MILITARISM, PACIFISM, POWER AND PEACE

by Hugh M. Lewis

The best defense is a good offense. The best offense is none at all. The prize can only be lost if it can be won by peace.

The balance of power can only be upset. Peace cannot be permanent if it is promised by the threat of war. Any weapon has only one purpose in the hand of its wielder, and this is to murder. Once forged, a weapon will eventually be used.

The Power of Peace is the appeal and appreciation of what is most commonly and mutually human in all of us. The Power of War is the threat to what is most common and mutually human in all of us. War and Peace have the same source in the human heart, but in each the heart serves a different master.

The cowardly of war are the courageous of peace, and the courageous of war are the cowardly of peace. We honor our war dead as sacred heroes, and think of those who wish to continue living in peace as fools. The coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once.

Our earthbound age is discovering the preparations for and consequences of war are increasingly expensive, unaffordable, and destructive. We are learning indirectly the hard worn lesson learned and forgotten on thousands of fields of battle that no one wins in war and everyone loses. War, and its machineries of death, are quickly becoming barbaric anachronisms in an earthbound age, which in the long run has no net profit for anyone and yet which is increasingly costly for everyone. It is a grand paradox that permanent and lasting peace in our earthbound age will not be won by victory in war, or by its threat, or over the bargaining table of the powerful military nations. Peace will be achieved when the common soldier simply throws down her/his weapon to let the earth and the sea reclaim it.

Better more mouths to feed and more babies to breed than buttons to push and triggers to pull. The world might become an over populated place, but at least it doesn’t have to be a violent one.

Militarism is ultimately an anti-human disease in which the social preoccupation with the fear of death leads to a compulsion to project and cause death upon others. The main problem with this social pathology is that it is extremely contagious and pernicious—the need to beget death in ourselves leads to the same needs in others.

The thing the military mentality fears most is peace and freedom. Peace depends upon the realization of freedom in the world, and freedom depends upon peace. In a world that is peaceful and free, there is no room for the military minded, and this is the worst possible threat to the warmonger.

As long as we seek to define empowerment in narrow and unequal terms which divide humankind into different groups, such empowerment can only lead to its own corruption and the perversion of violence and war. Only when we seek panhuman empowerment through the realization of human rights, freedoms and equality, can we speak legitimately of our own empowerment as well. Such empowerment can only be had through the promotion of Pacifism in the world—a live and let live ethos of love, charity, tolerance, and forgiveness in a world of evil.

It is a paradox of Pacifism that its power can only be had in the individual’s renunciation of the pathos and nomos and obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with empowerment in the world. The power of pacifism comes from the renunciation of power hence its dialectical transcendence in the realization of the power of the human heart.

It is also a paradox that such empowerment also constitutes the ultimate connection between panhuman interests and rights and individual interests and rights. The pursuit of our own rights, freedoms and responsibilities in the world is concomitant with the pursuit of universal human rights, responsibilities and freedom in the world. One cannot be had without the other, and one cannot be taken away without taking away from the other.

Those who pursue the path of pacifism cannot but help be led sooner or later to the same conclusions regarding the paramount importance of human rights, responsibilities and freedoms in the world defined in both the broadest, panhuman sense as well as in the narrowest of individual senses.

To relinquish the preoccupation of power and violence in our own personal lives, and to gain the upper hand in the control of our existential fears and uncertainties, is to gain access to and release a vast hidden reservoir of human potentiality in both ourselves and in everybody whose life we touch.

The cultivation of creativity, in ourselves and in others, goes hand in hand with the promotion of Pacifist values and world view in the world. Human creativity is the opposite of human destructiveness. That which is creative, if frustrated, must become destructive. That which is destructive, if constrained, must become creative. Peace is to war as creation is to destruction.

