Making War History

Making War History

“Making Poverty History” must also mean making war history. World
annual military expenditure is again creeping up to the 1 trillion dollar
mark – that’s a thousand billion dollars a year – a sum that dwarfs any
amount spent on aid or the release of debt. Though Iraq, which has so far
cost the United States alone over 150 billion dollars, is the conflict that
makes the news, it is not the only one. There are over 20 armed conflicts
in progress now, more than half of which are civil wars rather than wars
between states.

The link between war and poverty has been pointed out often enough. It
is there in article 26 of the UN Charter, signed in 1945. It is powerfully
there in Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio of 1967. It is there in
paragraph 89 of the Final Report of the 1978 First UN Special Session on
Disarmament. In 1992 Mostafa Tolbe, then Director of the United Nations
Environmental Programme, having listed all our global needs, concluded
that without progress on disarmament all other positive agreements “are
worthless”.

The connection between poverty and war is too obvious to be a matter of
dispute but in practical terms it has not always been made.

Perhaps one reason is that bringing war to an end looks like an impossible
dream despite its noble ambition. We applauded Pope John Paul in 1982
when, while the Falklands War was still in progress, he said “war should
belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity’s
agenda for the future”, but could it ever happen? After all, the UN was
founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Yet
the years since 1945 have been bloodstained with wars and shadowed by
the threat of war.

It is a time for a dose of practical optimism. Social change is always at
first dismissed as impossible. The abolition of the slave trade, the
creation of an old age pension, votes for women, were all in their turn
described as utopian. The realistic optimist points to history. Our country
is dotted with castles – once military fortresses but now tourist attractions.
Some one-time enemies, for instance Germany and France, or Norway and
Sweden, have so changed their political and economic relationships that
war between them is simply unthinkable.

Consigning war to history means taking practical steps to build a culture
of peace, to reject “peace” resting on threats of massive retaliation, to
end the arms trade, source of so much destruction and so much debt, to
create a public conviction that killing people is a barbaric way of resolving
conflict.

For such changes to come about we need to build a global society in
which the rule of law is paramount. There has been some progress in that
direction. We even have a working International Criminal Court, though
its jurisdiction is not accepted by the remaining superpower. In Interpol
we have the start of an international police force. Changing attitudes is
not easy but it does happen. The war nostalgia of the entertainment
media can be redirected. The anti-poverty agencies can make practical
and financial links with the peace movements. Remembrance Sunday and
Week can honour the dead in the one way that they would want to be
honoured, by working towards the abolition of war itself. Professor Joseph
Rotblat, who refused in 1944 to work on the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima, is the inspiration behind, and the President of the Movement
for the Abolition of War. He remains a realistic optimist: “war must cease
to be an admissible human institution”.

Making poverty history is a practical possibility, but it will not happen
unless at the same time we start to cut out the cancer of militarism.

Bruce Kent

This article first appeared in Pax Christi’s newsletter, Justpeace, for
March/April 2005