Is Peace even an option for humanity

When has America not been at war? I am 40, and counting the Cold war - we have been fighting or bombing someone pretty much my entire lifetime. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in history is a widely accepted statement. Albert Einstein - one of the most liberal peace activists of all time - was convinced that war is inevitable unless we give up National Sovereignty.

So, Is the Human Race capable of peaceful coexistence or are peace activists just deluded?

I am glad that I can ask this on a liberal forum where everybody comes to the table with a quick wit instead of guns...


from a previous post..
SNIP...."The party divide shows up in today's nomination contest. On one side are anti-war candidates Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean, whose arguments echo those of Henry Wallace and George McGovern. On the other are Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and John Edwards, who, like Britain's Tony Blair, backed using force against Iraq on the condition that President Bush challenge the United Nations to do its job. While scathingly critical of Bush's botched Iraq diplomacy, once an impasse was reached in the U.N. Security Council, they did not flinch from going to war with a smaller coalition.

This enraged "peace activists," who passionately and sincerely believe they speak for most Democrats. They are passionately and sincerely wrong: McGovernism is a distinctly minority view in the party, held mainly by left-leaning activists who have disproportionate influence in caucus states like Iowa. Polls show that two-thirds of Democrats (and more than three-fourths of all Americans) approve of the second Persian Gulf War. And lest we forget, McGovern himself suffered the worst landslide defeat in U.S. history, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia and winning only 38 percent of the national vote against Richard Nixon.

To win next year, Democrats need to return to their real national security tradition -- one that's tough enough to keep Americans safe and smart enough to build alliances and institutions that make the world safer for democracy.

in the name of political expediencey, the answer is no.

I would venture to say one day it is possible for a peaceful existence but it will not be in the near future, unless something dramatic (earthshakingly) and unforeseen happens.

will have to give up national sovereignty and have a world government before it can occur...

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant

It woulod not seem a wager likely to pay off that peace will break out any time soon.

Nor will national sovereignty be relenquished peaceable. If it is done away with, it will be by absorption in provincial status within some global hegemony....

"All governments expand to the practical limits of their ability to do so."

It could disolve through absorbtion, or it could desolve through decay. I think it's much more likely that we'll soon see a disolution of societal order, and along with it, imaginary notions such as nations will be discarded for more useful concepts such as survival.

In the state of decay, various sub-national forces, such as tribal identity, or other forms of local peculiarism, will emerge at the fore, and fight for sway over the carcass of the state, and for greater portions of its carved chunks. The imperatives of survival will move a sufficient number to violence that none will be able to discard the art entirely, lest they serve as food for those who do not discard that "cheap and cheeerful" tool.

Unfortunately it's usually not until you almost fall of a cliff before you start walking away from it.

But while it would be a battle between tribes in those times, I believe that in the end it would be the tribes that retained the better parts of 'civilization' that would make it through the darkness and forge the new humanity. Kind of like how Europe made it through the Dark Ages, certainly not pretty, but in the end, better.

the inhumanity race.

sadly it won't happened until all the idiots that love war so much have killed each other and a hell of a lot of other people first.

Remember how evolution works, a species will remain in stasis until a threat to its survival rears its head. Then it must either adapt or or die. Humanity is witnessing a threat to its survival as we speak. It's time for us to start adapting to the new order of things. That means we'll have to learn to be comfortable with less, to cooperate for survival, and many other useful skills. Those who do will live, those who don't won't.

Probably won't be too pretty for a while, but after we get through, humanity will see a golden age never before dreamed of.

we cut out about 90% of it

For most of the last century the US led a war on drugs that carried American hedgemony across the globe starting with the UN Single Convention of 1961. The US called for a militarization model using the criminal justice model and fights all change as the world calls for a harm reduction stradegy under a health care model. Just yesterday the Drug Bizarre Walters called for more federal intervention with the states in this Perpetual War. That was in Los Angeles where he could not even speak before a public crown. He never speaks to a public audience.

The War on Terror is also another call for Perpetual War. Everything is now Orwellian all the way up to the doublethink of intrepreting the Constitution as a living document which basically says it does not even exist.

Orwell's 1984 has a short version on the Internet- http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/1/

war will become more commonplace as the psyche has been taught to blame the "other" for the decline. Mother Earth can only take so much punishment before she begins her unheathy period, followed shortly by her death.

through war? Have we not been doing this for thousands of years? Seems to me that some humans use war as a first impulse - others resort to it - either way we are a violent species. If we deny our warrior instinct - do we become less human or more? Is it the warrior instinct that has allowed us to survive the eons?

added...
I believe the above is consistent with Carl Jung's philosophy on man as warrior.

Peace on earth is a pie in the sky. Einstein was partially right. Id say as long as there are factions and groups there will always be dispute and war.

Here we see only failure and misery with no public support to go on and the government says we must go on because they must protect us from drugs. Never mind a person can learn the harms of things and make decisions and never injest anything now so arbitrarily illegal only to have to endure a black market no matter what his habits.

In the War on Terror Bush somehow calls us to spend more on military as if someone is going to launch a navy or air force. It is tuned into a call for Perpetual War when it is more of a police action and intelligence matter.

Do you understand what evolve means?

Force *is* required to 1) stop weapons proliferation 2) end ethnic cleansing and 3) clean out international terrorism. The wars of the past where nations wage total warfare against the industrial capacity of another nation are over. However, a state-of-affairs where Syria obtains a nuclear warhead and gives it to Islamic Jihad is possible. Additionally, narco-terrorism is a problem in several regions in the world.

Personally, I'm not comfortable with such devices going off in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles. While there is a lot in the obscene defense budget that needs to go, we need to be real about our security priorities.

and bombing Syria/Iran/Iraq to destroy their industrial capacity to make WMDs.

If a state harbors international terrorists, they don't have the legitimacy to possess weapons of mass destruction. The object of force is to preclude such a threat. For example, the Israeli attack on Iraq's Osirak facility in 1981. One doesn't have to reduce cities like Dresden in WW2 to rubble to attain the objective.

greed is a powerful motivator

We just happen to find ourselves at the mercy of the mad .01% who weild omnipresent control through corrupted power.

Personally, I think a world-wide revolution is in the offing, but, sadly, not before some unimaginably catastrophic - yet unifying, motivating event occurs at the hands of these madmen.

So yes, peace and unison, after the current us vs. them madness climaxes.

that 99.9 % want peaceful coexistence, but empirical evidence is against this claim.

The thing that brought an end of the wild west was statehood, and a criminal and civil justice system.

In the next 100 years we'll have international civil and criminal courts and that'll stop lots of the shit that goes on today.

"if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act but the coming of a state of mind."

but all out war must become obsolete or we will.

It's become clear that military domination is useless. Having a big pile of nukes and bases in 130 countries did not prevent 9-11. They caught those guys with the cyanide bombs without bombing Texas, and 9-11 could have been prevented if Shrubbie had not blocked investigations leading to his Saudi fuckbuddies.

Now the military is saying they are sending a special unit after Osama Bin Who? and they know where he is. It's obvious that if they can do that now, they could have done it any time during the past two years, and flattening two countries that had no connection with 9-11 was totally unnecessary.

The silly naive idealists are the people who don't get that domination is expensive, and FSU is cheap. We could continue militarizing our society until there are armed guards posted near every bit of critical infrastructure, but why bother? Paying the guards means you can't afford to maintain the infrastructure, so it falls down all by itself without the help of any terrorists.