If we wish to diagnose the extent of evil in the world, and to understand the fundamental irrationality of its pathology, then we have to look no further than our own Pentagon which promotes global militarization in the name of the ‘Defense’ and ‘World Peace’ and our CIA which threatens, with all its secret psychological operations, to destroy the foundation of the freedom of mind and will in the world. We must see the fundamental madness of the intellectual rationalization of MAD, which has sought to secure a lasting ‘Pax Americana’ by threatening the ‘mutually assured destruction’ of virtually all life on earth. When the Pentagon wins a victory in the world, humanity loses another battle.

If we wish to find our worst enemies and our most dangerous threat to our freedom and future security in the world, then we have to look no further than on our own neighborhoods, our own backyards and on our own mirrors. The threat is there, like a shadow we always cast in the light.

The preoccupation and fanticization of violence and aggressive power in the world is a symptom of our own immature and regressed development. It is to be well wondered how much the promotion of aggression in the world doesn’t rely upon the repression and frustration of human sexuality in the world, when so much violence of obscene proportions is replete in our television programming while even the most innocent and natural images of sexuality are taboo and perverted. Human development can only be advanced when as both individuals and as a world society, we learn to give up our dependent and neurotic attachment to such violent and immature forms of power in order to cultivate more human capacities and pursue more worthwhile interests in the world. In our global militarism, humankind has become like dependent and retarded children in the pursuit of its own developmental interests.

MAD-ness equals ’In order to save the world, it was necessary to destroy the world.’ In order to assure peace and freedom, it is necessary to control peace and freedom by the threat of war. The madness continues to grow unabated in the world.

The victimization of children in war is parallel to and an extension of the victimization of children in peace. The former relies on weapons to amputate, burn and break the bodies of children, the latter relies on poverty to amputate, shock and paralyze the child’s soul and spirit. In this sense it can be genuinely said that war is a kind of politics of enforced inequality between different classes and categories of people. There is no greater or sobering lesson in the horrors and unnecessary realities of war than to see and smell and hear the screams of a child that’s been burned head to foot by white phosphorous or napalm. This is a tragic if sometimes-necessary way to be taught the value and virtue of pacifism.

Too bad that no one has yet thought up a kind of inoculation to the horror and violence of war which would render humankind immune to the threat of its infectious disease. It seems that sometimes we can only get pacifism under the skin when we can become sensitized to the suffering of others and aware of our human heart of darkness in the cause of such suffering.

If war is the pursuit of politics by another means, then peace is the pursuit of war by another means. In war, there is always a better way.

There is only one kind of development, and this is human development. Any human action, which does not ultimately contribute to the improvement of the human condition in the world, either directly or indirectly, must be considered as unnecessary or antithetical to the long term interests of pan human development. In the human world, there are no neutral words or deeds. Neutrality is only the guarded disguise of the pursuit of power. The best index of human development in the world is the relative health, happiness and opportunity of the average child.

Though there are many consequences and causes in the historical and cultural explanation of how and why war happens, within context of the modern World System we cannot overlook the central importance played by the history of political economic development in creating the conditions as well as the means for virtually every major war in modern earth history. Economic affluence at home has often entailed economic imperialism and exploitation aboard. The promotion of capitalistic development is interdependent with the control of colonial underdevelopment. When armies are marching and whole nation states are mobilized for war, it is the captains of the armament industry, weapons manufacture and the military industrial complex that profits the most and wins. Capitalistic enterprise often makes alliances with fanatical fascists and bureaucratic officials.

There will be peace in the world when so few are no longer allowed to profit from the suffering of so many.

Peace depends upon the realization of human freedom in the world. The realization of such freedom depends upon the education for responsibility to realize such freedom. The realization of such responsibility depends upon the promotion of the values and views of non-violence, which entails the realization of human equality in the world. The basis of violence in the human world is the creation and promotion of human inequality, by class, race, religion, nation, caste, age or sex. It follows from this chain of associations that if we want to attain peace in the world, the best thing we can do is to promote human equality.

For closely related reasons, it takes money to make more money just as poverty begets yet greater poverty. Similarly, and still related, we may say that just as violence leads invariably to more and greater violence, so too does peace promote more peace.

