NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JAN/FEBRUARY2003
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There was a time when I snubbed Switzerland’s remark
able achievements by attributing them largely to size and the
extraordinary good fortune of geographic isolation caused by
mountainous terrain instead of the resourcefulness and shrewd
ness of a stable but highly imaginative and introspectively and
instinctively aware people who possess a rare and profound
comprehension of their relationship with their environment,
natural and political alike.
It seems likely that the Swiss have kept their priorities in
order. First and foremost, the citizenry has long avowed national
peace as a way of life. The road of peace requires political
neutrality as well as a lack of military armament. It requires a
vulnerability to military conquest. But most of all, it requires a
mindset, a mentality so stubborn that war cannot be an option.
Such a mindset, by definition, requires will power, or in other
words, the creative visualization to achieve goals. If one is truly
devoted to peace one always uses the tools of peace, never the
tools of war. Obviously mindset is not magic. Rather, in my
opinion, mindset locks the mind in place so that it enables one to
find the solution needed to succeed. Also, since the mind is set
(for peace, for example) it clearly avoids as much as possible
circumstances which might doom the desired goal to failure If
there is no strong military guarding one’s peaceful borders, one
becomes adroit in not offending or becoming a threat to one’s
neighbors, and if one does this long enough it becomes a way
of life.
Peace has in a sense become the economic mainstay
for Switzerland. Because the Swiss have steadfastly insisted on
neutrality for hundreds of years, not only have they sustained a
stable and solid economy while the fortunes of warring empires
have risen and fallen, but investors from around the globe have
long deposited funds in their banks as a safeguard against
confiscation by their enemies. It's true that Switzerland's thriving
economy might be largely dependent on somebody's else’s war
and might temporarily collapse if war were permanently ended,
but the Swiss could make money producing and selling clocks if
it came to that.
When world leaders such as George Bush of the United
States persuade the United Nations to administer world peace
by: a) threatening to replace economic boycotting measures
with firepower as a means to enforce nonaggression tactics in
the interest of global cooperation and peace, b) setting a dead
line for the accursed aggressor to reply, c) declaring war upon
the accused, and d) mercilessly invade and bomb the newly
declared enemy for not meeting the deadline is not an act of
peace and should not be construed as one. I am not qualified to
make this next judgment, but I believe the country of Switzer
land comes close to establishing the precedent for peace so
demanded by skeptical historians and other rationalists who
need proof before they can give support to any proposed policy.
Further, I believe the Swiss exemplify the potential flexibility in
the human species and its ability to adapt by locating alternative
and better ways to survive. And in a sense, world peace is
increasingly becoming more a matter of long range survival than
an issue of what is morally right, which war has never been.
“Envision that peace, not war is inevitable! Imagine the
possibilities!" reads a sign I produced after a peace demonstra
tion in an effort to express my epiphany that a world without war
or armed conflict is inevitable. I am aware this is by no means
an original concept, yet it is an idea whose merit is largely
ignored and not taken seriously. If we were to regard war as
an impossibility, we would not only not waste our energies, our
taxes, our resources and our time preparing for an act which
irretrievably destroys and kills, but the lack of such preparation
would also enable us to devote all of the above to improving the
lot of life on earth.
But, of course, there are those (probably most of the
world’s population) who will tell me to get real and stop living
in a fantasy world. Many will express the viewpoint that war has
always been and always will be. A rightwinger will philosophize
(as I used to) that war is nature’s method of population control
of the human species. And liberals who acknowledge that war is
intrinsically evil and naturally unwarranted will wonder how else
to deal with the Adolf Hitlers of the world without implementing
the deadly force of war as a tool. The first two of these view
points are rather easy to deal with and dismiss. There is no way
to ascertain that war has always been, but even if it is true our
existence would not be if such a factor were a valid criterion,
everything has to begin somewhere in the dynamics of the ever
changing universe; that is, whether or not war has always been,
peace could be around the corner. As for population control,
birth control is much to be preferred to war.
However, I have to admit it is not easy for to condemn
World War 2 or to urge peaceful coexistence with the likes of
Adolf Hitler. The truth is, were it not for my peace epiphany, I
would not have included World War 2 in my belief there is no
such thing as justifiable warfare. It is only through intense brain
wracking that I am led to the unorthodox opinion that today’s
world would be in much better shape had the Allied forces
opposed the earlier 'Axis of Evil' (Germany, Italy and Japan)
Gandhi-style — although such an approach would probably
have meant military defeat (but not necessarily) and my death
(as a defective “cripple’’) at an early age. I am beginning to
understand that one cannot expect to use fire to fight fire without
getting burned. One cannot militarily vanquish blind tyranny
without becoming a blind tyrant. One cannot drop a bomb or
bombs as we did on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and hundreds
of other cities, towns and villages as well) without bringing the
whole planet closer to a disaster more horrible than Auschwitz,
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and certainly no more humane. Neither approach is justifiable;
but it can be argued, I suspect, that a Nazi crematorium is not
operated at a distance by an individual who is deluded that
dropping bombs from on high is a more admirable achievement
and less brutal than humans torturing others face to face simply
because the looks and screams of agony and the smells of burn
ing flesh enmasse cannot be sensed from afar.
It is both a scientific and religious principle that action
begets reaction. Preparation for war on the part of one political
entity begets preparation for war elsewhere. But what if we were
to take a different stance, an approach with another attitude?
