Feel-Good Blather
To be aspirational and inspirationally noble is a fine and grand thing. It elevates the mind and motives people to feel good about themselves, about the prospects for success in the pursuit of their game. When it comes to the potential for world peace, everyone sits back and pays attention. Is there anyone against peace in the world? There are a handful of dark troglodytes who rule in dim places of misery and misfortune who don't much care, but for the most part, peace on a universal scale is what everyone subscribes to.All we need do is lay down our arms. Forswear the stockpiling of munitions. Pledge ourselves to work toward patience and comprehension and understanding of others' little irritations. Working together with purposeful determination, can we not overcome the perturbations of those whose feelings require occasional coddling? Why cannot the settlement of international disputes be performed by resourceful arbitration?
Why, we could assemble a body of world representatives to sit in wise judgement, to deflect antagonisms with reason, to encourage brotherhood among all nations of the world. All dedicated to the useful support of one the other; politically, socially, economically. Just think of the power of organized, rational debate as opposed to spear-throwing and club-bashing! Military service should be outlawed. The acquisition of weaponry frowned upon, not fawned upon, as is now the case.
Uh-oh, did we forget, kind of overlook the huge trade in weapons? That most countries of the world spend inordinate amounts of their country's treasury on weapons-acquisition? That the developed countries of the world produce enormous measures of technologically-advanced weapons, and are quick and eager to sell them where they may, including nations barely able to afford to feed their own people. Including countries whose need for weapons is clearly offensive, never defensive.
Remove the offence, no need for defence. But all those suddenly-sale-deprived industrial defence giants would be extremely restive, and their governments upon whom they prevail with funding and electoral support might do a whole lot of second-guessing. But then there is always someone new on the scene, a visionary, a man of goodwill and charismatic presence and illuminating character, to chart a new way. We must all disarm.
Indeed, this is precisely the priority placed before the Security Council at their summit, which enthused the great powers of the world to the extent that they (most of them) agreed wholeheartedly to support Barack Obama's call to disarm: "We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the Earth". Do we get any more noble than that? Abolish nuclear, resort to old-fashioned, infinitely more humane bludgeoning tactics.
Actually, yes. Finer minds and more pure spirits have spent their lives attempting to turn the world into one great happy, peaceful neighbourhood. Before, during and after the great wars that have so traumatized the citizens of the world. Who, if it were given them, they would outright ban wars. How does one go about altering human nature? Armaments are but the means by which humans set about committing atrocities upon one another; it is human beings who slaughter one another.
Nicolas Sarkozy is a better judge of human nature than is Barack Obama, a dreamer, who seems to believe that if one wishes hard enough, one's dreams come true. It is the stuff of dreams to believe that a resolution to "seek a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons", could eventually come to pass. When the truth is, we need to be saved from ourselves, from our primitive drive to survive at the expense of others.
How rational is it that any country would possess countless arsenals of nuclear-tipped missiles? How many are required for self-protection? Already a barking-mad administration in North Korea has acquired a dozen. Iran and Syria would like what Pakistan so generously shared. Russia has amassed 3,400, the United States 5,236. If a fraction of these were deployed what would be left standing of all that we are familiar with?
War is not a condition of the human-social construct that can be easily defeated. But the tyrants and the raving lunatics who aspire to possess the dread weapons of mass destruction must be dealt with. Not, unfortunately, by catering to their deluded whims, and elevating their fanatical egos by diplomatic sanctions, for mollifying those whose end is to deliver death has never succeeded.
Labels: Political Realities, Technology, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Friday, September 25, 2009
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