Stories We Tell Each Other.

We believe that violence is necessary because we believe the stories we tell each other.

About 90% of the films, television programs, magazine articles, and newspaper articles, produced in our society tell stories about violence, and nearly all of the stories they tell about violence show violence as a thing that is sometimes needed, and most of these stories portray violence as a thing that is often needed. In these stories if violence is not used, then “evil” people will destroy and leave destitute “good” people. These stories are designed to help us believe that we can use violence and can still be good people. They make it easier for us to obey our violent urges and impulses and to still feel good about ourselves.

Of course, everyone who takes part in violence believes that he or she is the “good” person in the story that is taking place, and believes that his or her adversary is the “evil” person in that story. Because of this each of us threatens our adversary, and each of us tells ourselves that we are doing so in an attempt to promote peace by deterring an “evil” person who otherwise would surely ravage us with unlimited violence. At the same time we tell ourselves that our adversary’s threats are not attempts to promote peace but are instead clear and undeniable signs of our adversaries evil and violent nature. Believing this we escalate our threats, until threats lead to blows, and until blows lead to wars.

The truth that if we refuse to fight, and also refuse to run from a person who is threatening us, but if we instead try to find our common humanity with people who threaten us, through rational discussion, then we will almost always create situations that are better for everyone involved. This truth is a truth that we seldom tell each other in stories that we tell each other about violence, because telling this truth does not make us feel good about ourselves when we give in to our violent urges.

In the small portion of situations in which violence avert harm that would otherwise come to us, that violence will also bring us greater harm than it will avert, through other effects it will have. This is another truth that we leave out of stories we tell each other about violence. We do so because telling this truth would show us that we make ourselves fools when we give in to our violent urges, and because we do not want to believe that we are fools.

We would rather feel good about ourselves while we tear down everything that is good in our world by using violence, than feel bad about ourselves when we commit violence, because we are trying to avoid tearing our world apart, by trying to avoid violence. The stories we tell each other make our culture a culture of violence. Our cultural heroes are people who use violence but who use violence in a way that we tell ourselves is good. They are our heroes because they give in to the violent urges that we all feel, but are still called good people by our society.

The only place in our society where we are told clearly and consistently that violence is not good, is in the gospels of Jesus. Jesus tells us that we should always refrain from violence, even though He knows that we will not be able to do so. Jesus also tells us, in detail, how we would treat other people if we were able to lead a life that was free of violence. If we can do any of the things that Jesus tells us to do, then we will decrease the violence in our lives, And if we could do all that Jesus tells us to do, then we would eliminate all violence from our lives. Though we will never be able to do this, Jesus tells us clearly that this is what we should do.

The greatest weakness of most contemporary peace movements is that they do not teach that we should be peaceful in all situations, as Jesus teaches that we should be peaceful in all situations. Most contemporary peace movements teach, instead, that violence is appropriate and good in some situations. They only teach that violence is wrong in one particular situation. They say, ‘Not this fight’, or ‘Not this war’ but they are perfectly willing to support other fights, and other wars.

This severely limits the persuasive potential of contemporary peace movements, because when people believe that violence is appropriate in some situations, they will disagree about what situations violence is appropriate in, and because these differences of opinion will be based on each person’s unique experiences, to a greater extent than they will be based on all people’s common experiences.

In particular, most people inside contemporary peace movements, almost never share very many experiences in common with most people outside contemporary peace movements. There is a social chasm between these two groups, that the rhetoric of contemporary peace movements does nothing to bridge. People in the contemporary peace movement often present specific factual information about a conflict that might sometimes persuade people who support a fight, to oppose that fight, but this seldom happens because at the same time people in the pro-war movement are presenting contradictory factual information, and because in this situation each person will believe and will follow whatever person they feel closer to socially.

Because of this, most contemporary peace movements become forums in which people congratulate each other on opinions that they held in common long before they became a part of any peace movement. Very little persuasion goes on in contemporary peace movements. Speakers in contemporary peace movements are preaching to the choir.

Much more persuasion can take place, though, In peace movements that teach that violence is never good and is never appropriate, as Jesus teaches that violence is never good and is never appropriate. This is so, because the decision about whether or not violence is ever appropriate is based on experiences that we all share in common. These experiences are the experience of what pain feels like, the knowledge that violence leads to pain, the experience of what has made violence go away for short periods in our own lives, and the knowledge that violence cannot go away permanently for some people unless it goes away permanently for all people.

Because of this following Jesus can lead us to peace that contemporary peace movements could never lead us to. We must follow Jesus’ teachings if we hope to achieve peace in our world. We can learn many of Jesus’ teachings from sources other than Jesus, but the best source we have for learning how we can live in peace is the teachings of Jesus.

In order to achieve peace we must make peace with our enemies. The enemies of people in contemporary peace movements are not people who live in foreign countries that our government is at war with. The enemies of people in contemporary peace movements are people in our country who support the war that they oppose.

