A Plan for Peace -- Part II
To recap Part I, there were 4 things I tried to show. The first is that the quest for peace is a human issue and not a tactical war issue. If we define peace in terms of subjugating our foes by military or economic warfare, all we have achieved is a ceasefire. There are those who think of peace as removing the opposition's ability to launch a strike, NeoCons are at the top of heap here but they are not the only ones. Not only I disagree with the viability of such approach, I even don't agree that the end results even if successful can be termed as "peace". I am repeating this point because unless we know what the goal is, we cannot plan for it.
The second point is that looking at war as a human issue, we need to address it mostly via human solutions. In other words, people do not wake up half way around the world and suddenly say, "hey even though I've never met any of them, I think I hate people at the other end so much that I am willing to kill myself just so that I can take a few of them with me". So we need to address the root causes of such emotions and not just dismiss it with simpleminded labels like "they are evil" or "they are just jealous".
And the third point I tried to make was that peace is a good thing for all parties involved. It leads to much greater prosperity for the weak as well as the strong. And ultimately, it is better to own a smaller piece of a big pie than most of a much smaller pie.
Forthly, through an anology with parliamentary politics, I tried to show that personal ambitions and competition for the top position do not necessarily mean peace is not achievable.
Let's continue.
One of the ways to look at the current issues is in terms described by books like Coca Cola versus Ayatollah or by McWorkd versus Jihad. This is by no means the only way to look at it (Noam Chomsky for example looks at it as conflict between indigenous nationalism versus oligarchy). But these books and others like them do provided a useful framework of understanding. The long version of the hypothesis appears here theatlantic.com The short version is that there are two massive and polarizing forces at work on the world stage. The one presented by MacWorld is unbridled consumerism and expansion of pop culture. The other is the implosionary forces that seek to amplify self-identity through division of the world into "us against them" by rejection of all "outside" ideas.
These two forces cannot coexist. Nor can one be removed without the other because the nature of polarization is such that they both push the middle towards both extremes. So while there are many people who are unhappy with the world of Jihad, so long as they feel more threatened by MacWorld they will support it. Similarly, those who are frightened by the picture Jihad paints (and many of them are middle eastern Muslims) support MacWorld as the lesser of two evil. Diminishing these diametric forces is a prerequisite of achieving global peace and prosperity.
Just as we do everything we can to prevent the spread of radical fundamentalism, we must also do everything we can to oppose its antithesis. The picture is not unlike yin-yang image in which two opposing forces have their seed in each other.
To oppose Jihad, the solution is (1) educational, (2) equitable, and (4) compassionate policies. And yes, there is some need of use of (5) force as well. But only to protect our primary forces of progress. In short we need to remove Jihad's power base.
To oppose MacWorld we our goal is the same; removing its power base, but the method differs. This is where we in the west can be most effective, there is two things we need to do: (1) We must disallow political contributions by corporations and business interference with political and judicial process. And (2) we must forbid the government to use taxation as a means of control and directing economic activity.
Given that we live in a society that claims to be in favor of capitalism and given that the latter objective is directly in support of capitalistic principles, achieving (2) is the simpler platform to defend. Item (1) is a bit harder to sell, but I can show that if we agree not to treat corporations as people, it can be defended easily.
I think of these objectives the way Lao Tzu thinks of leadership. You lay the foundation for the right environment and you watch it grow without micromanaging. As to the tactical issues of what will happen (or how we need to proceed) Jacob Snyder's Blueprint for Victory is very good Message 18801778 . I just don't see how they can possibly even make it to the discussion table if the principles I laid out here are not first met.
Sun Tzu |
