In the many thousands of years that have elapsed since he (presumably) uttered them, the prophet Isaiah's admonition has not been heeded by the powers that be of our world. Why is that so? Plato, in Phaedo, one of his most famous 'dialogues',  wrote:  

The origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body.2

The great Greek philosopher who, with Aristotle his student and later equal, provided the foundation stones of our Western civilisation, hit the nail on its head, so to speak, because, in the two and a half millennia that have passed, the form, or the language, in which we express that 'reality' may have changed, but not, alas, its substance. Indeed, becoming rich is still the goal of most human beings, mainly because it allows us to convert wealth into status and power, and, also live luxurious and privileged lives. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the  poor continues to widen, extreme poverty persists and the exploitation of the resources of the planet has reached dangerous levels. But all this is presented as a normal state of affairs. Why? I think that Antonio Gramsci's theory of 'cultural hegemony'3 gives us a good explanation. The 'bourgeoisie', or the upper classes, he wrote, have succeeded to impose their values on the 'proletariat', or the lower classes, which adopted them, believing that, if they adhered to those values, they, or their children, and grandchildren, would have a good chance of joining the privileged classes. This is the basis of the celebrated 'American dream' which has worked in the United States for a long time, but it seems that, for various reasons, that is less and less the case.  

As for Seneca, in his Epistles, he noted that:

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murder; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?

I share Seneca's bewilderment, anger and incomprehension, even if this is the way it has always been. Especially in the twentieth century which, with its two world wars and several genocides, is clearly the bloodiest in human history.

To fight against British colonialism, Gandhi developed and relied on two philosophical concepts:  Ahimsa, or the spirit of non-violence, and Satygraha, the truth.4 Lately, the Indian sage's  influence has been increasing all over the world, non-violent resistance being seen as as a constructive approach. That does not mean, however,  that powerful states have stopped using military power to  defend what they perceive is their interests. Moreover, another form of violence, which existed historically, has become much more widespread: terrorism. Not only its 'classical' form - as was practised by small groups of rebels, such as Russian revolutionaries and the Italian Red Brigades --  but also in the shape of  state terrorism. Many regard the American drone attacks in Afghanistan that cause scores of civilian deaths, and Israel's massive and disproportionate offensive in Gaza, in December 2008 and January 2009, as examples of state terrorism. International terrorism in the form of suicide bombing is practised by Islamic-fundamentalist, extremist and fanatical groups, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In Iraq, the Shi'a and the Sunni branches of Islam are locked in  a ruthless power struggle.    

Thomas Morton, in The Root of War is Fear, his influential long essay, wrote:

The task is to work for the total abolition of the war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probably at every moment everywhere. … At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.5

I could not agree more. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke of 'fear from fear' as our most dangerous enemy, he saw it as a diffuse form of fear that permeates our thinking and conditions our behaviour(see also below: 'freedom from fear', in the last paragraph: Human Right to Peace, a Holistic Right).6 In our contemporary world, this fear has taken the form of a global fear that our human civilisation and the planet will be destroyed. As William Butler Yeats put it so well in his  immortal poem, The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Given the threats of global warming and a global nuclear war, it is a legitimate fear. Will our  great grandchildren  see the year 2100? Nothing is less certain. We seem to be - congenitally ? - unable to do what it takes to build a better and sustainable world. After all, despite all the talk of progress, and some real progress, this in a world in which, one billion people still live in extreme poverty, and two billion more people are poor ...

To fight for the abolition of war has never been easy. Linus Pauling (the winner of two Nobel Prizes, in chemistry and in peace), and his wife Ava Helen, had,  in the 1950s,  '60s and '70s, to face constant harassment and threats in the United States because of their unceasing campaign to abolish war.  Daisaku Ikeda, a close friend of the Paulings and the president of Soka Gakkai, a buddhist organization devoted to peace, was rewarded for his efforts, in 1983, the United Nation's Peace Medal.

But, ultimately, it comes down to what David Applebaum, the editor of the Parabola magazine said at the conclusion of the important conference he organized at Oxford in 2002 :7

To abolish war would require a sea change in the heart of man.

This is indeed the case. To build a better world, in which all 'nations' live in harmony and peace, we need  a basic shift in our outdated worldview. We need, a new planetary civilisation. But, let us admit it, things, probably, will get worse, perhaps even much worse, before, hopefully, they get better, we have, alas, not yet reached bottom. Yes, despite the appearances -- a lot of people, especially in the West,  live comfortable lives - it would not be an exaggeration to say that humanity is going through a dark night as a species, and we do not know what the daybreak will bring, while the mass media continue to feed us trivialities.8


                                                                      The Images

Our contemporary civilization is increasingly dominated by television and internet. Words, as contained in books, magazines, newspapers, etc., i.e.,  novels, essays, poetry, etc., have, as a result, lost a lot of their  power and influence. Images play a big role in the shaping of the modern consciousness. When a natural disaster occurs, for example, people are not moved to action unless they see the terrible images on the television. For man-made catastrophes - such as the death and the destruction caused by war, and an oil spill, such as the one that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, it is different. Civil society may react, there will be articles in the newspapers, 'talking heads' on TV, but structurally things will not change. Obviously, there is truth in the saying that 'An image is worth a thousand words'.

