In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, former President Barack Obama stated that "War goes back to the earliest man." I suggest this self-fulfilling claim explains why the recipient of the Peace Prize went on to start several wars and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Lyndon Johnson made an even more startling comment when he said: "War is madness, but we do what we must."
(See:
Has a Bogus Theory of War Kept Obama from Being a Peace President?Once again, Barack Obama, the world's most powerful military leader, has propagated an erroneous claim about the origins of war
- By John Horgan on June 1, 2016/Scientificamerican
Clearly, our ex-President failed to deliver. Our current President has, to make matters even worse, escalated wars in 5 nations, attacked Syria directly and threatened North Korea with nukes. Those that believe war is inevitable, such as Trump's strategy adviser Steve Bannon, who said in 2016: "We are going to war in the South China Sea in 5 to 10 years, " and added, "There's no doubt about that," are engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy. He also says there will me a "major" war in the Middle East, and Trump has already made that likely by escalating in Iraq and attacking Syria.
"You cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war." AE
Both our former and our current President operate from the neo-Hobbesian view of the world as a war of "all against all, each against each." This view of human nature and destiny is a self-fulfilling prophesy, a mistaken idea that always leads to bloodshed (as Camus wrote).
I argue, in length, that this belief that we must fight is the reason that we continue to fight, that the myth of our warlike nature blinds us both to our long history of non-violence and blunts our fervent desire for an end to war.
"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case, it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.
This series of essays explores the mistaken idea that has led humanity into a 10,000-year era of unending warfare and violence.
This essay is a response, a challenge to a dialogue, about the competing paradigms of politics. I propose there is a politics of equality and a politics of the master/slave paradigm and therefore, we have a choice. This essay is long, for the modern tweet addict, so I recommend reading it in sections.
The articles by my esteemed colleague, Arlan Ebel, propose that there is
only one political paradigm, that of hierarchy, and therefore it will take, I presume, a revolution, to create a new paradigm which would be beyond politics.
I thank Arlan for raising this issue, which I hope to expand from a dilemma into a choice. I argue that there are two political paradigms, one dominant, one suppressed. The contention that there is only one political paradigm, I will suggest, is part of the suppression.
My basic assumption is that politics is NOT about domination but about the distribution of power and that our history shows us two competing paradigms, one hierarchical, the other egalitarian. My further contention is that only the non-hierarchial paradigm is sustainable and can bring us a world free of perpetual violence, that the dominant paradigm, which argues that any other arrangement is utopian and destined for failure, is itself unsustainable and destined to destroy us all if we do not replace it. I further suggest the replacement is not a fantasy but a return to our most ancient principles of political organization which sustained humankind for hundreds of thousands of years without war or the need for masters and slaves.
The oldest symbol is the circle, which in its dynamic form is a spiral; the circle represents unity, equality, and movement, and the concept of revolution is founded on the concept of the functional circle we call the wheel, the spinning circle which always returns to its point of origin.
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