Demonstrating for Peace or "Everybody Loves a Good War"

    Four or five times a year, as I drive past Town Hall in Peterborough on my way to the Post Office, the front steps of the not-very-stately, not-particularly-time-honored red brick building are decorated with a modest flock of gray-haired ladies and balding gentlemen bearing placards with Picasso doves, peace symbols, and canned clichés ─ "Make Peace Not War," "All You Need Is Love," "Give Peace a Chance," and kindred crap.
    Like tattered scarecrows, these aging missionaries shuffle aimlessly around on creaking joints, mouthing an occasional aphorism, indulging in an occasional give-and-take with a random passerby come to sympathize or criticize.
    I imagine you’ve seen them in your own town or city, People With a Cause. And I’m sure you’ve driven by many a suburban lawn adorned with posters bearing similar sentiments.
    These "activists" as the press would have it, are not mere lonely voices pleading for decency and sanity in a world of savagery and chaos and shattered bodies and rape and brutality and sudden death. They are part of a great host of pious fools who believe they can wean our species from its eons-old propensity to organize and conduct those orgies of mass slaughter that English-speaking peoples refer to with that ugliest and most-echoing of words ─ WAR.
    Give Peace a Chance?
    Please...Give Me a Break!
    Humanity has been giving Peace a Chance since the dawn of time. But Peace, that ungrateful bastard, refuses to take advantage.
    Maybe those dedicated acolytes of the angels that demonstrate in front of Town Hall should redo their placards and their slogans. How about

GIVE WAR A CHANCE

    or

MAKE WAR NOT PEACE

    Now that might bring some interesting results.
    Instead of appealing to mankind’s Better Nature ─ a quality that a cursory examination of literature, art, and history conclusively demonstrates to be nonexistent ─ these well-meaning proselytizers should try appealing to the race’s Worse Nature. Perhaps then, like disobedient children who, when ordered not to eat something, immediately do so when the parent’s back is turned, some good might eventuate given our species innate perversity.
    
Alas! The way it stands, these self-anointed apostles of peace simply promote the very thing they claim to oppose. Not only are they preaching to the choir, but, worse yet, by swaddling their sermons in rabbit-skins of mindless religiosity, childish fable, and sanctimonious drivel ─ by basing their passionate pleas on imaginary treacle about man’s innate goodness ─ they only undermine any realistic attempts to prevent armed conflict.
    After millennia of history and pre-history stretching back to the dawn-world of our hominid ancestors, is it too much to ask that we, as adults, face facts and that those ambulatory scarecrows in front of Town Hall with their placards and slogans and exhibitionist fantasies, recognize one simple, central Human truth:

THE HUMAN ANIMAL IS ADDICTED TO WAR

    History is more or less a boring recounting of a boring succession of wars.
    The great majority of our most famous figures, many admired, some despised, are leaders who have presided over notorious episodes of destruction: Cyrus the Great, Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Attila, Hernando Cortez, Washington, Robert E. Lee, Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, Xerxes, Leonidas of Sparta, Winston Churchill.
    Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is Hell." The general knew what he was talking about ─  his famous observation was inspired by his own tactics which involved putting much of the South to the torch, including the city of Atlanta.
    Winston Churchill, that rare and unpopular pragmatist whose advice in the 1930s to stop Hitler in his tracks was attacked as warmongering by his peace-loving compatriots, once confessed, "There’s nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed."
    The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), a 6th century former merchant who currently is worshipped by hundreds of millions as God’s messenger, inspired his followers to wage war against infidels (everybody else) as a surefire way to get them to convert to the one true faith (his).
    As for our own Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, Matthew quotes him as advising the crowd: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Yeah, yeah. I know...I know. There’s disagreement in liturgical circles about exactly what Jesus meant by this remark, but a quick check of the history of Christianity in the years that followed indicates he meant exactly what he said.)

* * *

    It makes good reading in daily newspapers and entertaining broadcasts on the Military Channel, but all-in-all I don’t like war.
    I don’t even like killing spiders or houseflies, let alone people.
    I spent two of the most tedious and stupid years of my life in the service and the only thing I can say in its favor is that, as with Yossarian in Catch 22, time passed with such exquisite slowness ─ each day a month, each month a year ─ that I now wish my life today would move with comparable sluggishness.
    I’ve said before (Kids, Prejudice, and Traffic Lights) and I’ll say again. What the world needs is a traffic light to control mankind’s more murderous instincts ─ something that works ─ not slogan chanting and preaching and pink ribbons and asinine bumper stickers and Papal encyclicals and mushy sermons by self-appointed reverends and hate-filled diatribes by cannabis-sodden Marxist juveniles.
    Where will this magic stop light come from? Who will manufacture it now that Steve Jobs is dead? Beats the shit out of me. But this I do know ─ there’s no point in trying to remake human nature ─ human nature is not remakeable.
    It’s time we accept what we are and who we are; understand what we are and who we are.
    It’s time that we begin working within the narrow limits of the actual rather than the vast open spaces of the imaginary.
    I don’t give a fuck what the Bible says. Men are not a little lower than the angels ─ they’re a goddamn hundred or so stories below them,
    In the meantime, until something better comes along in a century or two or three, the best thing sane people and sane nations can do is stick to their guns, keep their powder dry, and pray that no nut tries to bust into their house with a Kalashnikov.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.com

 

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