Sowing the seeds of a century of hatred and conflict

From a comment on GoComics:

“between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict…”

Not sowed the seeds. It is already a well-established and ancient forest of hatred and conflict. It has been fed and watered frequently with bitterness and blood since before records began.

They like it this way. It is embedded into people’s culture and lore, into their tradition and values.

It can be changed, but not until: they want it to change; the rest of the world stops interfering to make it worse; the privatised arms industry is dismantled or otherwise not allowed to profit from provoking war; the women say “enough!” (which is hard when the cultures suppress women’s voices); they recognise that people with different value and beliefs are equal; they accept compromise and forgiveness over vengeance; they accept mistakes and harm are caused on all sides; they convince one another that getting along without bloodshed is what they want; they recognise that everybody has to live somewhere; they accept we are not entitled to anything when we are born other than what we are given by other people and that means someone else has to go without so we must share.

In the above ‘they’ means ‘everyone’ and anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and not ready for change.

It can be done, and has been done many times around the world. But this one is particularly tricky.

“i’ll stick with what i said, thanks. yes, the conflict has gone on for a long time and both sides have scuppered solutions that have been suggested along the way. but what i said above was that the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions…”

Yes, you are right. I did not mean to imply I disagreed.

between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict” and “the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions

Absolutely.

The ‘leaders’ on both sides with their desires for violence, and those external to the area who provoke and promote it, are terrible people. They are also spineless cowards since they do not take any risks themselves.

There was something more honourable in the days of feudalism and before, when the kings and princes and dukes and chieftains stood amongst their lines. They knew if they were defeated, they would at best be ransomed but as likely killed. And those doing the fighting did it eyeball to eyeball and saw the pain and screaming and blood for themselves. And then came home too ashamed to talk of what they had done.

Politicians now send others to do their dirty work. Safe and rich and powerful and the more people die, the greater they believe their military fantasy. And the more support they get. It is obscene: more sickening than a mass murderer who at least stabs people themselves. Even the sickos who shoot schoolkids in America have the decency to look at their targets and risk being shot themselves. Even they are less contemptible than cowards in tunnels who send suicide bombers to kill women in shopping queues. Or rich men in palaces who send bombers against hospitals and tanks against children.

And the contempt I feel for these ‘people’ will be as nothing compared to the hate and angst and despair felt by orphans, widowers and other relatives of their victims. And we know there can never be justice against the leaders, they always get away with it.

And people – through a lack of empathy and imagination, people with full bellies and nice homes – wonder why other people – starved, widowed, robbed of everything and with no access to justice – resort to terrorism.

Not until the citizens themselves – the women, the widowers, the conscripts, the reserves – refuse to allow it to continue will it stop.

The 1960s line was “Suppose they gave a war and no one came”.

Hopefully, this will be Israel’s Vietnam with the IDF troops going home afterwards traumatised at what they have done, and the atrocities being revealed and realising they were not war heroes after all but victims themselves. Forming an Israeli branch of Veterans For Peace, campaigning for conscientious objection and becoming a generation of pro-peace activists as so many ex-soldiers do after an unfair war.

Hopefully, it will be the Gazan Northern Ireland, where the women find a voice to tell their sons and husbands that this has to stop, that they do not want or need vengeance and just want to live peaceful lives. That there is more honour in working together with one’s enemy for a common good than losing more sons and husbands for a principle. Ultimately forcing the opposing sides to grow up and find a way to tolerate one another.

Hopefully, it will be the Israeli citizens’ Ukraine, realising the world knows their government has done a wrong thing and they have been lied to. That they are considered responsible for what their leaders did by the rest of the world, and not want it to happen that way again.

Hopefully, it will be the businesses’ South Africa, where those who want to make money realise that peace and reconciliation, trading with each other and the world, is better financially for all concerned. On realising the sanctions being imposed by citizens and organisations boycotting Israeli goods and goods from the occupied territories hurts their profits. So they demand a change in government policy, one that supports free trade through peaceful co-existence.