Among the images that, historically, have influenced, and continue to influence, human beings, works of art remain pre-eminent. While not everyone is equally influenced, or impressed, by a work of art, there is an educated consensus that a small number of masterpieces deeply touch a large majority of people. They are, to use an untranslatable French expression, 'incontournables' ('cannot be ignored' is probably its closest equivalent in English). Among those against war, Goya's  oil painting, Scene of 3rd  of May, 1808, depicting the bloody crushing by the Napoleonic troops of the patriotic rebellion in Madrid, and his series of a hundred or so etchings, Disasters of War, are considered to be the pioneers and among the most forceful expressions of the condemnation of war by an artist.

Another such 'incontournable' masterpiece is certainly Picasso's Guernica, one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century, which commemorates the total destruction, during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, of the eponymous little town in the Basque country in the Pyrenees, by the German  Luftwaffe.

Perhaps less known,  but just as powerful, is Chagall's War, an oil painting he finished after three years of work, in 1966, when he was almost eighty years old. The painting was inspired by the the pogroms he experienced first hand as a child in the Russian shtettl he lived, at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the 1970s, Robert Capa's photographs on the Vietnam War - as I write these lines, I can see vividly with my mind's eyes his famous of photograph of the naked little girl running away from a napalm attack to a village --, and the horrifying scenes of Francis Ford Coppola's, Apocalypse Now, (a film inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness).



Recent polls have found that in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa large majorities of 70 to 90 per cent of the general public are against war. Not a specific war - such as that in Afghanistan, for example - but war in general (in the US the majority is lower, possibly because the American Constitution allows the general population to bear fire arms). In other words, war is now seen by most people as being part of the problem, and not part of the solution.  More sophisticated people consider war as an obsolete, outmoded, or passĂ©, useless in conflict resolution. It is now generally acknowledged that, in most cases, war leads to an endless vicious circle of hatred and revenge. It is now understood that war cannot provide viable and lasting solutions to the multiplicity of the problems that contemporary humanity is faced with in an increasingly complex world. I have already mentioned global warming, nuclear proliferation and extreme poverty.

Let me, briefly, go back to the 'problem' of international  terrorism, since it appears to be at the heart of our dysfunctional world. The idea is widespread - especially among  neo-conservative ideologues - that one cannot 'deal' with it without using force, or  military means.  Admittedly, it is a thorny, difficult question. But, I remember that, in a meeting of our P.E.N. Club in Geneva, one year before his death, Peter Ustinov, our honorary president, defined terrorism as 'the war of the poor and the powerless', and war as 'the terrorism of the rich and the powerful, the only difference between the two being one of scale: war kills far more people than terrorism'.9 One does not have to agree with Ustinov's definition to see that war is not the solution against terrorism. We live in an era of total war which inflicts terrible pain and suffering on civilian populations. Also, the enormous cost of war must, ultimately, be borne by the civilian populations. It is, thus, a huge waste of scarce resources that could be used far more constructively. It seems to me that the best way to tackle terrorism is indirectly and globally by 'attacking' frontally inequality, injustice, intolerance and selfishness in the world. Only in a better world in which sharing, to a significant extent, replaces competition, will  terrorism have a much harder time to flourish.

So, to repeat, war has lost its legitimacy to deal with the major problems of the world. We need to develop peaceful means of international conflict resolution. Therefore, in one word as in a thousand, war must be abolished. It must be placed out of bounds of civilization, thrown into the dustbin of history, as were slavery and colonialism not so long ago.  



At the United Nations, in the circles moving around the Human Rights Council, the idea that peace is a human right is, increasingly, taken seriously. So, what is a Human Right to Peace? How can we define it? Why is it indispensable? To begin with, peace is not merely the absence of war. It is far more than that. Secondly, peace is both a means and an end because, while it is indispensable to build a better world, it is also desirable by and in itself. Thirdly, peace has both collective and individual dimensions for, not only it concerns nations, communities, ethnic and religious groups, but  it is also of a vital importance to individuals.

Freedom of expression is a  right that has collective and individual implications. A nation has the right to protect its cultural heritage. An  individual has the right to create his or her personal literature by writing a novel, a poem, or  an essay.

