More on walls

It's time to pick up the blog pen once again. Over at the PeaceProbe blog my friend Gene Stoltzfus writes about various walls. The late Berlin wall was very much on the news and blogs these past weeks. As I attended a series of events in Washington DC, focusing on military spending, demilitarization and related burning issues such as climate change and education, it occurred to me that world military spending is also some kind of a wall. Only that its height and thickness is hardly imagined. The wall is so big and so predominant we cannot see it.


World military spending is just over 1 Trillion Dollars/Swiss Francs in 2009. How much is that? Well, it's several times 100 Million, right? Right but wrong. Here is a hint Frida Berrigan of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation gave us:


One trillion is one million million, in other words:
1 Million seconds = 11.5 days (the week after next)
1 Billion seconds = 32 years (I'd be well over 80 by then, but it's not inconceivable)
1 Trillion seconds = 32,000 years (what is that in human history?)


That's a little help in picturing the amount of money spent on military stuff. 10% of it would be enough to feed all the hungry children (in the US, which accounts for close to 50% of world military spending, in 2009 one child in four was affected by malnutrition), to provide vaccines and education for the world's children. Alas, education and health are sectors that are being cut as I write this. Military spending has about doubled over the past 10 years.


How is military spending a wall? By keeping people, and especially children, out of bounds from food, health and education. By adding tremendously to spoiling the earth, the waters and the air and by preventing effective measures to slow global warming. By killing hundreds of thousands of people, directly and indirectly. By keeping uncounted soldiers and their families from healthy living. By dividing many whose deaths are not reported from live - they commit suicide. By piling up an unimaginable amount of expenditures - which even our grandchildren won't be able to repay - for stuff that kills people and destroys the earth.


World military spending is a double scandal: it is a scandal in its very nature and existence. And it adds to that scandal the one of its sheer size. It is as if the Berlin wall, a scandal in itself, had been built 300 meters high and 2 kilometers thick. How can we not protest all day long against such deadly nonsense?

The tragic confusion of war, conflict and violence

It is common in the media to find the word conflict when it actually is about war, real, physical, armed war. "Armed conflict" would be more accurate, since it may well be a conflict, but the real problem and disaster is the killing and destruction caused by weapons. The use of the term conflict is tragic and has devastating long term effect, because it reinforces an all too common misunderstanding which is that conflict is necessarily violent, negative, terrible and destructive. In fact the terms conflict and war have become pretty much interchangeable in the media. Just as in churches, sermons and general talk use the terms violence and conflict as being synonymous. The general sense is that conflict is bad and should be prevented just as violence. At the same time, the general assumption is that conflict breeds violence and more problematic still, that if there was no conflict there would be no violence. The fact that much of the violence happens not out of conflict but out of greed or thrill.

When will we learn that conflict is necessary and, more often than not, constructive. War is neither necessary nor constructive, ever. Recent findings in sociology suggest that it is more accurate to see violence as happening in the absence or real conflict. Violence happens before or after conflict is being recognized and "handled". Looked at from this perspective, violence could almost be seen as the opposite of conflict. The opposite of violence is not peace, but tenderness. War kills truth, conflict brings it to the fore. War distorts proportions, conflict helps set them straight. Violence makes dialogue impossible, conflict makes it necessary. War and violence are not the same, but the former is not possible without the latter. Conflict does not need violence, nor does violence necessarily emanate from conflict. But the suppression of the truth makes real conflict impossible and that may eventually lead to violence.