Conflict is inevitable. War is not.

“Glory be to God in the highest and on Earth, peace, goodwill toward men.” It is a marvelous concept stated and worshipped for at least 2000 years. Yet, world peace has been unknown and thus unavailable to leaders of world governments.

At a time when powerful animals were the enemy and nature unexplained by science, fear was ever present outside of the tribe. The only experience of safety existed within the tribe. There, providing for the necessities of life, it was possible to develop softer human emotions: love, trust, mutuality and respect.

Thus was born the duality in human life that exists to today; pervasive external fear, severely limited external love.

Peace is prevented by persistent corrosive beliefs. Those beliefs determine behavior. Some examples of such beliefs and behaviors in the United States are:

1. There are enemies out there, threatening. The only way to gain control is through force of arms. In economics, there are competitors everywhere. Power, control and beating others in any ways possible are the rule.

2. In a highly competitive world trust is risky, Generals want five stars. They cannot trust anyone seeking the same goal. CEO’s want more and more power and control. Middle management in industry and the military strive for advancement. Lower economic levels see resource shortage everywhere and compete for leftovers.

Internationally, there are alliances, spheres of influence and suspicion everywhere. Experts proliferate to advise leaders on how to win the brass ring. Willingness to explore mutual needs and possible cooperation with enemies is verboten. It is a sign of weakness and even considered traitorous.

3. A further belief that makes peace elusive is the growth of individualism, especially individual rights and privileges unaccompanied by responsibility. Individualism has become dominant over mutualism. My needs, my ideas, my goals are vital to me and I am willing to fight for them. Weapons of war are available everywhere and are there to protect the most elite individuals. Money from near or distant co-believers is available, often temporarily as sides shift with the wind.

4. Willingness to fight is still the gold standard of manliness. Cowardice in the face of the enemy will get a soldier shot immediately or condemned to prison.

Trust cannot survive in such a belief and behavioral context.

There are solutions: they are known and are in plain sight. The trends enumerated above can be be reversed. Softer human emotions as part of public enterprise would be part of social norms. Morality, having all but vanished, would become part of the human spirit.

The following strategies, taken together in a bottom-up plan can change the world:

Religion is still powerful around the world. Pope Francis is promoting peace and humility. Every Priest, Rabbi, Imam and all other leaders of religion can be of enormous influence if every “church” became a supporter of peaceful emotions expressed in public.

In the United States and elsewhere, transfers of power are accepted by vote. Every single elected member of government at any level can be replaced by the vote. A public steeped in the need for gentler emotions on a local, national and international level can spur the candidacy of carefully selected people. If the people are able to select the candidates for political office instead of political parties, the vote in the US can peacefully revolutionize the government.

Peace groups are legion in the U.S and around the world. Though they have been more cooperative recently, too often they still follow separate paths, each with its own agenda. If they focused on creating an emotional context for peace, progress would be more rapid.

Top down efforts are less effective than coalescing masses of informed people to support change. Person to person contacts work best to spread the word. We can expand our circle of trust and cooperation to others outside our immediate group.

Social media offer stunning possibilities for changing attitudes. Skills in the use of those media have become highly honed. They are a key part of a comprehensive plan.

Those are working strategies. They require organization, education and implementation by ordinary people trained in the basic principles.

The total effort would be to reduce fear, especially fear of each other and of strangers. We would rally against deliberate use of fear that allows the “elites” to solidify and maintain their power. Fear and its expression in aggression would be reduced to a minimum. Unmanageable fear prevented world peace historically. It makes peace elusive now.

Again, the knowledge of how to proceed is available. The will to risk change is still mired in the conviction that violence is an effective and necessary tool to protect self, country and world from dangers that exist. Since violence promotes more violence, new dangers increase exponentially as more violence is invoked. Peace suffers continuous setbacks where violence is thought to be viable.

In brief:

Emotion guides behavior. As long as the world outside one’s in-group is fear-inducing and that fear induces aggression, world peace will remain an elusive dream.

Replacing unfettered competition with mutuality, fear with hope. suspicion with trust, dominance with equality and egoism with respect can create a road to peace.

If people are cherished as equal in their humanity, world peace can prevail.

Hubert Kauffman, Ph.D.

July 28, 2014 is the centennial of the start of World War I when Austria declared war on Serbia. As the direct result of a lone gunman’s assassination of the archduke of Austria, within the week, a combination of complicated secret treaties and colonial aspirations for expansion embroiled the great states of Europe in a general war where Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Central Powers) were arrayed against Serbia, Russia, France & Britain (the Allies). Thus began World War I, a war that would rage on for more than 4 years and 3 months setting the stage for the next Great War. It was a long, bloody tragedy of global scope with appalling losses. As in every major war, the number of victims are uncountable, but can only be estimated. Among the millions dead were the soldiers who were dug down in water-filled trenches, exposed to vermin, and filth. They endured exposures that lead to trench foot, amputations, and disease. They huddled behind barbed wire while howitzers bellowed, and the cavalry were ordered to futilely charge against tanks armed only with bayonets. In addition to millions of civilians killed in the fog of war, the populations were so weakened by starvation that millions more succumbed to the Great Influenza Epidemic after arms were put down.

At the outset of the war, no one could have imagined the scope of the consequences. Both sides expected to be home by Christmas. The Armenians were eliminated in the first genocide, the British artillery put down an Irish rising, and Lenin and his revolutionaries took over the war-weakened monarchy of Russia. Indeed, four great monarchies and empires did not survive the war.

