"The First World
War, boys,
It came and it went
The reason for fighting
I never did get"
- Bob Dylan, "With God
on Our Side"
In the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers that put an end to fighting on the western front in the Great War. The war started in 1914 making this
year the 100th anniversary of its beginning. The Great War/World War I was one of the most inexplainable and horrific wars in
history. Bob Dylan is not alone in wondering why an assassination in
Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist grew into the greatest global conflict the world had yet seen. By the time it was over in 1918, "The Great War"
claimed more than 16 million lives, including 7 million civilians.
The trenches, machine guns, chemical weapons, and the use of
airplanes made this war different - more horrific and more deadly
than previous wars. The Treaty of Versailles, by severely punishing
the Germans as if they were solely responsible for the war, laid the
grounds for the rise of Hitler and World War II, with its even greater death toll. The "war to end all wars" did no such thing.
This year is also the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which marked the beginning of the massive escalation of United States involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam.
I was at a baseball game with my father that August in 1964. Fans erupted in applause when some "retaliatory action" against North Vietnam was announced. I'm sure none of that delirious and deluded mass had any idea what the consequences of the American escalation would be. Or the background and disputable evidence for the incidents on which the retaliation was supposedly based. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Johnson the right to wage all out war against North Vietnam without securing a formal Declaration of War from Congress. That was in the days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union when the bogus "domino theory" held sway over the American political landscape and military thinking.
The Cold War came to a symbolic end 25 years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The Soviet Union itself officially came to an end on December 26, 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and the man responsible for the liberaliziation of the Soviet system embodied in the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (change), had resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over power to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. And now the man at the center of the reforms that led to the end of the Cold War and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion is warning us that the world is on the brink of a new cold war. Speaking in Berlin during the celebration commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev warned that the world was “on the brink of a new cold war” and strongly criticised the west for having sown the seeds of the current crisis by mishandling the fallout from the collapse of the iron curtain. “Instead of building new mechanisms and institutions of European security and pursuing a major demilitarisation of European politics … the west, and particularly the United States, declared victory in the cold war...Euphoria and triumphalism went to the heads of western leaders. Taking advantage of Russia’s weakening and the lack of a counterweight, they claimed monopoly leadership and domination in the world.” The enlargement of NATO, Kosovo, missile defence plans and wars in the Middle East had led to a “collapse of trust”, said Gorbachev, now 83. “To put it metaphorically, a blister has now turned into a bloody, festering wound.” [The Guardian, November 8]
The 3,000 wars of recorded human history have claimed more than 340,000,000 lives. Hundreds of millions have been forced to leave their homes. And still the wars go on.
At present, more than 60 countries are suffering armed conflict.
For the first time since World War II, there are more than 50,000,000 refugees and internally displaced persons - more than half of whom are children.
Twenty five years after the Cold War ended, nine countries still possess 17,000 nuclear weapons.
In 2013, the nations of the world spent about $1,700,000,000,000 on their military budgets.
In the United States, Armistice Day is commemorated now as Veterans Day - a day to remember the sacrifices of the men and women sent to fight and die in wars. As we remember veterans, we should also continue the struggle against the notions that violence is a viable solution and that war is a means of achieving peace. I refuse to believe that war and violence are ingrained indelibly in human nature. We must continue to believe in the transformative power of nonviolent action and work against the underlying causes of war - the "interwoven systems of domination and exploitation at the roots of inequality and injustice."
"History tells us that the absence of war is not the presence of peace. We have seen time and time again that violence does not end when you put down the gun, that war is not over when you declare a ceasefire. We understand that there are interwoven systems of domination and exploitation at the roots of inequality and injustice, and that to 'remove all causes of war' we must collaborate and stand in solidarity with oppressed people across the globe."
- War Resisters League Statement of Purpose
"I wonder how foreign policies would look if we ...thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never...wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children."
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
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To paraphrase former president Reagan, "Tear down that wall, Mr. Netanyahu."
A powerful video and rendition of "We Shall Overcome" by Roger Waters.
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