We must understand
the causes of war
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
April 27, 2007
LONDON - “The practice of violence”, wrote
the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, “changes the world, but
the most probable change is a more violent world”. Don’t we
know it from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq? We learn fitfully, and too
late - usually only after needless suffering and untold numbers of casualties,
the majority these days “innocents”. As one Northern Irish
politician lamented recently, observing the recent peace agreement between
the ultra Protestant, Ian Paisley and the former IRA leader, Gerry Adams,
“This was Sunningdale (the aborted peace agreement of 1973) for
late learners.”
As we have learnt from Iraq, we can be badly hoodwinked by our leaders
when it comes to the reasons for war. And after a war there are many with
a vested interest who wish us to interpret the reasons for going to war
in a way that makes them - or their fathers - look reasonable. Japan today
is a painful example of this - very much the opposite of Germany - seeking
to airbrush the atrocities its Second World War forces engaged in.
Yet the victorious allies play fast and loose with the telling of the
saga of that war. Very few of us have been educated at school or even
university to understand how the roots of the Second World War lay in
the first one and how much the hostile, humiliating and economically bleeding
punishment inflicted on Germany after its defeat in 1918 led to the rise
of Hitler. Likewise, we have been brainwashed to believe the war stopped
the Holocaust. In fact, it was started by it.
As Mark Kurlansky writes in his forceful new book,
“Non-Violence- the history of a dangerous idea”, “Before
the war the Jews had been stripped of their rights and property and in
some cases thrown into labour camps along with Communists and political
dissidents. Various schemes emerged, including one in 1940, to deport
the Jews to Madagascar. Only in the isolation and brutality of wartime,
in 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June, when Germans
had millions of additional east German Jews under their control, did Germany
dare to turn concentration camps into death camps. Only in 1942 did the
Germans plan the “Final Solution”.
The bitter truth, that we can somehow never swallow, is that if we had
wanted to save the Jews we should not have gone to war.
If ever there were to be a war between the West and Russia much of the
blame should be lain on the shoulders of the U.S. and most of its NATO
partners who in the 1990s provoked Russian nationalism by breaking America’s
solemn end-of-Cold War promise on not expanding NATO and on de-militarising
east Germany, and went on to open military bases in parts of the old Soviet
Union, to hold back on nuclear arms control, all coming on top of being
a dismal and fitful friend during Moscow’s early dismantling of
the Soviet economic apparatus. The row over missiles defences to be placed
on former Warsaw Pact territories is just one more bad step, as if the
U.S. and NATO wish to gratuitously feed Russian paranoia.
The trouble is human nature is disposed to think violence or the threat
of violence works. In a fascinating recent article in Foreign Policy magazine,
Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon analyse “Why Hawks Win”.
There is, they argue, in the foreign policy making machine a bias in favour
of hawkish beliefs and preferences. “It is built into the fabric
of the human mind. Humans tend to exaggerate our strengths, to exaggerate
the evil tendencies of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive
us, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start and over reluctant to
make necessary concessions in negotiations.”
One sees this on a macro level with Iraq and on a micro one with the Palestinians.
Polls show that the Palestinians believe the intifada succeeded. An overwhelming
majority think that Israel only understands the language of force. But
most Israelis believe they contained the Palestinian intifada and that
the only language the Palestinians understand is force. Can both sides
be right? More likely both sides are wrong. As the Israeli poet, Amos
Oz, has written: “Everybody knows that when the peace treaty is
finally implemented the Palestinian people are going to get a lot less
than they could have gotten fifty-five years ago, five wars ago, 150,000
dead ago………But we Israelis could have gotten ourselves
a much more convincing deal, if we had been less arrogant, less power-intoxicated,
less selfish, and less imaginative after our military victory in 1967.”
Too often we have what Nadine Gordimer calls a “lying, hysterical
babble of world rhetoric about current conflicts.” The evidence
should point us in one direction. Our undereducated and perhaps biased
emotions allow us too often to be pushed into another.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
reached by phone +44 7785 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Jonathan
Power
2007 Book
Conundrums
of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice
“Conundrums
of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging
from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can
we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will
China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of
his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the
International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the
hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.
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