A More Peaceful World

…but it is difficult

Everybody except arms traders would like to live in a more peaceful world, but nearly everybody feels that it is impossible to bring about change. The obstacles we face may sometimes seem to be immovable. Even dedicated campaigners may burn out now and then.

Sometimes people fall into a different level of despair, into a kind of dogmatic insistence that there is no way that our rulers can ever be persuaded that a more peaceful world. The implication of this belief is that we will just blow ourselves up. This is our doom, and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. Nothing. Nihilism is the belief that nothing can be done about a problem and it is a common thought at present.

Peace nihilism – the widespread assumption that wars are inevitable and that peace activism is futile – must be left behind if we, the people, are to successfully push our governments to taking peace seriously.

Nobody can accurately predict the future. Human societies and ways of behaving, no matter how deeply engraved, do change. We are improving in many ways. We no longer send children up chimneys to clean them. Slavery was abolished. Humans are no longer sacrificed to the gods.

Although abolished, human sacrifice may persist in the form of war. It is common for modern journalists to refer to the death of soldiers as “sacrifice”. This may explain the irrational aspects of waging war, and why we encounter the determined opposition which we meet when we argue against the cost of war.

Imagine the pushback from the priesthood when people began to demand that human sacrifice should be stopped, yet it was stopped. There are many stories in myth and legend of how it was stopped – of Abraham who was about to sacrifice his son Isaac and then switching to a trapped ram instead. In Persia myth, Keva the blacksmith who initiated a rebellion against the dictator Dahuk, who was having daily human sacrifices to try to cure his migraines. In Greece, the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, shows the ambivalence of her father, and in some versions a deer is swapped for her at the last moment.

A more peaceful world is possible but it will be won only through strong and persistent pressure from people who are aware of the basic case for peace and ready to put the case for peace in front of their democratic respresentatives.