To make peace with our enemies, we who are involved in contemporary peace movements must admit that we would probably have been just as warlike as our enemies have been, if we had been in power when our enemies were in power. (though our wars might have been different ones). For example, in the United States today, had a democrat been president for the past four years, our military would probably have pursued members of Al Qaida from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and our nation would then have become involved in a civil war that would have broken out in Pakistan.

We will all fight if we become frightened enough, and we must admit that if we were in the same circumstances as our enemies, we would become frightened just as they have become frightened. As it is, most of us who are involved in contemporary peace movements are using the “peace” issue to try to wrest power from our enemies in this nation.

We who are involved in contemporary peace movements are right to urge our government to withdraw from wars it is currently involved in, but doing this is not enough to create a lasting peace: either in foreign nations, or in the United States.

Unless we make peace with our enemies, we will always be dragged to our destruction by violence. In order to make peace with our enemies, we must follow Jesus command to “Love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us” (Mt 5:39-48 & Lk 6:27-38).

Violence

Violence is the red badge of shame that is worn by the human race. It is our greatest crime against God and it is our greatest crime against our fellow humans.

The only way in which we can start to pay God back for all we have done to Him is by decreasing the violence in our world.

Everyone involved in a fight tries to say that fight was all the other person’s fault, just as everyone involved in a war tries to say that war is all the other side’s fault. The truth is that both sides in a fight and in a war are always partially to blame, and that both sides in a fight or in a war must take responsibility for making sure that fights and wars don’t happen.

Every fight and every war happen for the same two reasons: because one person or one group of people want or need something that another person or group of people do not want to share, and because all people have a strong desire to believe that they are good, and that their adversaries are evil, whenever they disagree with other people.

Both the desire to take and the desire to keep are natural human desires that we will never be able to rid ourselves of. So is the desire to believe that we are better than other people are. We should not try to rid ourselves of these desires and we should not try to pretend that these desires do not control most of our actions. Instead, we should accept these desires and we should try to resist them so that they do not lead us into violence. Jesus tells us this when He says, “If any one will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” (Lk 9:23 & Mt 16:24).

People who want to take should often resist their desire to take and people who want to keep should often resist their desire to keep, and all people should admit that they are usually not good people.

When we tell ourselves that the reason we fight is not to try to either keep or take something that another person also wants, and is not to try to silence people who will not admit that we are better than they are. It is when we tell ourselves this that we do the least to resist our desires. We love to create abstract concepts that sound noble to us, and to then say that when we fight we are fighting for those concepts. When we do this we often stop trying to resist our desires altogether. Then the powers of darkness have their day.

Almost 1/6^th of all people in our world live in India, and most people in India never eat meat. The only way we can imagine how we appear to these people is to imagine a society in which nearly every person did something that is morally repugnant to us. For example to imagine a society in which nearly every adult had sex with children, or to imagine a society in which nearly every person ate other people. Some one from India must be horrified by our society in a similar way to the way that we would be horrified by these two societies. (A person from India is probably more horrified by us than we would be by a society of adults who had sex with children, but is probably less horrified by us than we would be by a society of people who ate other people.)

Just as our emotions tell us to do every thing in our power to stop cannibalism, and tell most of us to do everything in our power to stop adults from having sex with children. So must the emotions of a person from India who does not eat meat tell that person to do everything in his or her power to stop people from eating animals.

We can all agree, though, that treating people well is more important than how we treat animals. Keeping this thought in mind might allow a person from India who does not eat animals to see past this issue, and to become friends with people who eat animals. If this happened people from India who do not eat animals, and people who do eat animals might work together to make our world a place in which all people treat each other better.

We should all often use this way of thinking to allow ourselves to work together with people who do something that we believe is wrong.

We may never stop feeling horrified by what certain people do, just as a person from India may never stop being horrified by us. We must ask ourselves, though, “Is the thing that horrifies me a violation of the value that is most important to me?” If it is then trying to stop this action will be more important to us than working with a person who performs this action to achieve any other goal. If it is not a violation of our highest value, though, then it will be more important for us to work with another person to attain our highest value than it will be for us to try to stop the actions this person performs.

If we do not think in this way then we will never achieve the goals that are most important to us, because we will seldom work together with other people to achieve these goals. Just as people from India who do not eat meat would refuse to work together with meat eaters, so also would many people from outside India refuse to work with any person from India who perpetuates the caste distinctions that have great force in India and that seem to violate the principle of judging people on the basis of their own actions that is cherished by many people (especially by many people in western societies.)

Whenever any of us feels horror at any other person’s actions we must remember that each of us does many things that horrify many other people.

War and Wealth

Noone should ever get rich from a war, because if some people get rich from wars, then nations will go to war to make those people rich.

This is what is happening in the United States today. The American contractors who have been given the contracts to rebuild Iraq are becoming wildly rich. And so are the defense contractors who sell weapons, and other products and services to the U.S. Army. From Haliburton, to Boeing, to Lockheed-Martin, to the Carlisle Group, to Rockwell, to Honeycut, to Bechtel, to thousands of other companies that I do not know the names of, This war is a gold mine for many people who either want to get rich quick, or who want to greatly increase their riches quickly. And of course this will only increase when American companies are given the contracts for drilling and exporting oil throughout Iraq.

