PEACE; VICTIM OF UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Emadeddin Baghi
‎(21 Sep 2020 : On the occasion of World Peace Day)‎
You may have heard more or less the words of Will Durant‏ ‏that war is one of the enduring elements of ‎history, of the 3421 years of codified history recorded in human civilization, only 268 years have passed ‎without war. (Lessons of History, translated by Ahmad Bat’haaei, p. 119). In other words, it seems that ‎there was basically no peace. Peace is nothing but the distance between two wars. Since 1700 BC, 8,000 ‎peace treaties have been concluded, all of which have ended up to wars. (Bastani Parizi, Nun-e‏-‏jow and ‎Doogh-e-Gow, 348 and 347). The repetition of wars confirms that war does not solve any problem, but ‎peace does not solve the problem of war, either. But does this account belong to the past and is the ‎future different? Alvin Toffler also made predictions about a world of peace in the information age, but ‎the opposite happened.‎
The question is, is war essentially removable? Why do optimistic predictions fail? Why is peace better ‎than war? It may seem like a ridiculous question, but the reality of the world from the past to the present ‎is too serious to laugh at. When peace turns into a luxury commodity, poems are written for it, music is ‎composed for it, and conferences, plays, and awards are adorned in its name. Conferences are held and ‎books are written in its name, and throughout history to this day may be considered as a report of war ‎and peace. Awarding a prize and setting up a peace seat at a university and things like that is sort of ‎administrative and bureaucratic tasks, not to feel a change from the day after. With such attitudes and ‎decorative actions, we will no longer go into the depths of peace. In order to feel change, we do not ‎tolerate real and gratuitous suffering. Even when we go beyond the propaganda and praise of peace and ‎write a book on the virtues of peace, it is nothing but a product of interpretive fantasy or a fantasy ‎interpretation. Peace is good, peace is beautiful, peace is human rights, it is the basis of economic ‎prosperity, life, industry, trade, and .....‎
But the experience of long human history shows that the discussion of peace is not so simple. Romantic ‎peace is fascinating, but why, despite all this commotion on peace and the Nobel Prize and other awards, ‎does nothing change? Arms sales figures have always been upward and have increased in recent years ‎compared to the past. Why?‎
Because the questions that need to be answered are still unanswered or the answers are lost in the midst ‎of a multitude of philosophical debates. Questions such as whether truth is superior or peace? Hiroshima ‎and invasion of Saddam’ Iraq are examples of this question and challenge. Those who strongly oppose ‎the war say the Hiroshima disaster was a crime, and those who defend it say that if the Hiroshima disaster ‎had not happened, the world would have seen more killings than the Hiroshima bombing. Regarding the ‎invasion of Iraq, when the Western press attacked George W. Bush, who, contrary to the lie they told to ‎get a war license, said that the existence of Saddam was more dangerous than the atomic bomb, and if ‎we did not attack, the world would see more killings of Iraqis.‎
In general, the badness of war should not lead us to a romantic, utopian and unrealistic confrontation ‎with the subject of war. Is war absolutely reprehensible or not? For example, is war as a defence ‎condemned? Is war completely ugly? And is peace entirely good? If yes, why? And if not, under what ‎conditions are war or peace good or bad? And who is the reference for its diagnosis? This diagnostic ‎reference is itself a big problem.‎
‎"I also accept Maxim Gorky's claim that there is no crime that was not prescribed by the war, but there is ‎another fact, and that is that many human civilizational and cultural leaps in the direction of evolution," ‎writes Bastani Parizi, a pacifist writer, has been achieved by war. I do not know what you think about the ‎war? Sociologists have conflicting views on this phenomenon of human society, but one thing is certain: ‎one of the factors in the evolution of humanity is war, because almost all the great inventions of the ‎universe were found after the great wars, from the use of fire to invention of gunpowder and from ‎making catapults to penicillin, atoms, rockets, flying to the skies, reaching Mars and… (ibid, 348 and 349)‎
Despite such theories, can usefulness and agreement be used as a criterion for evaluating a phenomenon ‎such as war? Is our world a world of‏ ‏struggle between good and evil? As the ancients, philosophers, and ‎traditional moral scholars considered human nature to be made up of the three powers of lust, anger, ‎and delusion (the power of reason), is war a continuation of the power of anger and a‏ ‏part of human ‎instincts and therefore inevitable? Can man become utterly rational because wisdom prevents war?‎
‏ ‏If the intellect dominates and the emotions are silenced, will the war end or, on the contrary, it become ‎more violent (so long as thou art an embryo, thy occupation is blood-drinking.)?‎
Leprosy was once thought to be the spirit of the devil, but later it turned out to be a curable disease. It ‎was once thought that some diseases are viruses. Is war like a virus? Can it be transmitted? Have we ever ‎continued Freud's work to see if war has anything to do with sexual instinct? And basically, can human ‎beings talk about peace until they can come up with a single, universal formula for how to deal with ‎sexual instinct? While we see that many thinkers and people are not even willing to discuss it.‎
Many other "do's" can be listed that peace is actually a victim of their remaining unanswered. Peace does ‎not proceed for all these reasons and because of illusions. We are accustomed to underestimating the ‎theory of illusion. Right now it is the illusions that are slowly leading us to war and we cannot even talk ‎about these illusions and‏ ‏even when we wrote it, it was not published because it was risky. Many wars in ‎the world are rooted in illusions.‎‏ ‏
Of course, I have answered some of these questions on various occasions. In fact, in an essay that is ‎supposed not to exceed 1,500 words, they cannot be recounted, but you can be invited to take peace out ‎of the showcase and flow it in the life. If we run peace in our lives, the whole system of our individual ‎lives, the lives of the defenders of peace, will be reconstructed, or vice versa, our lives should be ‎reconstructed in order to become pacifists, because we either do not know the requirements of believing ‎in peace and adhering to its consequences‏ ‏or we simply look the other way. ‎

Do not be offended by me. Do not be upset. I apologize in advance. Let me say in one word that peace ‎cannot be achieved, because with respect to war we are confronted with two groups of people: those ‎who openly advocate war and we know for sure that they are in favor of war. Throughout history, many ‎dictators and militants in the world have been staunch advocates of peace and have spoken out for the ‎good of peace. But the problem arises when those who defend peace, while ostensibly defending peace, ‎see war as a blessing. But those who are peace defenders, although very different from the forgoing ‎dictators, sometimes either lie or do not know what the requirements of peace and belief in peace are. I ‎have seen thousands of people in my life who talk about God and resurrection, about mercy and ‎compassion, but when it comes to forgiving others and giving consent, there is a flood of justifications to ‎escape from the implications and consequences of these beliefs (belief in God and in compassion). Then I ‎realize that this contradiction between belief and action is a general habit and mood that manifests itself ‎in various forms. When we talk about peace and become truly pacifist, we will change ourselves before ‎we transform the world outside of us. Examine the private and public lives of each peace advocate to see ‎what the reality is. I declare that we are just at the very beginning of this labyrinth.

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