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The
Ancient Global Lesson of 9:11
No
More Killing!
By
Glenn
D. Paige
President, Center for Global Nonviolence
TFF associate
September 13, 2002
Most humans who have ever lived have never directly
killed anyone. The global lesson of 9.11 is that we
humans must learn to stop killing each other from
domestic homicide to war. We must stop praying, planning,
training, arming, and threatening to kill. We must stop
celebrating killers and the killed and begin
compassionately to recognize that they and we are victims
of our failure to learn how not to kill. For just as
humans can learn to kill, we can learn not to kill. Just
as we are capable of killing, we are capable of not
killing. But as long as readiness to kill is abroad on
our planet no one will be safe in home, community,
nation, region, and world. Offensive lethal ingenuity has
been able to penetrate every form of lethal defense. In
conflict we must make it absolutely credible to each
other that we will not kill.
Some of the world's greatest experts in the profession
of killing have called for courageous creativity to
realize nonkilling conditions of human life. In 1955
General Douglas MacArthur warned that weapons of mass
destruction had made the "abolition of war" an urgent
task of "scientific realism." "It is no longer an ethical
question to be pondered by learned philosophers and
ecclesiastics but a hard core one for the decision of the
masses whose survival is at stake….The leaders are
the laggards….We are in a new era. The old methods
and solutions no longer suffice. We must have new
thoughts, new ideas, new concepts….We must break out
of the strait-jacket of the past."
The task of human self-liberation from lethality is an
ancient one, but the globalization of hostilities and
unprecedented technologies for annihilation make it
increasingly imperative. The task of nonkilling
transformation must be global:
- Global in discovery, creativity and
effectiveness.
- Global in nurturance of creative leadership and
empowerment of all to take and support initiatives that
celebrate life.
- Global in compassionate commitment to solve problems
in response to human needs.
- Global in determination to end killing everywhere or
no one will be safe anywhere.
- Global in participation for no science, vocation, or
society has all the wisdom, skills, and resources
required.
- Global in commitment to local well-being, for in
particulars lie the liberating seeds of universals.
- Global in respect for diversity and in multiple
loyalties to the well-being of people in one's own and
other societies.
- Global in mutual supportiveness among all who act to
end the era of lethality that produces colossal waste of
lives, economic deprivation, and environmental
devastation.
- Global as in viewing our planetary home from the
Moon, conscious of each of us among billions as potential
contributors to a free, just, and peaceful nonkilling
world.
We need to combine the power of the nonkilling spirit
of all faiths. Whereas Samuel Huntington finds the
greatest threat of war in the "clash of civilizations,"
he also sees the greatest hope for peace in "finding
commonalties among civilizations." We need to combine the
discoveries of all the sciences on the causes of killing,
the causes of nonkilling, the causes of transition from
killing to nonkilling, and on the characteristics of
completely killing-free societies. We need the skills of
all who are courageously engaged in actions to bring
about nonkilling social change. We need the creativity of
all the arts, not only to lament lethality but to
liberate human capacity to celebrate and bring forth
nonkilling alternatives. And we need to nurture
leadership and citizen competence to understand and
support nonkilling transformational tasks.
To facilitate transition to a nonkilling world,
existing institutions will need to be modified and new
ones created. A significant innovation that merits global
attention and emulation is the proposal to establish a
Cabinet level United States Department of Peace (H.R.
2459) introduced in the House of Representatives on July
11, 2001 by Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D. Ohio),
now with 56 co-sponsors. The Secretary of Peace would be
assisted by an Undersecretary and seven Assistant
Secretaries for peace education and training, domestic
peace activities, international peace activities,
technology for peace, arms control and disarmament,
peaceful coexistence and nonviolent conflict resolution,
and for human and economic rights. There would be a
four-year Academy of Peace with a five-year postgraduate
public service responsibility. Although there is as yet
no co-sponsor in the Senate, this would be well
understood by Hawai'i's late Senator Spark Matsunaga who
first stood alone in his pioneering efforts to establish
a Peace Department and Academy that fell far short with
the establishment of the present U.S. Institute for
Peace.
In Hawai'i the effort to establish a small, creative,
and catalytic nonprofit Center for Global
Nonviolence--encouraged by Nobel laureates and associates
in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America,and the Middle
East--represents another attempt at nonkilling
innovation. A seven-person working group will monitor and
share advances in nonviolent research,
education-training, and public policy in worldwide
cooperation with individuals and institutions. There will
be an associated short-term Global Nonviolence Leadership
Academy. The Center will seek to serve transition to a
killing-free Hawai'i as well as to a nonkilling
world.
The ancient lesson of the atrocities of 9.11 and
others in history is that the benefits of preventing them
far outweigh the costs of perpetual cycles of
counter-atrocity. The greatest obstacle to breaking this
cycle is the belief that a nonkilling world is
impossible. The only sure security lies in the absence of
the will to kill by everyone on earth.
Glenn D. Paige
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of
Hawai'i
President, Center for Global Nonviolence
www.globalnonviolence.org
Author of Nonkilling
Global Political Science (Xlibris
2002)
and Nonviolence
in Hawaii's Spiritual Traditions
(Matsunaga Inst for Peace, 1992)
Copyright © 2002 TFF
& authors
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