The escalation of world war has been a vicious cycle of the growth of global militarization, which has been fueled primarily by the capitalistic interests of the armaments industries. It is the epitome of evil in the world that so many should have been made to suffer so terribly so that only a small proportion of humankind can have its cake and eat it too. Outlawing all weapons would not stop these parasites of human pain, but it would prevent them from acquiring the prestige, which they do not deserve so well.

Our earthbound age is one in which many things stand for there opposite. We promote war in the name of peace, aggression in the name of defense, fascism and totalitarianism in the name of freedom and democracy, death in the name of life, deceit in the name of truth, poverty in the name of affluence, hierarchy in the name of equality, underdevelopment in the name of development. It is a testament to the power and authority of official verbiage and the mass media that can turn black to white and white to black, and obscure all colors in the world beneath the veil of gray. It is the epitome of the evil and unfreedom of the human mind when such instruments and devices as the television, radio, newspaper, education, magazines can be used to rationalize away any problem or paradox, no matter how fundamentally nonsensical, irrational or inherently pathological it may really be. It is all the more remarkable when it is considered that what is taken as the basis of social scientific fact is really fiction, and there is no such thing as the average John and Jane Doe Public. We have created an illusion of world power by the make believe magic of paper realities, and as long as it seems convincing and credible enough to the uninquisitive and gullible, the world will continue to conform to the lie, and turn a mythological prophecy into an ideological history.

Educating our children for peace and teaching no-violent and pacifistic values in the world has never been an especially problematic or  not efficacious proposition except that we’ve made it seem so. Because it has rarely been tried, it is believed that it cannot be done. But if we can prepare our youth to be good warriors then it seems possible also to be able to be able to prepare them for being good peacemakers of the world. He means for such pacifistic education has long been available, but the motivation has always been lacking. Its benefits for humankind far outweigh its costs.

War is a situation for which everyone is responsible for their own small part that is played, and yet no one is to blame for the entire thing. Whether we work in a munitions factory, buy war bonds, or we pull the trigger, or drop a bomb on an anonymous enemy, we are all ultimately responsible for our acts in the war. Nuremberg has instructed humankind that it is no longer merely enough to blindly follow one’s orders without ethical consideration of the moral consequences of our own involvement. If all participants and combatants accepted their fullest human responsibility for their own involvement in the perpetration of its violence, then there would be no war in the world to judge. The tyranny of aggression and violence is that it forces the innocent and the good to commit evil and atrocious acts. In war, as in peace, the buck stops at the center of each and every person’s soul, and we cannot legitimately point our fingers at our enemy to blame for our actions and decisions.

Though in war everyone is responsible for their own part that they play, and no one is ultimately to blame, some people share more responsibility and blame than others because they play a bigger and more critical role in the perpetration of violence. In this regard, we must look to the politicians and high ranking military commanders who are most influential of the decision and directions of violence in war, but who rarely if ever suffer the first hand consequences of such violence. Only naïve and gullible young men can be made to readily die for a false cause. It has been unfortunate in history that the arena of conflict and combat cannot be confined to include just those instigators and war mongers and profiteers who are most responsible for the war and yet who suffer least from its consequences. Such leaders might be less likely to wage war and dissuaded from entering armed combat if they had to confront the very real prospects of their own possible death from such a decision.

Peace comes from the capacity for compromise. The world will not meet us halfway if we are not willing to meet the world more than halfway. Compromise is an art, which is learned in life. Its capacity comes from patience, tolerance, and the willingness to adopt the point of view of one’s opponents. It does not come easily. It does not come without struggle, risks or courage.

The groundwork for war is laid when people raise some symbolic form to a level higher than their own. It comes when people who are otherwise good and common to commit acts that are evil and uncommon because they are not held responsible for their own actions, but are able to defer that responsibility onto something beyond themselves, superhuman, absolutely and ideally good.

The foundations for a secure peace cannot be laid in the preparations for war.