Duck and Cover

Duck and Cover was one of the winning stories performed by the wonderful Lin Sagovsky at the 'Women and Girls' Liars League event on August 11th.

Read it or listen to it here or watch 👇

Is Nature Right? Is War Natural?

'Are Human Beings Naturally Violent and Warlike?' we are asked in an article of the War and Peace issue of  Philosophy Now (Nov/Dec Issue, 2014). 'Not necessarily,' says David P. Barash.

Barash goes on to say that '...the ‘war is in our genes’ perspective is not only scientifically invalid but ethically suspect' (2014). Barash (2014) considers '...the connection between expectation and reality becomes complex, because of the risk that theories of human nature feed directly into people being liable to modify their behavior (although not their ‘nature’) as a result.'  

Barash (2014) asks us to imagine a miltary group in country A convinced of country B's 'warproneness' refusal to get involved in negotiations instead planning for war which in turn has the same reaction from country B. The 'danger' being, he says of 'assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural instinct for war is that it can become a highly destructive self-fulfilling prophecy, not only closing off possible avenues of peaceful conflict resolution, but actually making war more likely' (Barash, 2014).

As Barash maintains '...a capacity is a far cry from a necessity...' (2014). He is 'an optimist' and a 'believer in the power of human cultural self-direction to espouse not only the desirability of peace but also its feasibility' (ibid). However this does rely upon, he contends, people freeing themselves 'from the cynical, self-deceiving, and indeed scientifically unsupportable presumption that our species is biologically doomed to unceasing violence'(ibid).
  
Wenden (2013) speaks of 'the ethical dimension, the absence of which leads to a gap between right thinking and responsible action'.

Barash (2014) tells the story about a girl who asks her Grandfather what her dream about two wolves fighting means. He tells her that they are inside everyone, and one is peaceful and one is not. When she asks him which wolf wins, he tells her its the one that you feed!

Einstein, as quoted in The Meanings of Peace, said: 

We need an essentially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive. Men must radically change their attitudes toward each other and their views of the future. Force must no longer be an instrument of politics. Today, we do not have much time left; it is up to our generation to succeed in thinking differently. If we fail, the days of civilized humanity are numbered.

52 Quotes on War and Peace

Barash, P, (2014) Are Humans Naturally Violent and Warlike? November/December Issue, Philosophy Now
Wenden, A. L. (2013) Raising the bar for peace and sustainability educators: an educational response to the implementation gap, Special Issue: Greening Peace and Sustaining Justice, Volume 11, Issue 3, Journal of Peace Education

Doing the Right Thing

'It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.'

(Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre)

Or to paraphrase the Bible:

Turn the other cheek.

However in the Bible it is providing an alternative tack to take to 'An eye for and eye, and a tooth for a tooth' . So rather than seeking revenge in equal measure to the crime committed, the advice appears to be to provide instead an opportunity of equal measure for the offence to be repeated. This time not out of anger or perhaps in the cold light of day. Is it providing an opportunity for the person to do the right thing? Is it to give them a second change?

Otherwise we are saying that people who suffer domestic violence should just put up with it. Or is it saying that it is as equally ridiculous to use the mantra 'An eye for an eye and an tooth for a tooth' as it is to say that if some one hits you on one cheek that you should give them the other to hit too. Or perhaps it is expanding on the idea that revenge is self-perpetuating and will eventually come back to bite you.

So what is the 'right thing'?

• I've heard parents tell their kids to hit the bully back.
• I've heard the tit-for-tat goings on of messy divorces.
• I've heard the neighbourhood ASBO threatening battles.
• I've heard the sentences prisoners judges and juries have doled out for crimes.

What is the difference between punishment and revenge? Does it matter? Do either make the world a better place?

I remember a 7 year old saying to me how 'horrible' someone was all the time, that the boy just didn't know how to 'behave'  and everybody said he was 'naughty' so nobody liked him or wanted to play with him and he got into 'trouble' a lot.

We talked about how 'sad' it was that he should make people feel like that but we also discussed how sad it was that he had no friends and how that must feel. But out of the conversation, the most important question was:

'How can someone know how to behave if they are not shown?'