There will be some profit in this war for everyone who uses fossil fuels, because this war will probably keep oil and gas prices low for a while, and there will be some profit in this war for anyone who gets a job with any war contractor, or in any related industry. But the profit of the war contractors will dwarf the profits that will come to all other people involved in this war.

War contractors have given vast sums of money to political officeholders from both major parties in our nation for years, and will continue to do so for years to come, so that whoever controls the American government will act in their interest.

War contractors assume that the majority of Americans can be easily manipulated through television commercials that convey superficial information that is designed to lead people to think as the war contractors want them to think, and through other means. And so far history has proven these companies right. The American public has been extremely easy to manipulate.

Especially in recent years.

In the past, The United States has usually only gone to war after most Americans believed that the nation we were going to war against had launched an unprovoked attack on the United States. From the Boston Massacre, to the war of 1812. From ’Remember the Alamo’, to Fort Sumpter, From ‘Remember the Maine’, to the Lusitania, to Pearl Harbor. Admittedly in many of these cases, the United States had taken illegal actions to provoke its enemy, and at least in regard to the Maine, it is now believed that Spain never attacked that ship. And admittedly Americans were easily led to believe that they had been unjustly attacked by nations that they wanted to fight anyway, with regard to all of these wars. Still, nearly all Americans believed that our nation truly had been attacked by the enemy that we went to war against, in the case of each of these wars. Today this is not so.

The United States was attacked on September 11^th, 2001, but noone has found any strong connection between our attackers and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And to see how different things are in America today, we need only remember that in the past even strong connections would not lead America to enter wars. America only went to war if it could go to war against its attacker. In World War II we did also fight our attackers allies in Europe, but we only did this because those allies were already at war with our Allies in Europe.

No nation should ever go to war, but wars are especially painful when some people are forced to die in order to make other people rich. Though this happens often, it should never happen. The only way to make it less likely that this will happen in the future, is to take the riches of Iraq away from the people who orchestrated America’s attack on Iraq, and to give these riches back to their rightful owners, the long suffering people of Iraq. Contracts for rebuilding Iraq must be given to Iraqis. Iraq’s oil wells must be operated by Iraqis, and Iraq’s oil exported by Iraqis, if Iraqi oil is drilled for and exported by anyone. Whether or not it will be is a decision that must be made by the people of Iraq. American’s decide how our nation will use its natural resources. Iraqis must have the same right.

If the people who orchestrated this war do not receive the prizes that led them to orchestrate this war, then they will be less likely to orchestrate wars in the future. If they do receive these prizes, then they will be eager to orchestrate wars as often as they can.

America’s two major political parties will try to make sure that people who orchestrated this war will receive their war prizes. This will be so because most office-holders in these parties have been financed by the people who want to profit from this war, and because all other office-holders in these parties will make deals with these people, so that they can use their position in government to bring rewards to the people who financed them. Everyone who holds elective office expects, quite rightly, that they would lose their positions of power very quickly if they oppose the interests of their financiers.

It is very unlikely that the people who orchestrated this war will be denied the prizes of this war. Still, This may happen if enough people work to make it happen.

Any person will only work to promote peace if that person realizes that there are many goods that are much more valuable than the pursuit of wealth that our lives are reduced to when we give in to the manipulation and mind control of advertisers who are concerned only with increasing our spending and consumption, and if that person realizes that peace is one of the most valuable of these goods. As we tread water in the sea of manufactured desires that advertisers try to inflame in us, we must learn to discern what things are truly valuable to us.

Unwise, and unbridled consumption turns our lives into meaningless pursuits of arbitrarily chosen fads and fashions of the moment, whether or not our nation’s army is at war. This is why Jesus says to us, Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me Satan. You offend me, because you savour not things of God, but savour, instead, things of man.” (Mt 16:23). When this consumption then also leads us into to wars, our situation goes from bad to worse.

Even when Bush was claiming to know that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the CIA and Bush’s national security advisers knew that what bush claimed was irrefutable proof of nuclear weapons was only shaky evidence. Bush claimed that aluminum tubes that we had found in Iraq could only be used to produce nuclear weapons. Before Bush made this claim before the American people, and before he ordered Colin Powell to make this claim before the U.N., CIA experts had written internal reports saying that they thought these tubes could actually only be used in conventional rockets. Now we all know that these experts were right, but Bush didn’t care. He wanted a war with Iraq, whether or not Iraq had nuclear weapons, or had connections with Al Qaida. And he lied to us about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program to get us to follow him into war.

Bush has watched too many actions movies. He thinks war is a fun thing that we should rush into at the drop of a hat. He has never fought in a war, and none of his children or close relatives are fighting in this one, so why shouldn’t he feel this way. People who do have to fight in wars, know better. It is those people we must protect on November 2^nd.

George Pelly-Bosela

Email: GPellyBosela@gmail.com