Comment by Tony Smith
In the mid-80s, an Australian Liberal Party leader addressed members of the Jewish community in Sydney. This politician was quoted in the major dailies as saying that the gates of Nazi concentration camps were not opened by pacifists. Now, whether he was right might be disputed by the people who did actually open the gates. But his viewpoint was clear enough: peace cannot be had without strength. Enemies have to be deterred, and nuclear enemies deterred by nuclear means.
Post-Cold War, has this polemic any relevance to problems like Bosnia, Rostock, Georgia, Cambodia and Afghanistan? It very neatly focuses attention on what we consider to be solutions, and on what we consider to be a "solved" problem.
A great fault of the "arming for peace" mentality is that, by separating ends and means, it causes us to concentrate on the short term. It allows us to be content with a negative definition of peace which celebrates the absence of military conflict and fails to challenge us to work for lasting peace while we have the breathing space.
And this, it would seem, is precisely the problem which is only now surfacing in Europe. This narrow idea of peace which we have emphasised allowed us the luxury of thinking that military victory over fascism solved the problem.
But now it seems that the problem was not solved but merely buried for 40 years. Why? Because military solutions are not solutions at all. Force cannot defeat evil notions such as racism. Force is absorbed, so magnifying and deepening the problem. While fighting a "just war" against fascism may have been a lesser evil, the mistake is to imagine that war, killing and military victory are anything but another evil. Even Wellington said that the worst thing may be a battle lost, but the second worst is a battle won.
We are so desperate not to think about the world's problems that we seize upon any excuse not to. The best current example of this is the way we pretend that the Cold War is over, and that the threat of nuclear war has abated. But the weapons stockpile is still there, and the dangers of horizontal proliferation are greater now than ever before. Why is it that we cannot plan beyond the last war?
So when leaders call for United Nations intervention in places like Bosnia, they should consider carefully the sort of intervention which has some chance of providing a solution. More killing will cause more resentment. But perhaps the greater danger is that if the military option is seen as the solution, and not a mere emergency measure to allow real solutions to be found, then the impetus to some creative thinking about the problem will be lost.
So what is the answer? No doubt there are experts in conflict evels who would dearly love to be consulted about this. The solution may be long in coming and involve great suffering. But the military way will involve greater suffering and in the end will achieve nothing more positive than the last war did.
Ironic, is it not, how ready we are to spend on military non-solutions, but how we are niggardly when it comes to peaceful means which may produce lasting results? Someone calculated that the US could have given every Vietnamese $15,000 in 1964, to help the country's development.
Fifty thousand American lives — and more — might have been spared, and the country's political problems might have been solved. Current values would regard 50,000 lives lost attempting mediation not as noble sacrifice but as folly. Yet sooner or later, we must come to recognise that this is an inversion of the truth.
But it is not only such creative thinking which is not popular. A wise head once remarked that "history repeats itself because it has to. Nobody listens the first time." For those whose lives are devastated by the same old problems, it must seems more line the nth time than merely the second.