 

If every time someone behaves in the manner in which they have been brought up or are accustomed to,  they are punished or experience some other form or reinforcement of negative behaviours how will they ever know what appropriate behaviour looks or feels like or have the positive association of reinforcement?

Its trust. How can we expect people to do the right thing if we don't do it ourselves? What will they learn from us?

• If he hits me and I hit him back. I am saying it is ok to hit. 
• If he attacks my home and I bomb his back. I'm saying its ok to bomb.
• If he kills someone and he is given the death penalty. I am saying its ok to kill.

It's not ok to hit, bomb or kill, whatever my justification...whether by tradition, law or military force. We must overcome our baser, immature and reactionary natures. Evolution can't come fast enough. 

Turn the other cheek. If only to give yourself time to think of what to do next, time to develop a plan, a way of dealing with the issues at the root of the problem. To prevent recurrences of the same problem for the same reasons.

Like Gandhi said:

 'An eye for and eye only makes the whole world blind.'

And as Martin Luther King Jnr said:

'Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.'

 (King, 1958, p.213)

52 Quotes on War & Peace  and  some thoughts on Hope

 

King, M, L. (1958) 'Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story', Harper & Row, New York

The Story of Us and Them

Us and Them

It was Us and Them. It was always Us and Them. Sometimes there was more of Us and less of Them. Sometimes vice versa. Always verses each other. Always aversion. Always Us and Them. We had to protect ourselves, defend our lands, maintain the borders between our territories. Some were disputed territories - no man's land. That's where the most conflict arose. The intersection. Like the central overlap in the Venn diagram we were taught at school. If the right was yellow and the left was blue the middle would be green. Sun yellow and sky blue would make grass green. It would if we didn't have war. Instead we had bloody red. Not a mixture but a primary colour of its own. No blending of our ways, instead another way - a bloody one.

No one want's to get caught in no-man's land. Not if you can help it. I only remember it happening once. We were out on patrol, saw a movement, investigated and found one of Them there. What’s the saying - the best defence is a good offence? The UN's not always there or on your side, so we went on the offence. We asked Them why they were there. They were lucky we started with interrogation, we could have cut to the chase but we were in a position of strength and flexing our freedom felt more powerful than our strength that day. So we asked why they were there. They didn't answer, instead they asked why we were. And the threat was there. No backing down. A fight to the death was only being postponed until we had strutted our stuff and out witted the other verbally and loudly, before cutting them down to the ground physically. We spat our words out with contempt and defended our right to be there with such ferocity they had no choice but to defend their position and affirm their own right to occupation. We were caught in deadlock. Was negotiation a possibility? We thought not and parried all kinds of heart felt rights from ancestral to legitimate to legal and the odd prosaic reference to other rights like freedom of speech rights and the like. And we proclaimed our heritage and cursed theirs and felt the adrenaline rise. We were warming up for the fight. Ready for battle. Ready for the bloody red. This is how the discussion went:

ME. Why are you here?
YOU. Why are YOU here?
ME. Cos I want to and I can
YOU. Me too.
ME. And my big brother used to come here.
YOU. Well my dad used to come here.
ME. Well I can go anywhere I like
YOU. Well why don't you go back to the swings where you belong.
ME. Why don't You go back to the sand pit?

The contested area was the see-saw on the grass green. But we never even got on it. And we could have together. But we were both too busy stopping the other getting on to realise. So forever, one side of the see-saw pointed silently to the swings and the other to the sand pit. No movement. No sharing of space. No balance. No-mans land.

And sometimes, when the football flew past it to the sand pit, we left it there, even if it was new and even if we had just got it as a present for some celebration. And it never came back. But then again, we had so many tennis and cricket balls from Them we never sent back either. We didn't even use them. They were just trophies in our war.

