EVER SINCE I was a little girl, I've wondered what it would take to
end war. It's probably why I became a historian: I wanted to understand what
drives truly profound social change.
As a child growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, I used to pray
every night, "Let there be no war," but no one seemed to be listening. No
surprise, then, that I spent a decade peacefully protesting the Vietnam War.
But I'm not a pacifist; I do believe in (the rare) just war and I support
international intervention against genocide.
It's hard to imagine a world without war. But don't forget that slavery --
another barbaric human practice -- existed for thousands of years and is now
banned around the globe.
What did it take for our species to decide that owning another human being
is unacceptable in a civilized society? Centuries of intellectual and
religious opposition, followed by an international movement of abolitionists
that never stopped preaching, mostly to an indifferent world, why the slave
trade was immoral and had to end.
In the United States, the campaign to end slavery heated up when a movement
of deeply religious abolitionists cast slavery as a sin and growing numbers of
Americans began to condemn the ownership of others as a hideous violation of
our nation's most cherished democratic principles. Nevertheless, it finally
took a savage civil war to end the slave system.
Still, humans did eventually abolish slavery, so is it conceivable that we
could also end war? And where might we look for glimpses of hope?
Science fiction seems like a good place to start. In much of this genre, we
enter a future when the human race has evolved and no longer wages war. In the
world of Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek," for example, the people of the Earth
long ago learned to settle their differences through negotiation and diplomacy.
In space, however, they still fight defensive wars against species from less
evolved civilizations.
We might also think about the blood-soaked soil of Europe, the result of
centuries of catastrophic warfare. Today, half a century after the end of
World War II, the nations of western Europe -- yoked together by powerful
economic and political ties -- no longer fight each other and have grown
increasingly wary of using war as an instrument of foreign policy.
Globalization, paradoxically, may one day help put an end to war. In the
short term, of course, the rapid expansion of global trade -- unregulated and
ungoverned by international institutions -- has intensified ethnic and
religious conflict, widened the gulf between rich and poor, and sparked
"resource wars" to control oil and water.
But someday, new political institutions may catch up with this dizzying
expansion of trade and global culture and right the wrongs caused by rapid
globalization. Newly synthesized sources of energy may even make resource wars
a thing of the past.
Meanwhile, we should draw upon our rich tradition of intellectual and
religious opposition to war. Some of those courageous voices -- Jeanette
Rankin, Jane Addams, Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,
-- tried, but failed, to prevent war during the last calamitous century.
I have no idea when -- or if -- humans will ever abolish war. It took
centuries of seemingly hopeless effort to end slavery. But this much I do know:
Voices that preach peace must never fall silent. They need to speak so loudly
that they drown out those who clamor for war. Even if our species is not yet
ready to end war, we must always be prepared to create a climate for peace.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle
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