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Enlightenment |
The Fight for Peace
Evan
October 10, 2004 - 5:07 PM
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I talk to a lot of people these days who want peace above all else. They, like Sting, have never seen a military solution that didn�t turn into something worse. The question I pose to those who truly love peace is this: can there be peace without freedom? With the sweeping hand of democracy in the past hundred years, where did all of this freedom come from? In answering that question, I believe that I can demonstrate that a humanitarian, someone who values freedom for all peoples, understands the duty to take up arms against the oppressors of humankind.
If there is one lesson that the Twentieth century taught us, it is that Peace exacts its own price. In the Great Depression, the League of Nations refused to punish Germany for militarizing. Thus allowing the Nazi war machine to grow unchecked. In World War II, a tired America let the Soviet Union march Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. President Eisenhower was elected to end the war in Korea not resolve it. Fifty years later we are still dealing with that relic of the Cold War. In Vietnam, the war protesters so wanted Peace that they caused America to lose the war, leading to the loss of freedom for an entire country.
In the Cold War, stability was the order of the day. It was understood that those in the world who lived under fascism were the price that the rest of the world paid for freedom. There was a global ying-yang that kept the balance between those who could determine their own course of action and those who could not. Only now we know that this was a convenient rationalization. All of the cries for stability were the cries of those who had no true compassion for nations held under the grip of tyranny.
We now live in an age that has finally cleared the way for true human freedom. The price for this freedom was high. The fight to free Western Europe in World War II, the fight against the Soviet Union, these wars are beyond compare in the course of human civilization. The result was freedom for millions, even billions of people. But this freedom only came with the sacrifice of multitudes.
Once again the world is faced with a choice to either fight for freedom or hide in the convenience of a false peace. The terrorists that attacked America on 9/11 will not sign a peace treaty or promise to not attack us in return of money. One way to deal with this menace is to back away and hide in our country, two oceans away from harms way. But would such a peace last?
So we once again have a choice, to either hide behind rationalizations or to choose, as an ideology, a country, an individual, to reject the idea that half of humanity is destined to live locked away in cages, denied the unalienable rights we so enjoy. Because the only way to defeat terrorism is to bring freedom to those parts of the world that are not plugged into the global economy, those places that refuse basic human rights to their inhabitants, those places that feed the terrorists their ideology, finances and safe houses.
The lessons of the Twentieth century are that freedom came at a price and that the price for Peace, for settling for less then true humanity, led only to more suffering. As a humanitarian who believes that all children have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I pledge to do whatever I can to fight for a true peace, against the fascists governments and terrorists that want to deny me the right to peaceably disagree.
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Comments
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Anonymous
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October 19, 2004 - 1:29 PM
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I think that I view peace as an ideal, that if you hope for, you try everything you can to avoid violence. So, Obviously you have to decide at one point when you can't withold from violence. GIVEN. so, what if you withold from violence and you believe that War is out of scale. I believe you are reffering as WW2 as a war that resulted in more peace. Yes it did. The fact though, that it was a result of human ignorance in the first place, the mobilization of the Japanese, French, Germans, Italians with Giant Battleships, and eventually aircraft carriers... This and the contination of ignorant notions that a nation needs an industry to create weapons, that in their very existance challenge the neighbors to a violent (perhaps future violent) move is sad!
I think that it is something that we have to evolve away from as far and as fast as we can. If we do not, then we will trully un-invent ourselves within a score of years. Why not look at past events and say: "how could this have been different, and how could it have been avoided?" I think that we must look at our selves and say, we have to get back into scale, or we are going to destroy our world. And I am not just talking about our environment par nature I am speaking of the very culture and human nest that we are struggling to create. So, I believe we must struggle, to hold to dreams even while we swing our fist.
-Shadoan
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Anonymous
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October 12, 2004 - 6:22 PM
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Peace without Freedom generally turns out to be slavery. If those folks in Darfur all had handguns and rifles, would the Janjaweed be quite so eager to roll in? Freedom includes the right, and the duty, to bear arms.
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