Then we grew up. We grew to adults and parents and took our children there and forgot our petty wars in the real rights children share: to be loved, cared for and safe. To be able to share the see saw, sand pit and swings. On common ground. The tarmacadam was taken up. The grass green under the see-saw grew all around the sand pit and under the swings, as it had in the beginning. There were no separate lands or people. We were all one. The tarmacadam wars ended but were not forgotten. The grassy knoll, on which the see-saw stood, had buried there, the stories of pain and empty glory. And in the fertile green no blood red grew but instead forget-me-nots of yellow and blue. The centre sun yellow and the petals sky blue with leaves and green stalk rooted to the earth. And the stalks stood firmly like we can. Not for the green of money or of envy but of growth and life and the grass that's just as green on every side.

Grass is green wherever you go
And spilt blood is red.
The same sun shines
From the same sky.
On You and I.
US and Them

Sometimes all we need is time to pass. And sometimes we grow up too fast. And other times we don't grow up at all. And we never get to play with the sand pit, swings and see-saw. We never get to play with any one at all. US or Them.

The Long-Long Term

'We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.'

Alan Turing

Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in the film The Imitation Game tells us so much about ourselves as humans. He shows us how traditions, social norms and laws can ruin lives while giving the  appearance of maintaining a benign status-quo. Although how any level of consistency can be maintained when the world is at war is hard to comprehend. But then that's the excuse. Fear. People are afraid of their ways of life being eroded, their lives being literally blown off the face of the earth.

Change is challenged. Difference is abhorred. New ideas are ridiculed. And if you are someone who is different, with new ideas of how to change the world you are challenged, abhorred and ridiculed. And in the sad case of Alan Turing, finally driven to madness and suicide. 

The horror of war is not in just in the body bags that come back from the front, or the tiny white coffins of the innocent children. It's in the very thought of it. This is an idea that should be challenged, ridiculed and abhorred. How is it not? How can war be seen as a solution for anything?

We are commemorating a hundred years since the outbreak of World War I, as if  war is a thing of the past. Today, according to the Independent,  only 11 countries out of 162 in the world are free from conflict. And its solving nothing. And gettting worse.

We are trying to solve problems which may be beyond us at the moment. They may be beyond our comprehension. Beyond our human evolutionary stage. If we consider violence to be an acceptable solution to violence we have more learning to do.

We look at the short-term or the near-long-term, or the long-term as boundaried by our life spans. As Turing said, 'We can only see a short distance ahead'. Perhaps the problems of the long term need to be addressed over a longer period. Einstein said  that he wasn't smarter than the next person, just that he stuck with the problem longer. We are not sticking with our problems long enough. We want quick fixes and wins. We are afraid of losing. Losing our ways of life. Forgetting our way of life has to change all the time or we don't find roots, grow and flourish.


SEEDS 

When the grim reapers
Cut down the tall poppy
And flowers and plants
Were seen as wayward weeds 
 
And dandelion wishes
Were blowing in the wind
They tried to bury us 
Not knowing we were seeds

As Turing, said there is  plenty that needs to be done for the 'short distance ahead' that we can see. The problem is seeing it and recognising what needs to be done. And not letting it to the poets, visionaries, martyrs and gardeners.   

As  Caecilius Statius knew, even in Roman times, we  plant trees for the benefit of another generation. If only we saw those genereations as an extension of ourselves. Because they are. We are all human. We are the one species on a continuum. The long-long term.

Acceptance kills hope

Would we bother doing anything if we just accepted our lot? What would be the point? Nothing to be gained. We'd probably be happier. With realistic to no expectations. No need to dream. No need for fiction. No need for an imagination. Or the future. Just the here and now. No coulds or woulds, or the impossible, or improbable or odd or strange.

Listening to a friend's questioning of why people don't accept their lot I became aware of why I didn't. Mainly because otherwise I might not leave the sofa. With everything that was either hard or scary, if I didn't think there was some chance that things would get better why would I bother? I said to him, something along the lines of  'acceptance kills hope'. He agreed whoelheartedly and delightedly recounted a scene in the play Separate Tables by Terence Rattigan, where Major Pollack ask Miss Cooper about her lost love. 'Any hope?' he asks. She replies, cheerfully, 'No, none at all.' He asks why she's so cheerful about it and she tells him that there no point in being any other way. She says, 'I've settled for the situation you see, and its surprising how cheerful one can be when one give up hope.'