Conscientious objection to military service, basically for religious reasons, the refusal to kill, is an individual right recognized in most democratic countries. But not, alas, serving in an illegal war of aggression, or in an army of occupation. The Iraq War was started by the Americans on false premises, and it is an illegal war according to the international law. Many Israelis refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

Some observers see the Human Right to Peace as a fourth, and even fifth, generation human right that came (chronologically) after political, economic, social, cultural and even ecological rights.

But, ultimately and substantively, the Human Right to Peace is an enabling right, because, precisely, it enables  individuals, communities, and  nations, to exercise, or to fulfil, all the other rights mentioned above.

Peace is indeed indispensable if people are to benefit from the 'five freedoms' mentioned in the book: 2048. Humanity's Agreement to Live Together: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom of the environment, and freedom from fear. 11


The 'five freedoms' are very broad categories: freedom of speech is similar to the freedom of expression mentioned above; true freedom of religion is essential and may include not only the right to worship, but also to build mosques, synagogues and churches - within reasonable limits (churches are forbidden in Saudi Arabia...); freedom from want includes the rights to food, health, education and shelter; freedom of the environment, means that people are entitled to clean water and clean air, and that the toxic waste of the rich and developed countries cannot be dumped in the grounds and in the seas of the poor and developing countries; freedom from fear may mean also that we do not feel guilty because we are not doing enough for justice and equality, and to save our planet ...

Freedom of  expression is essential in a democracy. But is it absolute or limitless? The debate now raging at the Human Rights Council between  Western countries and the Organisation of the Islamic States (OIS) seems to indicate that that is not the case. A modus vivendi needs to be found.

And what about the right to information? A person needs to have access to information in order to realize his or her potential as a human being.

Without peace, it is impossible to eradicate  extreme poverty -- which in a short essay I have characterized as 'genocide by omission' (as opposed to the generally recognized form of 'genocide by commission' -- such as the Holocaust and the Cambodian and the Rwandan genocides).12.

Thus, the human right to peace  is also a holistic right.  

In order to achieve it, education is indispensable. People need to be educated away from the glorification of military 'virtues', and in the essential value of peace. The value of sharing, as opposed to competition, and collaboration and cooperation and must be stressed. We need to share wealth and income, and the world's renewable and non-renewable resources.  We need to stop market fundamentalism, greed and the race to extreme and unjustifiable profits which result in subjugation and exploitation, which in turn create hatred, mistrust and hostility. War must be unlearned, we must disentangle our cultures and behaviours from violence. Education should generate social processes based on trust, solidarity and mutual respect. I will conclude mentioning the new doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which derives from the concept  of humanitarian intervention. Humanity cannot, must not, allow the atrocities of the  twentieth century to occur again.

                                                                   

1. I published several short pieces on this and related subjects, including: The Abolition of the Culture of War and the Creation of a Culture of Peace, in: In Search of a Better World (Robinco, Budapest, 2007), pp. 109-115; and, No More War, a short essay published in the now defunct  GEM (Geneva English-speaking Magazine), whose editor, Addison Holmes, was a good friend).
2. I found Plato's and Seneca's statements in Parabola (A quarterly magazine that investigates Myth, Tradition and the Search of Meaning). The whole of the Winter 2002 issue (Vol 27, No.4) was devoted to an Oxford conference on the abolition of war, in which participated many distinguished thinkers.
3.  Cf. L. Flank, Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony ...(Red and Black Publishers: St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007)
4. See: Gandhi. Tous les Hommes Sont Frères (Ed. K. Kripalani, Gallimard, Paris, 1969). Original title is: All Men Are Brothers.
5. First published in 1961. It was included in the book: Ed., W.H. Shannon, Passion for Peace.
6. See J. Kirk Boyd, 2048. Humanity's Agreement to Live Together. The International Movement for Enforceable Human Rights (BK, Barrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco), pp. 47-8
7. See Note 2 above.
8. Described by Hermann Hesse as the 'feuilletonistic age' in his great novel, The Glass Bead Game, first published in 1943. Original title: Das Glasperlenspiel.
9. It happened on 29 March 2003, during our annual General Assembly. Sir Peter died on 28 March 2004, exactly one year after that meeting.
10. This second part on my essay owes a great deal to Alfred de Zayas' Oral Statement delivered to the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council, during the Fifth Session, on 5 August 2010.
11. Boyd, op. cit. In Note 6 above. FDR spoke of the famous 'four freedoms' in his State of the Union  address to the U.S. Congress in January 1941 (the missing fifth 'freedom' being that of the environment ...
12. Is Extreme Poverty a Genocide by Omission? In Ergas, op. cit. pp. 66-72

Teaser photo: Pixelio Margot Kessler