What if the United States and its allies had stormed the beach at
Normandy with a hundred thousand unarmed soldiers? What if
we had responded to the attack at Pearl Harbor with attempts to
negotiate or even with outright surrender? Would more Ameri
cans have died? Possibly, but I doubt it. What about globally?
Personally, I strongly suspect if our nation had adhered to the
principles of isolationism (at least militarily) as advocated by
those who never forgot that World War 1 was “the war to end
all wars” — a concept which my generation was taught to regard
as nice but unrealistic; had we negotiated for peace instead of
instantly reacting in such a way that catapulted the USA to
armed victory and the pinnacle of power where we remain today
as the mightiest political/military entity the world has ever seen,
fewer of the planet’s inhabitants would have been needlessly
slaughtered simply because it is not likely the atomic bomb
would have been used at the time. If my suspicions are correct,
today’s world would be less endangered and therefore less
frenzied if the U.S. had refrained from participating in World
War 2, which transformed what had been largely a European
civil war into a global war: the harangue of historians aside,
there is no point to studying history if we do not consider and
speculate upon the options.*
The point I am trying to make is that since both science
and religion are part of the evolutionary process and examples
of the channeled, if misguided, genius of the human species,
and since the evolutionary process depends on the adaptability
to change of each species in order to survive its environment,
both religion and science will eventually join forces and combine
methodologies in order to return to an instinctive awareness that
all things in existence are equal and related. I speak with the
conviction of an optimistic atheist. It is this atheistic optimism
which spurs me to promulgate the use of will power or persistent
creative visualization as the initial step toward the goal of world
peace as the only viable means of global survival.
The idea is to speed up the evolutionary process
through attitudinal and other social changes (as I believe has
been the case throughout human development) in order to
influence human behavior to regard peace instead of war as
the natural condition of life. As such, we must learn to respond
to whatever differences arise in a conciliatory manner. We must
learn to respond to hostility, tyranny and the like with nonviolent
resistance instead of armed conflict This will mean the possibil
ity of being defenselessly killed, but such action (in the spirit of
Gandhi) will not only enable us to die for the greatest cause of
all, world peace, but it will provide us with the opportunity of
knowing we have lived and died with the honorable distinction
of not having taken a life.
Perhaps I am not being very realistic, but I honestly
question the use of weapons as a means of defense even
in warfare when weaponry simply increases the odds of not
“Although World War 2 was vastly different than war
in the Persian Gulf, there are startling similarities The most
obvious is the fervor against Saddam Hussein by the American
public which is very much like the hatred of Adolf Hitler Another
is that wars have consequences either not considered before
hand or ignored and regarded as a natural price for warfare;
such as the advent of nuclear weaponry and the buildup of the
military/industrial complex following World War 2 A few negative
consequences of the first Persian Gulf War a dozen years ago
are that the already impoverished and persecuted Kurds would
not have starved to death had by the thousands if negotiations
had prevailed, nor would more than 100,000 soldiers and
civilians (few of whom had any control over the events and
forces that caused the war) would not have been needlessly
killed while billions of global dollars evaporated and oil wells
burned for months
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surviving. It seems to me that the only purpose of firearms is
to kill and killing is an affront to peace and should never occur,
even to retaliate, except to prevent hunger.
It would be perfectly valid to ask if I would voluntarily
risk my life for such a venture. The answer is I am not sure but
I think I would be more inclined to volunteer for such an action
than for war, which I would resist. I can imagine myself march
ing peacefully in the face of danger carrying no weapon, for I
would not want the opportunity to call upon the savage lurking
inside me which might kill everything that gets in my way and
would probably result in my being gunned down more instantly
than the peaceable approach.
In short, the only hope for global peace is to think
peace, to imagine that war is passé, that it cannot happen again.
The nations and the peoples of the world must disarm. They
must exchange the illusory security of self-protection for the little
known security of openness and mutual trust. There must be no
option to peace. We must enforce peace with peace. Unlike war,
peace is no halfway proposition. This means that in order to
sustain peace we must be ever vigilant for the slightest hints of
war. We must negotiate for peace. We must fill ourselves with
peace We must build for peace, conduct ourselves in a peace
ful manner. The list goes on and on.
But let us glance at the opportunities offered in a
peaceful environment, for I have heard it claimed that war
generates technological progress and spurs the human species
to creativity. However, if a momentary spurt of creativity actually
occurs as a residual result of warfare and military arms buildup,
it is soon followed by an extreme drain on the economics of the
warring factions, depleted material resources and the abject
squandering of human life, all of which adds up to disaster that
far outweighs its so-called bandaid healing effects.
Global peace, on the other hand, would support an
attitude as well as sustain an environment complimentary to the
notion of cultivating an “earth agenda" which considers the well
being and improvement of all existence The world would still be
less than perfect and in all probability the conditions of peace
itself would present problems of its own But at least there would
be considerably less bloodshed as well as more time and
resources to devote to constructive purposes. With the passing
of time (perhaps eons) the uniquely human compulsion for
acquisitiveness might possibly dissipate through evolution and
be replaced with a natural sense of cooperation and peaceful
coexistence as the tried and proven technique for the survival
of the species
Arthur Honeyman has written many books, a number
of which are about physical deformities and the problems the
crippled, spastic, the blind and deaf have coping with society’s
avoidance of them He is the author of the award winning Sam
& His Cart and has published anthologies of his poetry. He has
a master’s degree in English. He was born with cerebral palsy
in 1940 and has spent much of his life in Portland
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