Could I be happier if I stopped hoping? My friend reminded me of the proverb 'What can't be cured must be endured.' But I amended it in my head to the less pithy: 'What can't be cured for now must be endured until....'  Or otherwise we would continue to live with polio, small pox and cancer. At one time none of these could be cured and if simply endured would not be eradicated as they have been and are being.

Marching in today's demonstration in the rain, in flip flops, with my rainbow PEACE flag over one shoulder and umbrella over the other, through Parliament Square to Downing Street, there was plenty of time to think. There was a background wash and sound-track of anti-war banners, Peace banners, placards saying 'Welfare not Warfare', chanting:

One, two, three, four - we don't want another war

Five, six, seven, eight - stop the killing, stop the hate

A French news camera appears in my face and I am asked by the cameraman, why I'm marching. I point to my flag. For Peace, I tell him. Peace as a process that doesn't just happen over night or can be brought about by bombs. He asks me what I thought of the death of Alan Henning. I said that it was shocking, as every death is shocking, and that nothing is solved by bombs. Peace is a process. A long one. 

And we need hope.

So I don't accept that we fight fire with fire so we're all end up burnt. And it can't be an eye for an eye until we're all blind. We just can't teach peace through war.

So.

I hope for better. I march for better. I try to do better.

And hope.

'Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.'

Martin Luther

52 Quotes on War and Peace

Luther, M. (1848) Table Talk or Familiar Discourse of Martin Luther (translated by W. Hazlitt), David Bogue, London

52 Quotes on War and Peace

Quotes on war and peace for every week of the year. I chose the 52 I could most identify with from the hundreds on Anti-War.com.

1. Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. Abraham Lincoln
2. In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus
3. One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one. Agatha Christie
4. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. Albert Einstein
5. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war. Albert Einstein
6. Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. Albert Einstein
7. War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. Benjamin Disraeli
8. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?Benjamin Franklin
9. There never was a good war or a bad peace. Benjamin Franklin
10. War does not determine who is right, only who is left. Bertrand Russell
11. All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons. Dalai Lama
12. We must pursue peaceful end through peaceful means. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
13. All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished. Eleanor Roosevelt
14. It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. Eleanor Roosevelt
15. No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. Ernest Hemingway
16. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. George Orwell
17. War is a way of shattering to pieces...materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and...too intelligent. George Orwell
18. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. George Orwell
19. Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. George Orwell
20. Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. George Washington
21. Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck. Guy de Maupassant
22. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction! Helen Keller
23. Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.' Immanuel Kant
24. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Issac Asimov
25. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. John F. Kennedy
26. Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. John F. Kennedy
27. The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, continued, and dishonest; but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. John F. Kennedy
28. For what can war, but endless war, still breed? John Milton
29. Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. Mahatma Gandhi
30. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? Mahatma Gandhi
31. An eye for an eye makes us all blind. Mahatma Gandhi
32. Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. Mahatma Gandhi
33. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. Mahatma Gandhi
34. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. Mahatma Gandhi
35. We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others. Martin Luther King III
36. The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. Martin Luther King, Jr.
37. Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. Martin Luther King, J
38. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. Martin Luther King, Jr.
39. Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. Martin Luther King, Jr.
40. Nothing good ever comes of violence. Martin Luther King, Jr.
41. If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. Nelson Mandela
42. Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. Noam Chomsky
43. Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. Percy Bysshe Shelley
44. Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men. Pope John Paul II
45. Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war...Pope John Paul II
46. Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. Ralph Waldo Emerson
47. Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. Sigmund Freud
48. If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat. Simone de Beauvoir
49. All wars are fought for money. Socrates
50. Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice. Spinoza
51. War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. Thomas Jefferson
52. Peace demands the most heroic labour and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. Thomas Merton

History Repeating

I marched in 2003/4 with the students of our school and I will be protesting again this coming Saturday the 4th of October.

Why ? Check out why Stop the War Coalition think Iraq and Syria should not be bombed.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said 'Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.'

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