english
Emadeddin Baghi
(21 Sep 2020 : On the occasion of World Peace Day)
You may have heard more or less the words of Will Durant that war is one of the enduring elements of history, of the 3421 years of codified history recorded in human civilization, only 268 years have passed without war. (Lessons of History, translated by Ahmad Bat’haaei, p. 119). In other words, it seems that there was basically no peace. Peace is nothing but the distance between two wars. Since 1700 BC, 8,000 peace treaties have been concluded, all of which have ended up to wars. (Bastani Parizi, Nun-e-jow and Doogh-e-Gow, 348 and 347). The repetition of wars confirms that war does not solve any problem, but peace does not solve the problem of war, either. But does this account belong to the past and is the future different? Alvin Toffler also made predictions about a world of peace in the information age, but the opposite happened.
The question is, is war essentially removable? Why do optimistic predictions fail? Why is peace better than war? It may seem like a ridiculous question, but the reality of the world from the past to the present is too serious to laugh at. When peace turns into a luxury commodity, poems are written for it, music is composed for it, and conferences, plays, and awards are adorned in its name. Conferences are held and books are written in its name, and throughout history to this day may be considered as a report of war and peace. Awarding a prize and setting up a peace seat at a university and things like that is sort of administrative and bureaucratic tasks, not to feel a change from the day after. With such attitudes and decorative actions, we will no longer go into the depths of peace. In order to feel change, we do not tolerate real and gratuitous suffering. Even when we go beyond the propaganda and praise of peace and write a book on the virtues of peace, it is nothing but a product of interpretive fantasy or a fantasy interpretation. Peace is good, peace is beautiful, peace is human rights, it is the basis of economic prosperity, life, industry, trade, and …..
But the experience of long human history shows that the discussion of peace is not so simple. Romantic peace is fascinating, but why, despite all this commotion on peace and the Nobel Prize and other awards, does nothing change? Arms sales figures have always been upward and have increased in recent years compared to the past. Why?
Because the questions that need to be answered are still unanswered or the answers are lost in the midst of a multitude of philosophical debates. Questions such as whether truth is superior or peace? Hiroshima and invasion of Saddam’ Iraq are examples of this question and challenge. Those who strongly oppose the war say the Hiroshima disaster was a crime, and those who defend it say that if the Hiroshima disaster had not happened, the world would have seen more killings than the Hiroshima bombing. Regarding the invasion of Iraq, when the Western press attacked George W. Bush, who, contrary to the lie they told to get a war license, said that the existence of Saddam was more dangerous than the atomic bomb, and if we did not attack, the world would see more killings of Iraqis.
In general, the badness of war should not lead us to a romantic, utopian and unrealistic confrontation with the subject of war. Is war absolutely reprehensible or not? For example, is war as a defence condemned? Is war completely ugly? And is peace entirely good? If yes, why? And if not, under what conditions are war or peace good or bad? And who is the reference for its diagnosis? This diagnostic reference is itself a big problem.
”I also accept Maxim Gorky’s claim that there is no crime that was not prescribed by the war, but there is another fact, and that is that many human civilizational and cultural leaps in the direction of evolution,” writes Bastani Parizi, a pacifist writer, has been achieved by war. I do not know what you think about the war? Sociologists have conflicting views on this phenomenon of human society, but one thing is certain: one of the factors in the evolution of humanity is war, because almost all the great inventions of the universe were found after the great wars, from the use of fire to invention of gunpowder and from making catapults to penicillin, atoms, rockets, flying to the skies, reaching Mars and… (ibid, 348 and 349)
Despite such theories, can usefulness and agreement be used as a criterion for evaluating a phenomenon such as war? Is our world a world of struggle between good and evil? As the ancients, philosophers, and traditional moral scholars considered human nature to be made up of the three powers of lust, anger, and delusion (the power of reason), is war a continuation of the power of anger and a part of human instincts and therefore inevitable? Can man become utterly rational because wisdom prevents war?
If the intellect dominates and the emotions are silenced, will the war end or, on the contrary, it become more violent (so long as thou art an embryo, thy occupation is blood-drinking.)?
Leprosy was once thought to be the spirit of the devil, but later it turned out to be a curable disease. It was once thought that some diseases are viruses. Is war like a virus? Can it be transmitted? Have we ever continued Freud’s work to see if war has anything to do with sexual instinct? And basically, can human beings talk about peace until they can come up with a single, universal formula for how to deal with sexual instinct? While we see that many thinkers and people are not even willing to discuss it.
Many other “do’s” can be listed that peace is actually a victim of their remaining unanswered. Peace does not proceed for all these reasons and because of illusions. We are accustomed to underestimating the theory of illusion. Right now it is the illusions that are slowly leading us to war and we cannot even talk about these illusions and even when we wrote it, it was not published because it was risky. Many wars in the world are rooted in illusions.
Of course, I have answered some of these questions on various occasions. In fact, in an essay that is supposed not to exceed 1,500 words, they cannot be recounted, but you can be invited to take peace out of the showcase and flow it in the life. If we run peace in our lives, the whole system of our individual lives, the lives of the defenders of peace, will be reconstructed, or vice versa, our lives should be reconstructed in order to become pacifists, because we either do not know the requirements of believing in peace and adhering to its consequences or we simply look the other way.
Do not be offended by me. Do not be upset. I apologize in advance. Let me say in one word that peace cannot be achieved, because with respect to war we are confronted with two groups of people: those who openly advocate war and we know for sure that they are in favor of war. Throughout history, many dictators and militants in the world have been staunch advocates of peace and have spoken out for the good of peace. But the problem arises when those who defend peace, while ostensibly defending peace, see war as a blessing. But those who are peace defenders, although very different from the forgoing dictators, sometimes either lie or do not know what the requirements of peace and belief in peace are. I have seen thousands of people in my life who talk about God and resurrection, about mercy and compassion, but when it comes to forgiving others and giving consent, there is a flood of justifications to escape from the implications and consequences of these beliefs (belief in God and in compassion). Then I realize that this contradiction between belief and action is a general habit and mood that manifests itself in various forms. When we talk about peace and become truly pacifist, we will change ourselves before we transform the world outside of us. Examine the private and public lives of each peace advocate to see what the reality is. I declare that we are just at the very beginning of this labyrinth.
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عمادالدین باقی