At the outset, President Wilson announced that the U.S. would remain neutral and he successfully campaigned for his second term on the promise of staying out of the expanding European war. But in less than three years that changed. Wilson called for congress to declare war on Germany just a month after his inauguration. And Congress obeyed by declaring war on Germany April, 6, 1917. The U.S. combined forces with the Allies in the “The war to end war,” a phrase borrowed from H.G. Wells and often attributed to Wilson. Whether Wilson’s use of the phrase was the product of the times, or naïve or foolish or manipulative, today the idea of a “War to End All Wars” is largely recognized as being contradictory or delusional as journalist and media critic Walter Lippman described it.

On this centennial anniversary of the start of World War I, perhaps we should consider how anyone could think that a war would end wars. Can war bring peace or is it a pretext for imperial aggression consisting of economic and physical violence against people? Wilson said, “Why, my fellow Americans, is there any man here or any woman — let me say, is there any child here — who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is commercial and industrial rivalry?” St. Louis, Sept. 9, 1919. (George Seldes, The Great Thoughts, Ballantine Books, (1985), pg. 455.)

Machiavelli infamously justified all manner of evil by stating that the ends justify the means. In contrast, a core principle of Beyond War Northwest declares that the means determine the outcome. The means to achieve peace are to work together to resolve conflict with an attitude of good will through peaceful collaboration and cooperation. This applies from the personal to the public and international levels. We have tried using destructive technologies to resolve interpersonal discord. Surely our shared humanity cautions us that it is time to take a different path.

Dorothy and Mike

“Seeing Systems: Peace, Justice & Sustainability”

The Northwest Earth Institute (http://www.nwei.org), assisted by Eugene BWNW members, has created a six-session discussion guide to help us recognize how peace, justice and sustainability are interrelated.

The guide quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 “A Christmas Sermon on Peace”: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly…This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of interrelated structure of all reality.” (p. 12)

Making use of insightful articles, the series brings us to a recognition of these interrelationships. It enables us to have “authentic hope,” as discussed by author Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer.

We can work together, engaged and inspired, to envision and act upon these systems to create positive change. Lacy Cagle, Editor and Curriculum Director for the series wrote that “recognizing the interconnected systems of our world can be difficult, but it can also be a joyous and empowering realization–through these networks of relationships, people power can expand and together, we can make a real difference for good.”

In Eugene, we are organizing discussion groups. If you live in the area and would like to participate, please email us at annemill@beyondwarnw.org.

If you would like to start a discussion group wherever you live, all of the information needed is available at the Northwest Earth Institute website: http://www.nwei.org.

We invite you to share your experiences and perspective with the Beyond War Northwest learning community in order to help us achieve greater clarity and effectiveness in our outreach.

( Note: Admin asked for comments on local activities working for peace. This was the first response.)

Since I’ve never met you, I don’t know what “voice” to utilize as I write this.  I suppose it is a “Letters to the Editor” kind of voice.  Whatever. Jim Schmidt says you are interested in Veterans for Peace (VFP), it’s stated goals, and how they might be achieved.

I’ll introduce my association with Veterans For Peace in a roundabout fashion:  Having been an active member of Vietnam Veterans of America, I was aware of its existence, since we’ve all sent mailers via “snail mail” to maintain contact with our various organizations.  I became more directly involved as a member of Team I of the Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project. We had been involved in building a medical clinic in Vung Tau, on the coast near Saigon in Viet Nam.  It was the first joint Viet Nam – American physical construction project since the fall of the South in 1975.  Since VFP had no budget, save only a budget for T- Shirts, we each got a free T-shirt with the VFP logo on it, and called it a day.

Fast forward almost twenty- five years.   I had been out of contact with VFP, and Vietnam Veterans of America, for that matter,  when Gordon Sturrock and Jack Dresser was attempting to introduce a local Eugene chapter of VFP. Nothing came of it, at least at first, due in no small part to problems of ego.  (It is a gross simplification to say it, but what the hell—Veterans, certainly Vietnam veterans, have schizoid egos: they are at the same time delicate yet rampant:  “This ego fortress must and shall be defended at all costs!”).

Approximately a year later, I fell in with a group of “coffee-klatch commandos” headed by one James Schmidt.  He and a small group of others were attempting to resurrect the local chapter of VFP.

The stated mission of Veterans For Peace is:  Exposing the true costs of war and militarism since 1985; and its motto is: “Organized Locally, Recognized Nationally.” Paid membership includes a quarterly bulletin, and access to VFP products, ostensibly for fund-raising.  But it’s the networking that I consider important.  With the advent of the Afghan and especially Iraq wars, I have felt an isolation which is particularly frustrating to me. Networking reduces that isolation.  In unity there is indeed strength.

Incidentally, the Veterans Viet Nam Restoration Project (VVRP) will have its final mission in April with Team XXIX.  I intend to be on that team:  As a member of Team I, I felt it appropriate that a member of Team I should also be a member of Team XXIX; the first and the last.  And along with a commemorative T- shirt featuring all the teams of VVRP, I will also include a VFP T-shirt with a quote by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the forces that liberated Western Europe: “I hate war, as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its BRUTALITY, its FUTILITY, its STUPIDITY.”

Michael E. Peterson