LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Marc Batko

Intimidation and double standards are destabilizing and make global peace problematic. Together with an authoritarian personality, they are signs of misanthropy and fatalism, hatred of the past, fear of the future and indifference to the present.

“In a thought-provoking age, we seem to have lost the ability to think” (M. Heidegger). Inability to think, remember and mourn is a bitter fruit of one-dimensionality or vulgar materialism, self-righteousness, myopia and ethnocentrism. Defending corporations and over-consumption is confused with defending civilization. Being self-critical is stylized as weakness when it is the prerequisite for true security and interdependence.

The United Nations and the UN Charter seek to outlaw war. The scourge of war is limited to self-defense and Security Council approval. The US refuses to see that its own interests are not the same as the interests of the community of nations and is blind to its own hemorrhages (military obsolescence and corporate enrichment). From a beacon of hope and inspiration, the US has become a source of fear and threat. “War can never be humanized; it can only be abolished” (Albert Einstein). “Every war has two losers (William Stafford). “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake” (Jeanette Rankin on the eve of World War I).

All people yearn for freedom and self-determination. You can bomb the world to pieces but you can’t bomb it into peace. International law is not a decoration or foil to legitimate imperial self-interest. International law is the foundation for future peace and security.

Megalomania, the hubris of offense as defense, leads to crises of language and community and the nightmare of global destruction. Hitler defended his preemptive attack on Poland by saying Poland would be a future threat to Germany.

Bush the elder learned the wrong lessons from the Vietnam horror. He said the US lost because too little firepower was used and the politicians interfered with the military. He should have learned that advanced and favored cultures can fall victim to delusions and denial where facts and reality give way to agenda and mission, where history is rewritten and where the myths of invulnerability and inviolability, myopia and arrogance give people a false security and make people blind to contradictions and internal hemorrhages. Mending our own pockets and accepting other countries as partners, not vassals are vital for true peace and security.

Noam Chomsky once said, everything the US does is the peace process. The US aggressions in Vietnam and Iraq and the US adventures in El Salvador and Nicaragua are examples of imperial hubris, of the empire refusing to see the signs on the wall or hear the wake up calls.

Running from Bethlehem replaces coming to Bethlehem. Clinging to myths of inerrancy and omnipotence led to building the Tower of Babel, the confusion of language, the scattering of humanity, humanitarian disasters (2-3 million dead Vietnamese and 650,000 dead Iraqis) and wasting half-trillion dollars on the wrongful Iraq occupation.

Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy. La lucha continua, the struggle continues. Persons or nations who think they represent all life are victims of arrogance (Gandhi). Pan con Dignidad, bread with dignity. A people without vision perish. May we see our neediness and admit all problems are not military problems and that truth and confession are stepping-stones to peace and security as prejudice is a stepping-stone to the event of understanding.