{"id":299,"date":"2015-09-23T14:36:37","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T20:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/?p=299"},"modified":"2016-01-13T14:11:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T21:11:51","slug":"beyond-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/2015\/09\/23\/beyond-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond “peace”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday (September 21) was the “International Day of Peace<\/a>.”\u00a0 I hope not to be misinterpreted, but I don’t like it, for all sorts of reasons.<\/p>\n

Is it because I am not in some horrible war, and can’t see the value of peace?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 Would anyone shooting at me stop because it was the “International Day of Peace?”\u00a0 It’s a feel-good holiday, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Is it because I like war?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I was a conscientious objector in 1971 and have ordered my life accordingly since then, leaving easy and lucrative work to work for — what?\u00a0 Peace?\u00a0 No — for nuclear disarmament, justice, environmental wholeness, and economic security.\u00a0 They go together, especially in New Mexico, where nuclear armaments are such a powerful industry.\u00a0 Not for peace, then.\u00a0 For something like “human dignity and solidarity in the living landscape.”<\/p>\n

For us in the U.S., peace is not something we have and it is not something we will have.\u00a0 Our president recently bragged that he has bombed seven countries<\/a> since taking office.\u00a0 If anything that is an undercount.\u00a0 Of course I don’t like it, but it’s a fact.<\/p>\n

Americans tend to take aspirations for peace personally.\u00a0 It’s about my<\/em> peace.\u00a0 I<\/em> want to be peaceful — the heck with you.<\/p>\n

The aspiration for peace is just terribly ambiguous and it comes with a bad psychology, which we as community workers have to face.\u00a0 Psychologist James Hillman, in\u00a0A Terrible Love of War<\/em><\/a>, (Penguin, 2004, pp. 29-36), explains (quoting at length):<\/p>\n

The name of this void of forgetfulness is peace, whose short first definition is: \u201cthe absence of war.\u201d More fully, the Oxford English Dictionary describes peace: \u201cFreedom from, or cessation of, war or hostilities; a state of a nation or community in which it is not at war with another.\u201d Further, peace means: \u201cFreedom from disturbance or perturbation, especially as a condition of an individual; quiet, tranquility.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Neville Chamberlain and his umbrella returned from Munich in 1938 after utterly failing to grasp the nature of Hitler, he told the British people he had achieved peace in our time and that now everyone should \u201cgo home and get a nice quiet sleep.\u201d
\n…
\nThe worst of war is that it ends in peace, that is, it absents itself from remembrance, a syndrome Chris Hedges calls \u201ccollective or blanket amnesia,\u201d beyond understanding, beyond imagining. \u201cPeace is visible already,\u201d writes Marguerite Duras. \u201cIt\u2019s like a great darkness falling, it\u2019s the beginning of forgetting.\u201d<\/p>\n

I will not march for peace, nor will I pray for it, because it falsifies all it touches. It is a cover-up, a curse. Peace is simply a bad word. \u201cPeace,\u201d said Plato, \u201cis really only a name.\u201d Even if states should \u201ccease from fighting,\u201d wrote Hobbes, \u201cit is not to be called peace; but rather a breathing time.\u201d True, yes; cease-fire, yes; surrender, victory, mediation, brinkmanship, standoff\u2013these words have content, but peace is darkness falling.
\n…
\nThe dictionary\u2019s definition, an exemplary of denial, fails the word, peace. Written by scholars in tranquillity, the definition fixates and perpetuates the denial. If peace is merely an absence of, a freedom from, it is both an emptiness and a repression. A psychologist must ask how is the emptiness filled, since nature abhors a vacuum; and how does the repressed return, since it must?
\nThe emptiness left by repressing war from the definition of peace bloats it with idealizations\u2013another classic defense mechanism. Fantasies of rest, of calm security, life as \u201cnormal,\u201d eternal peace, heavenly peace, the peace of love that transcends understanding; peace as easy (shalvah in the Hebrew Bible) and completeness (shalom). The peace of naivete, of ignorance disguised as innocence. Longings for peace become both simplistic and utopian with programs for universal love, disarmament, and an Aquarian federation of nations, or retrograde to the status quo ante of Norman Rockwell\u2019s apple pie. These are the options of psychic numbing that \u201cpeace\u201d offers and which must have so offended Jesus that he declared for a sword.<\/p>\n

To dispel such quieting illusions, writers along with those hounded by Mars roil the calm. The pages are thick with death because writers do not hold their peace, keep silent, play dumb. Books of war give voice to the tongue of the dead anesthetized by that major syndrome of the public psyche: \u201cpeace.\u201d
\n…
\nThe one virtue of the dictionary\u2019s definition of peace is its implied normalization of war. War is the larger idea, the normative term giving peace its meaning. Definitions using negation or privation are psychologically unsophisticated. The excluded notion immediately comes to mind and, in fact, the word \u201cpeace\u201d can be understood only after you have grasped the \u201cwar.\u201d<\/p>\n

War is also implied in another common meaning of peace: peace as victory. The fusion of peace with military victory shows plainly enough in the prayers for peace which tacitly ask for winning the war. Do people ever pray for surrender? Unconditional surrender would bring immediate peace. Do they ever light candles and march in supplication of defeat?<\/p>\n

The Romans understood this inner connection between peace and victory. Pax, the goddess of peace, was usually configured with a cornucopia of riches and plenty, an idealization that recurred in recent fantasies of a \u201cpeace dividend\u201d to fill our coffers now that the Cold War was won. Also accompanying Pax were a caduceus (twin serpents winding around a staff indicating the healing arts) and an olive branch. Soon enough (around the turn of the era, 40 BC), she became Pax-Victoria an the olive branch merged with laurel leaves, the crown of victors.
\n…
\nNot only does \u201cpeace\u201d too quickly translate into \u201csecurity,\u201d and a security purchased at the price of liberty. Something more sinister also is justified by peace which de Tocqueville superbly describes as a \u201cnew kind of servitude\u201d where a \u201csupreme power covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till a nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are engaged in a struggle for life.\u00a0 It will not be peaceful, nor should it be.\u00a0 It should be nonviolent, <\/em>but in the hands of “peace” advocates, “nonviolence” has almost lost the name of action.\u00a0 In the contexts in which we work, the dangerous ambiguity of “peace” works against the clarity and commitment that are the sine qua non<\/em> of harmonious, productive, nonviolent action of all kinds.\u00a0 “Peace” even begins to mean something like “civility.”\u00a0 A lot of blocking, destructive, and unethical conduct is justified in the name of “peace.”\u00a0 Even “nonviolence” can be a kind of bludgeon.\u00a0 For the “peaceful,” “violence” can be defined as anything which makes us uncomfortable and threatens our “peace.”\u00a0 “Peace out.”\u00a0 What good is this word, and this idea?\u00a0 There are usually better ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday (September 21) was the “International Day of Peace.”\u00a0 I hope not to be misinterpreted, but I don’t like it, for all sorts of reasons. Is it because I am not in some horrible war, and can’t see the value of peace?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 Would anyone shooting at me stop because it was the “International… Read More »Beyond “peace”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","neve_meta_reading_time":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZtEt-4P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}