War and Peace
Envisioning a united world community with peace, liberty and justice for all
By Paul Sawyer 01/10/2002
As a boy, I followed the Second World War closely — the maps of the fronts, the descriptions of battles in the newspapers I delivered on nippy fall and cold winter mornings, in the dark, breath in front of me; the smell of newspapers, clean and fresh, from the piles in back of Sanborn’s store.
First North Africa, then Italy, Anzio, the Russian battles, Moscow and Stalingrad, the Pacific Islands — Guadalcanal, Saipan, Iwo Jima. And after the war, speaking to the men that fought there, the grimness, the buddies lost. The atomic bomb — the big, new bomb, so simply announced on the front page. Nothing ever came close to the later pictures released years after, so careful to keep its devastation and merciless range secret, and “changed everything but man’s thinking,” said Albert Einstein.
The First World War — “the war to end all wars.” The Second, the war “to preserve democracy.”
And it was our generation that helped bring the United Nations into being 56 years ago. Oh how high our hopes at the end of World War II. We had seen enormous destruction. The Soviet Union alone lost 30 million people, enough to make it plain that they didn’t want to go to war again to expand militarily across Europe — which is what we were all told by our military industrial leaders. The Soviets had all they could do just to rebuild and renew themselves from the huge losses. Yet how high were our hopes to end war in our time.
Yet we went right back into it! Korea! I was too young for the draft for that war. As the Cold War turned hot, I became old enough, but I was married with a daughter and studying for the ministry. And then came the smoldering: Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. Then Chile, Argentina, the war on drugs, El Salvador, Nicaragua. Honduras. Grenada. All over were these wars, hidden and right out in the open. Then Panama, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the former Yugoslavia, the war on crime. And now the war on terrorism, Afghanistan and what comes next? A pattern of continual hot war, nothing finally settled and a huge aftermath of hatred and resentment toward this nation’s government and among some, even its people.
And the United Nations — the hope of the world — bankrupt and tarnished and kept anemic with its hands tied behind its back. What do we do? What can we do to stop this carnage, this 20th century mayhem starting off the 21st century, this new millennium?
Despite all the trashing of the United Nations by some of our politicians and media, it is time to recognize what we have known for all of our lifetime: The UN is the only world governing body we have that we can empower to save the peace and preserve the human species here on our small planet.
… If we really want to capture Osama Bin Laden and al Qaida or whoever is behind this terrorism, let us go to the World Court (or the International Criminal Court, which President Bush will not endorse) and present the evidence on a fast track. If the evidence is compelling, the court can issue indictments and arrest warrants. Then send the UN’s rapid deployment brigades to capture the alleged culprits and bring them to trial.
If any nation resists them, all nations together — the United Nations — will enforce the court order. The U.S., Britain, and Pakistan acting alone are a vigilante Imperial Army, without world sanction.
Why does the Bush administration risk what it is doing? Perhaps they believe that a sudden strike of testing the Taliban might prove successful, and the American public clamors for some easy solution, given the ignorance in which our mass media keeps them with the constant drum beat for war.
Most likely bin Laden and al Qaida are all too simple scapegoats for the widespread situation of Muslim resistance, and our leaders are not as interested in catching them as they are in intervening to maintain access and control of the essential strategic oil resources not only of the Middle East but Central Asia.
What must we do if we are to achieve a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all? We must insist that a strengthened United Nations now be empowered to act to defuse the war and end terrorism with the resources of all the nations together.
Here are a few suggestions. It will take a gathering of people in our highways and byways more massive than any civil rights and antiwar activities in the Vietnam era. We must restore justice and liberty here in our own nation, renew the democratic process that has been kidnapped by the moneyed interests. We must allow “We the people” to control our mass broadcasting and begin again to truly educate our young people, not just to “read, write and calculate,” but in the ways of “peace, liberty and justice for all.”
What we learned as boys and girls and young women and men is the absolutely necessary role the United Nations plays as a transcendent body for keeping the peace and helping the economic-social development of the world, and making us a family of nations, one family of humankind the world over.
As John Donne wrote in “Devotions XVII”: “Each man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The Rev. Paul Sawyer is a minister at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena.
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