Why is conflict resolution not as recognised as it should be?

Why do we expect politicians to be all-knowing multidisciplinary people?

This was asked on LinkedIn by one of my fellow students at Lancaster University, someone I was very impressed with, Pilar Perez Brown.  The context was President Macron attempting mediation talks with Putin, despite not having the necessary academic background or training to do so.

Mediators that comprehend the full political and strategic reality of the war are needed, people that know the best ways to guide this conflict and the relations in it. We need economists and strategists that can explain the depth of both sides’ demands, as well as many other specialists who are equally necessary despite not being politicians.

A discussion began.

Conflict analysis and responses have changed enormously this past few decades.  There are far more options and interventions available to prevent conflict, transform conflict and resolve conflict than most people are aware of.  Somehow, we need to get conflict resolution recognised and given a much higher profile in diplomacy and international relations incident management.

Exactly! Thank you for your insight. Indeed the nature of conflict has changed, and so the analysis of it has enhanced, therefore presenting more opportunities to transform and resolve conflicts, as you mention.
Why do you think these processes are not as recognised as they should be?

I think these are some factors:

  1. The nature of the media.  “If it bleeds, it leads“.  War is exciting and attracts readers / viewers so it is the lead story (to help sell advertising and raise revenue for the media).  Peace is not exciting: there is no blood, no blown up cars, no crying children or other images to bring in the readers.  So the media do not cover peace.  Hence people do not know peace-making is happening all the time.  This makes people assume war is the natural outcome of conflict.
  2. The warring leaders do not want to look weakAll conflict ends by talking.  When powerful people who publicly say they hate each other come to meet and compromise, they do not want their supporters to know they are doing so.  They think it makes them look like they are backing down and are weak.  So negotiation talks are kept secret.  Hence people do not get to hear about them.  When the outcome is a peaceful solution, even then the conflict resolution talks are not mentioned.  So people do not get to hear about how conflict resolution was involved and worked.
  3. Sometimes powerful third parties are involved in the conflict who want their involvement kept secret.  When it becomes politically or economically expedient to have this conflict resolved, it is not necessarily desirable to have the rest of the world see into the detail of the conflict.  Revealing their involvement in the peace process could reveal their role in causing or feeding the conflict, or appear hypocritical because of what they are doing somewhere else.  So they do not want any media coverage of the process of resolving the conflict.  It just quietly fizzles out, without the rest of the world noticing a process was followed.
  4. Revealing the presence of peace-making mediators makes them a target and can cause more conflict.  Some people will not want the conflict resolved and may attack the mediators.  Once mediation has been successful, knowing they were involved could make them vulnerable when they get involved in a later conflict.  So their involvement is never revealed.  This can be high profile individuals or specialist mediation agencies.  Again, the conflict resolution process does not get talked about, this time for reasons of mediator personal security.
  5. Historical precedent.  One view of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler was that it bought the rest of us a year to re-arm and prepare for the inevitable war.  But he has gone down in history as a weak man and a failure.  I suspect politicians are frightened of ending up in the history books for the same reason.  However, if you fight a war and lose, you can still be recorded as the brave hero who refused to give in.  It may seem better politically to go into a war and risk losing, then go into mediation talks that might fail and result in war anyway.  So a guaranteed war is actually more attractive than the risk of one.  Hence getting involved in peace talks risks losing one’s political credibility, so there is no interest, and no desire to have anyone know if they do so.
  6. President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex and how they have a vested financial interest to influence public policy toward fear of conflict.  Governments and academia get added to this mix, depending on the theory.  I cannot imagine NATO or Lockheed Martin lobbying to have their funds are reduced and diverted to investment into conflict resolution research and promotion.  Mediation specialists have small budgets for advertising and little need to do so to the general public.  The arms industry and the military and their activities get plenty of coverage for free.  That normalises conflict for the public.
  7. The immaturity of International Relations Theory.  It is still based around the Realist / Liberalist / Marxist tripartite.  The Realist theory is simplest, oldest and most embedded in our culture as “might is right” and international relations being anarchic, amoral and all about survival.  Liberal theory has had to be modified many times to try to match current affairs, making it look weak and reactive and so of little use as a theory.  Marxist theory is a political non-starter.  When people have studied international relations theory, it has typically been this academic view, one which is not about conflict resolution.  Instead, it is about studying how war is just and inevitable, based on past experience.  However, that does not cover what actual practitioners have been doing in reality, nor count the times a war was avoided.  Huge progress has been made in understanding how people are motivated and how to achieve change painlessly and so that it sticks.  These practitioner fields and their modern techniques are not taught so much as IR Theory in generalist politics degrees.
  8. But I blame the media foremost.
    Create a cease-fire in a war: it’s an editorial on page 7.
    Slap someone on TV for mocking your partner’s medical complaint: it’s front-page news and it fills social media (about 4,810,000,000 results on a Google search!)
    Violence increases sales and increases advertising revenue, conflict resolution does not.

