Tarek Ali Hassan
Political and Social
12-November-2018
Another
pertinent question left over from the sixties and from the Nuremberg trials:
Can
modern war ever be moral? Can it be legitimate and unresolved issues?
Is
it time yet to equate civilization with non-violence and with the abrogation of
arms as instruments of conflict resolution or of policy? Is the cumulative
vision of our race ready for this natural definition of civilization?
One
of the most serious challenges in to the avowed conceptual behavioral frame of
many of the human purportedly civilized social, political
philosophical and religious institutions and value systems, is the
continuation in human history of war as an instrument of policy, a decider of
right and wrong in conflict and as a keeper of "peace".
This
decision-by-war pattern continued even after the industrial revolution gave
birth to mechanized machinery and instruments for systematic impersonal killing
and then instruments and mechanisms for systematized impersonal, mass killing
and destruction.
Mass
impersonal killing is an issue that needed to be addressed at Nuremberg after
the Second World War. All civilized peoples needed, according to their avowed
value systems to address seriously the challenge posed by the capability of
mass impersonal killing of soldiers and civilians in War. There were -and still
there are- many pertinent unanswered questions.
Indeed
it is an issue that needed to be seriously addressed and resolved since the
first mechanized progressively impersonal wars after the industrial
revolution.
A
mystery that never ceases to shock, challenge and amaze!
It
is an interesting mystery how this moment of self searching was delayed. The
issues are relating to systematized and mechanized -and later computerized and
automated- mass impersonal killing needed to be reconciled with the purported
value systems.
The
West brandishes with great pride that it helped give birth to the individual
and individuality.
Together
with the parallel difficult issues emanating from the question of individual
responsibility to ones' own conscious and perception in relation to orders from
above. These issues were brought up at Nuremberg and they were also
periodically brought up in relation to the Berlin Wall and the orders to shoot
escapees and the execution of these orders by conscripts who received them.
Civilization
is a quality that is entirely incompatible with impersonal killing; it is
incompatible with mass impersonal killing. We can not escape this irksome fact!
We should rather strive to make it a reality without undermining peace or
security. In other words new means for peace and security have to be discovered
practiced and put into operation.
These
are some of the major issues that should have been tackled and resolved after
the tragedies of the first and second world wars. Progress has been
made but much more progress is needed.
In
general after the advent of modern warfare. The issue of the unacceptability of
war as instrument of conflict resolution after the industrial revolution and
the advent of instruments of impersonal killing is one of the issues that
needed resolution at the Nuremberg trials and were not. The issue of
personal and group responsibility towards life and earth and in relation to the
unacceptability of impersonal killing is still largely avoided, but it is
creeping progressively into human social awareness.
Is
man/woman the individual responsible or is he/she not? What are the
determinants and the limits of that responsibility?
What
religion allows mass impersonal killing? Judaiism, Christianity, Islam?
Buddhism, Hinduism.
We
have taught ourselves manifest moral abrogation thin nonsense like, war is war
and all is fair and we did not start it, we have amazingly avoided
the natural counter statement that killing of innocents is killing whatever the
excuse.
It
is not surprising that these fundamental issues have never been seriously
addressed let alone transcended by mechanisms for acceptable alternatives, thus
leaving this inexplicable contradiction in the quasi-civilized status of modern
man. The peak century of human civilization, the twentieth, is
at the same time quantitatively the bloodiest and most violent century in human
history in terms of the extent of impersonal killing deliberately perpetrated
by men and women against other men, women and children.
That
pathology of our century is leading -unresolved- straight into the twenty first
century dangerously maintaining that incredible split which remains unaddressed
in any effective depth. The infrastructure of plurality
attempts to tackle that pathology in the national and international conceptual
frame. The emergence of mechanisms for non-violent conflict resolution and
power-neutral, Earth-life-morality-sensitive national and international
arbitration bodies is essential.
If
we are to seriously decide that it is an absolute necessity to lay the
foundations for alternatives, for the win/win, "me" and
"you" principal in the twenty first century, then we have to
radically revise the mechanisms of international arbitration. These
should be revised in such a way that every voice must be heard and entered into
the dynamics of International decision making. Bodies set up to keep
the peace and to achieve non-violent conflict resolution have to be developed
with an entirely different philosophy. The challenge is our communal
will to lend our creative potential to work either for a club for the powerful
or for an institution for international survival of the race and of the earth's
threatened environment, guided by a new earth and life morality?
Structure
and function of International bodies in the political, social, cultural,
educational Health, and agricultural spheres need to be revised to comply with
the new goals of a truly pluralistic, harmonious - therefore just -
international community. If the problem of truer representative
bodies on the international scale must be addressed, it is needless to stress
that the same problem i.e. that of more truly representative institutions on a
national basis must be addressed too. The macro and microcosms of family,
society, nation, intra and inter-national spheres, have to develop into a
pluralistic interactional dynamic win/win rhythm, birthing an enormous new
infra-structure of concepts, of wider representation and of safeguards.