Atomic war has since emerged to become the greatest threat to life

In the words of a celebrated English creative writer, “we need no ghost to tell us” that peace is the opposite of the usual confrontation that we call war between human states. We can, therefore, authoritatively assert that total abolition of intra-specific war is the most desirable condition of life on the human planet.

The only problem — as observers  usually point out — is that this is much easier said  than done. Why? Because, it seems, war resides in the very kinaesthetic organs of the human animal, so that, whenever human individuals assemble as a society, they cannot help creating the conditions that we call political economy.

And political economy appears to be the very taproot of international and, internally,  even of inter-tribal confrontation. Yet it does not follow from that dictum that war can be abolished without any condition. Here, indeed, I do not mean confrontation merely by means of physically destructive weapons.

POLITICS

“Politics”, I would assert, is the central character of the way in which the human animal lives and governs itself as productive societies. That is the nature of the confrontation that we know by the misnomer of “politics”, not only  in national affairs but also between all of the earth’s nations  through their states.

I call  it a misnomer because — as I have pointed out here before — the word “politics” has the same etymological root as the adjective “polite” and the nouns “policy”, “polish” and other words for ideas which, if any human society insisted on them as its paradigms, would lead such a society directly towards what a certain Indo-Pakistani social philosophy used to call nirvana.

Yet frequent remain the confrontations that cannot help culminating in physical war. After reducing many of themselves to smithereens in two quick and exceptionally destructive world wars, you  would have expected the European states to sue for the surest and longest-lasting continental and even global peace?

KNOWLEDGE

For, indeed, at that time, Europe was the most civilised human continent ever. Here civilisation is considered and defined only in terms of both knowledge and technique, but not necessarily in terms of humanisation and polish of the mind and of action against all other specific members of the environment.

After — through brutal colonialism — Europe’s economic houses had reduced human beings to a desperate pack of animals the whole world over and, through intra-European competition over it, pushed the planet into two world wars of historically destructive proportions, Europe threatened to throw our whole species into extinction.

From that fact alone, wouldn’t you have expected the European intelligentsia — the world’s most educated and best trained that far — to push its states into thought conditions and actions that might put paid to everything that could lead to a continental and even global nuclear  holocaust?

EXTINCTION

Pinheaded nationalism of the kind that produced Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and other such animals in Europe and plunged that continent — the human world’s most civilised section — into two historically destructive world wars that threatened to plunge the human species into everlasting  extinction, wouldn’t you have expected the European elite thereafter to sue powerfully for a worldwide social security condition designed to lead humankind in the opposite policy direction?

That is by no means to say that it was not tried. Such  institutions as the United Nations and such of its many agencies as Unesco and WHO were immediate post-war international political initiatives designed as direct global peace instruments. Yet, despite them, nuclear war has since emerged and remains the biggest threat to the human race.

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