This year’s seasonal epiphany had a fitting theme – peace and how to attain it. It was a two part revelation. The first is very simple: stop starting new wars. If there’s not already a war somewhere, don’t start one. Period. No matter how undemocratic you think the regime or how crappy their policies, bombing a country does not improve the lives of the people there. On the contrary, it destroys lives in every sense.
The second step (which in my view, should be taken concurrently with the first) is to stop arming people. In other words, don’t arm anyone – not the armies of one side, or the armies of the other, not the insurgents or the ‘militants,’ no matter how moderate. Arm no one – let the combatants duke it out with what they have and when they run out, well, too bad for them. They’ll have to start whacking each other with swords or sticks or their fists, and one suspects that it would take a lot of the fun out of armed conflict if they had to do that. They might even stop fighting.
Ending the flow of weapons to war-torn areas could be accomplished in the same way that nations institute economic sanctions. When imposing sanctions, simply include all weaponry. This includes the means to make weapons. Let warring factions make their own if they want out of whatever they have lying around – we can’t stop that – but don’t supply them with anything useful. Sooner or later, they’re going to run out of supplies to make new weapons, which will greatly hinder their ability to continue the conflict.
I should add at this point that should a war break out somewhere, there will be refugees, as there are with the current conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. It would seem obvious that the nations of the world, and especially neighboring countries, would help them out. But arming people does not stop refugees – it just makes more.
Now one devil’s advocate said to me recently that we can’t stop having wars because the arms industry is so profitable. To begin with, the world’s military spending per annum only accounts for about 2.5% of world GDP, which is not a very big number. More to the point, it strikes me as callous if not outright immoral to sacrifice peace for the sake of corporate profits. Big companies have shown themselves able to adapt to the shift between a wartime and peacetime economy, as they did after World War II. Let them do it again. There are plenty of things, such as energy solutions, public transportation systems, clean water systems, and clean manufacturing, to name a few, that the engineering skills of arms makers and war technology companies could supply.
Finally, there’s cost: much of this war spending comes out of taxpayer money. Yes, folks – we are paying for war. Is that how we want to spend our tax revenues?
As it stands, the US accounts for around 35% of world military spending, despite the fact that there are no wars currently going on here. On the contrary, most of the war zones are in Africa and the Middle East, which combined, are responsible for only around 10% of the global war budget. All those armaments are coming from somewhere. What if they stopped coming?
Here in America, we have a weapon problem too, yet, ironically, we’re all about safety. In fact, safety is often cited as a reason why we have so many guns. But without the guns, we’d be safer, as armed madmen would be far less able to kill large numbers of people in workplaces and schools. In the interests of creating peace, the commitment against arming people should include private individuals (no automatic weapons, assault rifles, and the like) as well as armies and militias around the world.
Some say that people like to fight and will always take up arms against one another. I don’t buy that – I think most people would prefer to just live their lives and not get shot or blown up. It seems to me that the people most into having wars are world leader types (including congresspeople) and the media, both of whom benefit from them. Regular people, on the other hand, profit not at all. And yet, regular people often support wars, or accept them as inevitable, which amounts to the same thing. How do I know this? All of the democratic candidates support war right now, including Bernie Sanders. Ask why and pundits will tell you they’d would be unelectable otherwise. If that’s true, then the problem is us.
On that topic, we have this sage observation from James Madison, founding father, who said in 1795:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Is ending war really possible? I believe that it is if the people and governments of the world were committed to that goal. And if we could stop warring, imagine the benefit to the millions of people killed, maimed, or displaced in these unproductive and unnecessary horror shows.
I concede that ordinary citizens (and voters) of the world may not be able to stop war just like that, but we could at least be clear that war-mongering rhetoric will not win us. Maybe then we could start to convince our elected leaders to try a different tack and begin practicing peaceful conflict resolution. But as long as we require our leaders to be bellicose and fail to see alternatives to fighting, they’re going to give us what we say we want. So far, that has meant continuous warfare around the globe, paid for largely by us, the citizens of the “peaceful” western nations.