Nuclear weapons threat, end of German pacifism, NATO expansion and the arms race and censorship

I went to bed reminded of living as a child of the bomb, not expecting to reach adulthood because of the permanent threat of nuclear war and obliteration.  No point working for the school exams or planning a future, because there would not be one.  And now there are news stories looking breathlessly at nuclear escalation as an exciting prospect.

This is why we should have got rid of nuclear weapons by now.  We are still living in fear of total destruction which is supposedly there to protect us.

So the post WW2 constitutional attitude of Germany being a peaceful nation in Europe is over.  It feels like we’ve gone back 90 or more years in European peaceful negotiation and concepts.  Once again a militarised Germany in the centre of Europe, throwing its weight about.  And providing the arms for a war in another country: great way to get back into the game, Germany, by supporting a proxy war.  Start out at a low level, why don’t you?

And Germany has committed to providing 2% to NATO, so NATO’s budget goes up as a result of Russia’s actions.  Well done NATO for coming out the winner in this.  The most powerful state in the world with a national flag, national anthem, guaranteed budget paid by taxpayers elsewhere and with no democratically elected leaders.  Amazing.

Lots of countries are promising to send weapons of various sorts.  Russia is on the outskirts of Kiev.   By the time they have been found, ready to be boxed up, it will all be over.  But the contracts and orders with the arms manufacturers will still go ahead.  It is just throwing money at the arms industry that will have no effect.  What are they going to do with them when they are ready for shipment in a couple of months – send them to the Russians occupying Ukraine?  “Oh, these are items in the stores!”.  They have to be gathered up, boxed up, transport arranged, receipt arranged, training booked, maintenance arranged, documentation provided … it won’t happen.

And the censorship has begun.  During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan I found it very interesting watching the mainstream news and listening to the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Moscow and comparing the different versions of events.  By tracking what each was saying about the front moving back and forth in my school atlas, and keeping track of the losses and gains reported on each side, I was able to work out which was utter bobbins and which seemed reasonably accurate, albeit with some spin.  The Voice of America was utter bonkers fiction; the others were generally aligned.  Fake news and lies in the media are not a new thing.  Censorship in the West is.

What an unpleasant weekend.  How quickly politicians will re-instate a Cold War and military escalation when given the opportunity, rather than trying to sort their problems out.

Welcome to living with fear.

An inconvenient atom bomb explosion

Spoken in the House of Commons in 1952:

asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of further information available, he will order a new inquiry to be made into the dangers to bird and animal life on the Monte Bello islands before the atom bomb explosion is carried out there.

No, Sir.

