-discuss] Ending war

[patton paul]

Published on Thursday, December 26, 2002 by the San Francisco Chronicle
World Without War?
by Ruth Rosen


EVER SINCE I was a little girl, I've wondered what it would take to end
war. It's probably why I became a historian: I wanted to understand what
drives truly profound social change.

As a child growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, I used to pray
every night, "Let there be no war," but no one seemed to be listening. No
surprise, then, that I spent a decade peacefully protesting the Vietnam
War. But I'm not a pacifist; I do believe in (the rare) just war and I
support international intervention against genocide.

It's hard to imagine a world without war. But don't forget that slavery --
another barbaric human practice -- existed for thousands of years and is
now banned around the globe.

What did it take for our species to decide that owning another human being
is unacceptable in a civilized society? Centuries of intellectual and
religious opposition, followed by an international movement of
abolitionists that never stopped preaching, mostly to an indifferent
world, why the slave trade was immoral and had to end.

In the United States, the campaign to end slavery heated up when a
movement of deeply religious abolitionists cast slavery as a sin and
growing numbers of Americans began to condemn the ownership of others as a
hideous violation of our nation's most cherished democratic principles.
Nevertheless, it finally took a savage civil war to end the slave system.

Still, humans did eventually abolish slavery, so is it conceivable that we
could also end war? And where might we look for glimpses of hope?

Science fiction seems like a good place to start. In much of this genre,
we enter a future when the human race has evolved and no longer wages war.
In the world of Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek," for example, the people of
the Earth long ago learned to settle their differences through negotiation
and diplomacy.

In space, however, they still fight defensive wars against species from
less evolved civilizations.

We might also think about the blood-soaked soil of Europe, the result of
centuries of catastrophic warfare. Today, half a century after the end of
World War II, the nations of western Europe -- yoked together by powerful
economic and political ties -- no longer fight each other and have grown
increasingly wary of using war as an instrument of foreign policy.

Globalization, paradoxically, may one day help put an end to war. In the
short term, of course, the rapid expansion of global trade -- unregulated
and ungoverned by international institutions -- has intensified ethnic and
religious conflict, widened the gulf between rich and poor, and sparked
"resource wars" to control oil and water.

But someday, new political institutions may catch up with this dizzying
expansion of trade and global culture and right the wrongs caused by rapid
globalization. Newly synthesized sources of energy may even make resource
wars a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, we should draw upon our rich tradition of intellectual and
religious opposition to war. Some of those courageous voices -- Jeanette
Rankin, Jane Addams, Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King
Jr., -- tried, but failed, to prevent war during the last calamitous
century.

I have no idea when -- or if -- humans will ever abolish war. It took
centuries of seemingly hopeless effort to end slavery. But this much I do
know:

Voices that preach peace must never fall silent. They need to speak so
loudly that they drown out those who clamor for war. Even if our species
is not yet ready to end war, we must always be prepared to create a
climate for peace.

)2002 San Francisco Chronicle
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Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-328-4064
homepage: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ppatton/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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