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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 576
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WCL 576 Jan 2008
Lessons we need to learn?
When, as a college student over 60 years ago, a history professor set me the title for an essay "Wars settle nothing", it was a nice challenge. I recall writing the answer which basically declared that it was not a war that settled the future, whatever its outcome, but whatever peace settlement that followed. Obvious, perhaps, but worth remembering, when asked to consider what part violence plays in world history. Some gruesome wars have been ended with intelligent and far-sighted peace treaties, others by vindictive and disastrous revenges. The preceding violence often poisons subsequent relations.
The American book Non-Violence discussed in WCL 575 ends with a series of "lessons" that one may see as being learnt from the Vietnam and earlier wars. They can provoke thought and perhaps dissension even among sympathisers with non-violence, and they may be the best starting-point for the discussion and study still needed to bring the concept within the mainstream thinking of global society.
To practitioners of violence, wedded like most people in our world, to ideas of the inevitability of violence in human relationships, these may appear abhorrent or silly, or both. But for world citizens, who may reject war but do not see how a governed world could occur unless the path to it would be a violent one, the statements below are a challenge. But many will see the essential truth that lies behind these lessons that the world must learn if it is to make the journey to peace.
THE TWENTY-FIVE LESSONS
1. There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
2. Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
3. Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
4. Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
5. A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
6. Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
7. A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
8. People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9. A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
10. The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
11. The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
12. The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
13. It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
14. All debate momentarily ends with an "enforced silence" once the first shots are fired.
15. A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but it is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
16. Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
17. Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
18. People motivated by fear do not act well.
19. While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with non-violent resistance.
20. Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
21. Once you start the business of killing, you just get "deeper and deeper," without limits.
22. Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation - which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
23. Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
24. The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
25. The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.
John Roberts
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