Where I disagree with Charles, is in his attempt to apply this approach to the war between Israel and Hamas. Or any war. An honest, open-hearted approach like this will not have the same effect there.
I don't say that because the people who make war are not decent people (although that is often true too). I say it because the incentives for warmakers are different.
The dance teacher, in this example, has reasons to care about what his student thinks. Practical, tangible, reasons, but also less tangible ones.
The people who make war, including the ones tasked with "defending" their countries, are not subject to the same incentives, nor the same limitations, as the rest of us are. I wrote a little about that here:
Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World
This essay originally appeared in the book, Why Peace, compiled by Marc Guttman. As I write this, my son is running around the house naked, even though I’ve asked him twice to put his clothes on. I can hear the bathroom sink swooshing on and off as he makes a swimming pool for his zoo animals. I weigh getting up and possibly waking his baby sister, who i…
My point in this piece, is that war doesn’t happen because people don’t understand each other, or because they “just hate each other”, or because we are not spiritually evolved enough. All of these may apply to much of what constitutes interpersonal violence, but war is a different animal, and it continues for its own reasons.
Specifically: War happens because we have carved out a special place in our societies for the warmakers. We have created entities called “governments”, to which the normal rules and laws of human behavior do not apply. The people who make war, and indeed, politicians who may not make “war”, but who enact legislation that ends up destroying people’s lives and even killing people, do not generally face real-world consequences for their actions.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are occasional Nuremberg-type trials that make examples of some of the worst (or maybe not the worst) evil-doers. But such trials are always and only for those on the losing side. As former US secretary of state Robert McNamara has famously said,
"(General Curtis) LeMay said: ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’"
My point is that the war-makers get away with making war, over and over again, not because they haven’t heard the right moral arguments against what they do. They get away with it because our society provides no genuine restraint against them doing it.
Nor does it provide genuine restraint against the financing of their wars. Indeed, our systems of fiat money and fractional-reserve banking have created a streamlined mechanism for siphoning society’s wealth away from private, peaceful, people, and into the hands of the warmakers, their military-industrial cronies, and the folks who arrange the financing.
If we want to end war, we need to take away their money machine, and start holding them accountable for their crimes. These two things. Anything else is just noise.
"If we want to end war, we need to take away their money machine, and start holding them accountable for their crimes. These two things. Anything else is just noise."
Well said. Unfortunately the political will in Washington to change course doesn’t exist in enough people there to make a difference. “We’ve” created a nexus of incredible power over the past one hundred and ten years; accordingly Washington attracts narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths from all over the world. They’ll be incredibly difficult to dislodge peacefully.
Same as Hugh Myers below: The political will to rein in the politicians doesn't, and may never, exist, and the voting population, through ignorance or apathy, aren't going to do it. I truly wish I could see a peaceful solution, but with an invasion coming/being welcomed through our southern border, we may not have that luxury. Sorry, wish I could be more optimistic . . . .