War of course. is a form of madness. It’s hardly a civilized pursuit. It’s amazing that we spend so much time inventing devices to kill each other and so little time working on ways to achieve peace. - Walter Cronkite
Wars and rumors of wars are once more (if they have ever ceased) dominating the public discourse. Our own conversations and of course the regular, and social media, are full of reports, verbal and visual, interviews not only updating us but inflaming us with propaganda on the many fronts. We are informed of military conflicts from Africa to the Middle East to Europe, the clash of our brothers and sisters, of weaponry: guns to sophisticated missiles and electronic devices that produce the misery of death and destruction.
Wars, or more correctly those that decide on, declare, launch and manage the evil business of chaos, dismemberment and death, confront us with the problem that human evolution does not prepare us for such wholesale suppression of social cohesion. Therefore, the vile purveyors of bloody armed conflict need to find ways to alienate us from our identity as human beings. In other words dehumanize us. The ceaseless propaganda that the military industrial complex has designed (Remember D.D. Eisenhower’s wise words) urges us to accept the objectification of our brothers and sisters.
Below I present sad but perceptive observations from individuals, some well-known, some people who have posted their observations on Face Book, who have obviously thought deeply about the perversity and evil of war.
“At the outset of every war…we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the demonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome and spiritual questions that the war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves.” - Rollo May
“I know this disease, the exaltation of race, religion and nation, the deification of the warrior, the martyr and violence, the celebration of victimhood. Holy warriors believe they alone possess virtue and courage, while their enemy is perfidious, cowardly and evil. They believe they alone have the right to revenge. Pain for pain. Blood for blood. Horror for horror. There is a fearsome symmetry to the madness, the abandonment of what it means to be humane and just. Once these fires are lit they can easily become a conflagration. T.E. Lawrence calls this cycle of violence “the rings of sorrow.” - Chris Hedges
Perpetrators of violence must objectify their victims. It allows the mind to commit atrocities it otherwise would not tolerate. The enemies must be dehumanized as they are then ready for slaughter as the mind is then able to justify literally anything. - Fred Daigle (FBP)
The Spirit and Beings continue unselfishly to maintain life upon our planet, restoring us nightly, and forgiving us our wilful blindness’s far beyond our spiritual or bodily capacity of repayment. If the Spirit, Who is Life, exacted an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth, this world would indeed be peopled with the blind and the toothless. - Rudolf Steiner (attributed)[i]
Nations do always demonize and dehumanize enemies in war, and that is how soldiers are indoctrinated. …. The cycle of violence will never be broken by weapons. - Shas Cho (FBP)
These people may stress different aspects of the awful stupidity and costs of war but each of them either overtly or implicitly points out that the first casualty of war is our sense that we are human beings. Thus, as a first step to the elimination of war, or at least to limit its carnage, we need to make efforts to reclaim our humanity. We must seek out individuals and groups who are committed to understanding that the capitalist understanding of human beings as simple economic beings, only on the look out to maintain or improve our individual financial life, is bogus and destructive. Fortunately, there are works available: the New Testament, the Quaran, the writings of and about Mohandas Gandhi, the writings of Gene Sharp, Francis of Assisi, the Budha, Ursula Franklin, Sylvia Pankhurst and many others; the songs of Buffy St. Marie, Phil Oaks and Joan Baez. All these contain words and ideas that can assist in building our understandings, our hope and determination as well. Fortified with these resources we may confront the forces that count on us being hopeless cynics. The words below urge us to be engaged people intent on making this world a genuine home for humanity.
If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.
- Robert Reich
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