\u201cIndividuals and peoples have a right to peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the beginning was the word. OK. This is the beginning, and these are the words, but they haven\u2019t arrived yet \u2014 at least not officially, with full force of meaning.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s our job, not God\u2019s, to create the new story of who we are, and millions \u2014 billions \u2014 of people fervently wish we could do so. The problem is that the worst of our nature is better organized than the best of it.<\/p>\n
The words constitute Article 1 of the U.N.\u2019s draft declaration on peace. What alerts me that they matter is the fact that they\u2019re controversial, that \u201cthere is a lack of consensus\u201d among the member states, according to the president of the Human Rights Council, \u201cabout the concept of the right to peace as a right in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Adams, former UNESCO senior program specialist, describes the controversy with a little more candor in his 2009 book, World Peace through the Town Hall<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cAt the United Nations in 1999, there was a remarkable moment when the draft culture of peace resolution that we had prepared at UNESCO was considered during informal sessions. The original draft had mentioned a \u2018human right to peace.\u2019 According to the notes taken by the UNESCO observer, \u2018the U.S. delegate said that peace should not be elevated to the category of human right, otherwise it will be very difficult to start a war.\u2019 The observer was so astonished that she asked the U.S. delegate to repeat his remark. \u2018Yes,\u2019 he said, \u2018peace should not be elevated to the category of human right, otherwise it will be very difficult to start a war.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And a remarkable truth emerges, one it\u2019s not polite to talk about or allude to in the context of national business: In one way or another, war rules. Elections come and go, even our enemies come and go, but war rules. This fact is not subject to debate or, good Lord, democratic tinkering. Nor is the need for and value of war \u2014 or its endless, self-perpetuating mutation \u2014 ever pondered with clear-eyed astonishment in the mass media. We never ask ourselves, in a national context: What would it mean if living in peace were a human right?<\/p>\n \u201cThe real story of the rise of ISIS shows that US interventions in Iraq and Syria were central in creating the chaos in which the group has thrived,\u201d writes Steve Rendall in Extra! (\u201cAddicted to Intervention\u201d). \u201cBut that story doesn\u2019t get told in US corporate media. . . . The informed input of actual experts on the region, who don\u2019t march in lockstep with Washington elites, might put a crimp in the public\u2019s support for the war, support largely informed by pro-war pundits and reporters, and the familiar retired military brass \u2014 often with ties to the military\/industrial complex.<\/p>\n \u201cWith pundits reflexively calling for more attacks,\u201d Rendall adds, \u201cthere\u2019s virtually no one to note that US wars have been catastrophic for the people in the targeted countries \u2014 from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a remarkable system that makes no sense from the point of view of compassion and planetary solidarity, and would surely be dismantled in an honest democracy, in which who we are and how we live is always on the table. But that\u2019s not how nation-states work.<\/p>\n \u201cThe State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form,\u201d Gandhi said, as quoted by Adams. \u201cThe individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.\u201d<\/p>\n And those who speak for the nation-state embody the addiction to violence and fear, and always see threats that require forceful reaction, never, of course, considering either the horror that force will inflict on those in its way or the long-term (and often enough short-term) blowback it will bring about.<\/p>\n Thus, as Rendall notes, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News that \u201cif ISIS wasn\u2019t stopped with a full-spectrum war in Syria, we were all going to die: \u2018This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRise to the occasion\u201d is how we talk about inflicting concentrated violence on random, faceless people we\u2019ll never know in their full humanity, except for the occasional picture of their suffering that shows up in the war coverage.<\/p>\n Regarding the accumulation of enemies, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently announced that the military has begun preparing to defend the United States against . . . climate change.<\/p>\n Kate Aronoff, writing at Waging Nonviolence, notes the extraordinary irony of this in view of the fact that the Pentagon is the biggest polluter on the planet. In the name of national defense, no environmental regulation is so important that it can\u2019t be utterly ignored and no piece of Earth is so pristine that it can\u2019t be trashed for eternity.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s what we do, as long as national identity defines the limits of our imagination. We go to war against every problem we face, from terrorism to drugs to cancer. And every war creates collateral damage and new enemies.<\/p>\n The beginning of change may simply be acknowledging that peace is a human right. The U.N.\u2019s member states \u2014 at least the major ones, with standing armies and stockpiles of nuclear weapons \u2014 object. But how could you trust such a declaration if they didn\u2019t?<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound <\/strong>(Xenos Press), is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a> or visit his website at commonwonders.com.<\/em><\/p>\n