“War is always a choice and it is always a bad choice.” World Beyond War in their publication “A Global Security System: An Alternative to War.” The war in Ukraine is both a wakeup call about the folly of war and rare opportunity to move toward a more peaceful world. It is time to put an end to war and threats of war as an accepted tool of statecraft.
Whatever provocations may be, history explained us several times that war is not the answer whether Russia is invading Ukraine or the United States is invading Afghanistan and Iraq. It is not the answer when any other nation uses military violence to pursue some political, territorial, economic or ethnic cleansing goal. Neither is war the answer when the invaded and oppressed fight back with violence.
But ironically, increasing animosity between Russia and Ukraine makes it hard to agree on a ceasefire. President of Russia Vladimir Putin persists in military intervention claiming he is liberating Ukraine from a regime that, like fascists, kills its own people.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy mobilizes the whole population to fight against aggression and says Russians behave like Nazis when killing civilians.
Ukrainian and Russian mainstream media use military propaganda to call the other side nazis or fascists, pointing to their right-wing and militarist abuses. All references of that sort are simply making a case for “just war” by appealing to the image of demonized enemies from the past entrenched in archaic political culture.
The worst possible outcome of the war in Ukraine would probably be nuclear war. People’s desire for revenge as a result of this war is getting stronger by the day. Whirling around in the hearts of many is a desire for revenge. This desire blinds and prevents them from recognizing that they are on a path that leads to nuclear war. That is why we must hurry. It may be impossible to stop this war, but it is unethical to stand by and not do our best to stop it, warns Joseph Essertier, Coordinator of Japan for a World BEYOND War.
Economic sanctions poor record of success
USA and West is making to believe that economic sanctions will force Putin to back down. But, economic sanctions also have a poor record of success. We think of sanctions as a peaceful alternative to military warfare. But it is only another form of war.
sanctions will impose collective punishment on the Russian people for the crimes committed by Putin and his authoritarian kleptocracy. The history of sanctions suggests the people in Russia (and other countries) will suffer economic hardship, hunger, disease, and death while the ruling oligarchy is unaffected. Sanctions hurt but they seldom deter bad behavior by world leaders.
Economic sanctions and shipping weapons to Ukraine also endangers the rest of the world. These actions will be seen as provocative acts of war by Putin and could easily lead to the expansion of the war to other countries or the use of nuclear weapons.
The huge, unprecedented support for the economic sanctions and opposition to the Russian invasion could be the international solidarity needed to finally get serious about ending war as a tool of all governments.
This solidarity could give momentum to serious work on arms control, dismantling national armies, abolishing nuclear weapons, reforming and strengthening of the United Nations, expanding the World Court, and moving toward collective security for all nations.
Violence only exacerbates conflicts
Violence – no matter who commits it or for what purpose – only exacerbates conflicts, killing innocent people, shattering countries, destroying local economies, creating hardship and suffering. Seldom is anything positive achieved. More often the underlying causes of the conflict are left to fester for decades into the future.
Peace activist Phil Anderson in this regard reminded us that the spread of terrorism, the decades of killing in Israel and Palestine, the Pakistan-India conflicts over Kashmir, and the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria are all current examples of the failures of war to achieve national objectives of any kind.
We tend to think there are only two options when facing a bully or an aggressor nation – fight or submit. But there are other options. As Gandhi demonstrated in India, nonviolent resistance can succeed.
Militarist politics in Russia, Ukraine, and NATO countries have some similarities both in ideology and practices with the horribly violent totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. Of course, such similarities are not an excuse for any war or trivialization of Nazi and Fascist crimes.
The United States, and Russia, and Ukraine look a bit like fascist states because all three have military forces and are ready to use them to pursue absolute sovereignty, i.e. to do whatever they wish in their territory or sphere of influence, as if might is right.
We have to realize that national security is not a zero-sum game. One nation doesn’t have to lose for another to win. Only when all countries are secure will any individual country have security.
This “common security” requires building an alternative security system based on non-provocative defense and international cooperation. The current worldwide system of military based national security is a failure.
Only Gandhian way
Normally, only two options when facing a bully or an aggressor nation – fight or submit, surfaces beore us. But there are other options. As Gandhi demonstrated in India, nonviolent resistance can succeed.
In modern times, civil disobedience, protests, strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation actions have succeeded against domestic tyrants, oppressive systems and foreign invaders. Historical research, based on real events between 1900 and 2006, has shown nonviolent resistance is twice as successful as armed resistance in achieving political change.
The 2004-05 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine was an example. The current videos of unarmed Ukrainian civilians blocking Russian military convoys with their bodies is another example of non-violent resistance.
Erica Chenoweth from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School observed that violent insurgencies have declined since the 1970s, while nonviolent resistance campaigns have grown much more common. But the numbers for the last decade—from 2010 to 2019—are truly staggering.
According to her, this period saw not only the most nonviolent resistance recorded since 1900, but the launch of no fewer than 96 nonviolent maximalist campaigns. This is far more than the previous record for revolutionary eruptions in a single decade (60 between 2000 and 2009). Fifteen mass nonviolent campaigns began in 2019 alone, and 24 others were continuing as 2019 ended.
She found that from the 1960s until about 2010, success rates for revolutionary nonviolent campaigns remained above 40 percent, climbing as high as 65 percent in the 1990s. But success rates for all revolutions have since declined. Since 2010, less than 34 percent of nonviolent revolutions and a mere 8 percent of violent ones have succeeded.
The reason for this is that nonviolent campaigns typically appeal to a much broader and diverse constituency than violent insurgencies.
Not all successful unarmed civil insurrections against dictatorships take place in a dramatic mass uprising with hundreds of thousands occupying central squares in the capital city.
However, Stephen Zunes from University of San Francisco said that there have also been cases of nonviolent struggles against autocratic regimes that failed to topple the dictatorship in a revolutionary wave, but did succeed in forcing a series of legal, constitutional and institutional reforms over a period of several years that eventually evolved into a liberal democratic order.
World Beyond War is providing us a comprehensive, practical plan to create an alternative system of common security for the world. It is all laid out in their publication “A Global Security System: An Alternative to War.”
They also show that this isn’t Utopian fantasy. The world has been moving toward this goal for over a hundred years. The United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the World Court and many arms control treaties are proof. Peace is possible.
The war in Ukraine should be a wakeup call for all nations. Confrontation is not leadership. Belligerence is not strength. Provocation is not diplomacy. Military actions do not solve conflicts. Until all nations recognize this, and change their militaristic behavior, we will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.
As President John F. Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
