This year’s Nobel Peace Prize selection of the group
dedicated to eliminating nuclear weapons represents yet another failure of the committee
to fully understand what is actually needed to achieve a solid foundation for
sustainable world peace.
Conservatives believe peace is a function of armaments. Liberals believe peace is a function of
disarmament. Both miss the fundamental
age old self-evident truth that real peace is a function of justice. Any so
called ‘peace’ without justice will be just a temporary ceasefire that allows
all sides to rearm and develop new capacities for waging war and mass murder.
“No justice, No Peace” is a frequent rallying poster for the
peace movement but rarely do they advocate for an enforceable global justice system
-- a system that puts the rights of “we the people” above the rights of nations
to do as they please. The unenforceable ‘feel-good’
concept/system of treaties and international law has allowed injustices, often
mass murder and those who start wars, to go virtually unpunished. This lack of global accountability has given
humanity the accelerating chaos and growing list of seeming insurmountable
problems we all face today.
Both ancient and modern scribes have always insisted that
injustices are the primary driver of war and other forms of mass violence.
"Justice
in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in
the hearts and souls of the citizens" : Plato : Ancient Greek
philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the
presence of justice. Jane Addams (First American woman to win the Nobel
Peace Prize).
Now with new kinds of WMD far easier and cheaper to
develop than nuclear weapons, and increasingly anonymous delivery systems, it’s
time to look beyond the failed concepts of both disarmament, and increasing
armaments, as a means of maximizing both the freedoms and security that we all
cherish.
After the horrors of World War II there was a global
consensus that the protection of fundamental human rights was essential to preventing
future wars and other threats to our freedom and security. The world unanimously approved of a Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Unfortunately, the war’s
victors created a UN that failed to give it the powers needed to protect these
list of inalienable human rights.
This post war error mirrored the same fatal error that our
founding fathers made in writing the U.S. Constitution. A ‘Bill of Rights’ ensured our nation’s
creation, but it did so codifying the injustice of slavery -- putting States Rights
over human rights. This led to a war that
cost more US lives than all the wars Americans fought in since then - combined. One
should never doubt that the degree to which people in this nation are denied
their fundamental rights is the degree to which risk future domestic violence
and potentially another civil war (imagine the bloodshed if the Second Amendment
were abolished). Now imagine an effort
to abolish nuclear weapons in a world filled with nation states that insist on
putting their national economic or survival interest above the rights of ‘we
the world’s people’.
So why reward the potentially catastrophic effort of ‘banning’
nuclear weapons (see Iraq War 2003, growing tensions with both North Korea or
Iran) without first eliminating the injustices that fuel the tensions.
Understanding the origin of the Nobel Peace prize offers
some insight. Alfred Nobel’s invention
of dynamite was intended to make war so destructive it would be ‘unthinkable”. It made
sense at the time. Today, given the
evolution of varying sources of WMD it makes even more sense. But banning WMD technology will do nothing
to reduce its availability and increasing affordability, when there is so much
demand for it.
If one clearly understands the current and future
accelerating evolution of biological weapons, cyber threats, robotics, nano technology,
and eventually drone delivery of almost any form of mass murder conceivable,
then the need for another path to security becomes self-evident. Unfortunately,
most disarmament (or armament) advocates are trapped in their deep-rooted mental
bubble that effectively blinds them from this obvious modern technological dilemma. Seeing
the dilemma clearly one can see that banning injustices will be infinitely easier
than trying to ban the means of mass destruction.
In the late 1990s a panel at the Brookings Institute
confirmed the wisdom of investing limited time and resources in protecting human rights and the environment verses the
growing difficulty of trying to track both the movements of weapons and
financial resources. The panel’s study
of four basic types of treaties and the impact that advances in technology were
having on each of them was extremely important and increasingly relevant today. They basically concluded, advances in
technology were making it easier and easier to monitor and verify violations in
human rights and environmental treaties, yet the same advances in technology
were making it harder and harder to monitor and verify the movement of weapons and
financial resources. Some consider our Government’s
debt and budget deficits a more inevitable threat to national security threat
than nuclear war.
And, we are now in a perpetual global war against terrorism…a
tactic of the weak for which there will be no victory without banning the
conditions that drive the weak to choose such a violent tactics. Banning their capacity to acquire weapons of
any kind will not only bankrupt any nation that tries. It will also require that nation to violate
the privacy rights of every person in the world. And even a Gestapo like inspection force
will not be capable of finding and stopping every attempt at mass murder.
Global justice won’t stop them all either. But it will dramatically reduce the number of
injustices that drive increasing numbers of people to seek the means for mass
murder.
And, when (not if) biological weapons are used the resulting
refugee flows, poverty, spread of infectious diseases, halt of trade, environmental
degradation, and more WMD proliferation will only exacerbate risks to our
freedoms and domestic security.
The bottom line is that the global elimination of nuclear
weapons is possible -- it just isn’t going to happen in a world of growing and glairing
injustices. Even if by magic all nuclear weapons
disappeared overnight, we would be no safer from those who can more easily and affordably
acquire other forms of WMD, some with anonymous delivery capability, and some
with even greater capacity for mass murder than a limited nuclear exchange or a
non-nuclear World War III.
The highest peace priority must be lessening the drivers of any
kind of war or desire for mass murder. If
nations, peace activists, and the Nobel Prize committee were truly interested
in creating a world where the possibility of war would be greatly diminished….they
would abandon their fantasies of increased security through either disarmament
or increased armaments – and put the protection of human rights on the top of
their agenda.
The most direct means of achieving this has already been agreed
upon by all the world’s nations. It’s achieving
the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for the year 2030. This is as close as we can now get, short of
a world federation that puts the protection of human rights above the rights of
nation states, to laying the foundation for sustainable world peace and
security from other ominous and likely threats.
Anything short of this only postpones the day of reckoning, yielding
the evolution of weaponry an even greater capacity for mass murder and the likelihood
they will be used.
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is
just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." - Thomas Jefferson
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