Is the Prime Minister aware that the recent answer he gave in the House on this question was more picturesque than accurate? Is he also aware that the leading Australian ornithologist has said that there are at least 20 different kinds of wild birds on these islands, and is nothing to be done to prevent this bird life from being blasted out of existence?

Every effort will be made to inconvenience them as little as possible.

hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-07-24/debates/665c1db3-fb2e-4991-9e7d-e3c3bd1c11f5/AtomExplosionMonteBelloIslands

Don’t send boilerplate letters to politicians

Don’t ask supporters to send standardised letters to politicians, but to write in their own words.Sometimes organisations ask you to click on a link to send a pre-written email to politicians supporting some campaign or other.  Alternatively, they provide the words for a letter asking one to send it.  I have been told a couple of times that politicians ignore these standardised letters.  I’ve just seen the following text from the debate in the Commons about air strikes on Syria in 2013:

Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)

 

My constituents’ instinct is also against any direct UK military action. Like, I am sure, all my colleagues throughout the House, I have received not just form e-mails sent by some lobbying organisation but individually composed e-mails showing the strength of feeling and fear that lie in the British population. Having said that, and despite feeling strongly that my constituents’ instincts and my own should be followed, what I have seen on the television and experienced through reports of what has gone on in Syria has struck at the very fabric of my being. However, I am unclear about our response and our objectives. What are punitive strikes? Will they send a message to Assad to use it or lose it when it comes to chemical weapons? What will be the reactions of other countries? What are the capabilities of the people who may be deployed in support of Syria? There are still many questions that need to be answered.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2013-08-29/debates/1308298000001/SyriaAndTheUseOfChemicalWeapons#contribution-13082928000036

No reduction in defence spending until at least June 2022

As part of Theresa May’s £1 billion deal to buy the support of the DUP so she can stay in power, defence spending will be at least maintained until the next general election.

Link: www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-40245514

So there’s not much point campaigning for any kind of reduction for the next four or five years.

Specifically: “On defence, the parties have said they will ensure they meet the NATO commitment of spending two per cent of GDP on the armed forces, as well as committing to the Armed Forces Covenant. They will also look at ways to support reserve forces in Northern Ireland.”  UK GDP is just over £2,000,000 million, 2% of that is about £40,000,000,000 or about £750,000,000 per week.

Note that it is 2% of the Gross Domestic Product which is the entire output of the economy, not 2% of the tax income, nor 2% of government expenditure.

What do we learn from history? That we are repeating it.

It’s funny where voluntary work can take you.

Yesterday I was helping someone put together words for inclusion in a United Nations report, responding to Human Rights Council resolution 20/2, proposing conscientious objection to military taxation be considered a form of military service thereby including it under article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1998/77 can then be used to advocate people be permitted to say they want the military part of their tax to be spent on peacebuilding.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is getting around human rights legislation and treaties by recreating the CIA’s secret overseas detention and interrogation centres for unrecorded and untried undesirables.  Their “black site” prisons where they humiliated, tortured, murdered and detained people without trial for years.

It must take an awful lot of volunteers to overcome the work of one powerful man’s pen.

It’s topical because I’ve been learning about the history of the SA, SD, SS, Gestapo, Gefepo and other Nazi tools of security and oppression.  They were granted authority above the law by order of the top executive.  Just like Donald Trump is about to do for the CIA.

Remember what they say about absolute power?  It corrupts absolutely.

Chilcot, briefly

At the most sympathetic interpretation, the second Gulf War was initiated on poor quality intelligence, incomplete intelligence, contrary to evidence-based failure to find WMDs, an overly-keen desire to initiate war, a premature decision to initiate war, a lack of collaborative decision making and not listening to objections and alternatives.

So, it should not have been initiated.

Tony Blair is a war-monger.

I don’t think we learned anything we did not know already.

There’s also no discussion going on about alternatives – which is what I have been feeling and saying for years.  Stop looking for reasons to go to war – which is what happened here – but instead look for evidence-based, properly-researched, alternatives.