War and the Ideal of Higher Community

The Only Solution to War

uclear weapons add nothing new to the problem of war. Even in Neolithic times it was possible for a community to be totally destroyed in war, all its inhabitants wiped out, its buildings burned and leveled, its language and traditions utterly lost and forgotten. Nearly every "tell" in the Middle East tells us just such a dreary and dreadful story. War is not new and neither is total war. Nor is there anything new about the strategies employed by communities for conflict avoidance or conflict survival. All the known strategies have been tried many times. There are consistent patterns in the success or failure of these strategies. The solution to the nuclear madness is the solution to the problem of war. The solution is known and has worked many times. This is the ideal of higher community. What it means is that two formerly warring communities combine into a larger community stronger than any of the factions. This is not an idealistic pipedream. It has happened many times.

emember Romeo and Juliet? A true story from medieval Verona. The story of the young lovers is set against the backdrop of a clan feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Every clan built its own tower, trying to build one taller than anyone else. These medieval towers still exist in some small Italian towns. Medieval city-states were plagued with armed clashes between clans in some periods, and clashes between classes in other periods. For instance, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines were political factions in Italy who fought each another in the last 200 years of the medieval period. The Guelfs represented the free merchant class of cities like Florence, whereas the Ghibellines were the Imperial Vicars of Italian cities controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor, and their followers.

table city-states were finally achieving success everywhere in the time of Machiavelli. Naturally, he approved of this. Peace is always preferable to chaos. The Prince is part observation of the process at work and part prescription.

f course, as soon as baronies and city-states became strong enough to keep peace between clans and classes, they began waging war on one another. Remember the war between Genoa and Venice, in which Marco Polo was captured? If he had not been captured, we would not have had the book of his travels. Genoa and Venice were always fighting. Florence, Siena and Pisa were often at war.

undreds of years of war between France and England make up their medieval history, retarding the Renaissance in both places. Crecy, Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars are just a few names that swim up from the dismal history of France and England from the Norman conquest until World Wars 1 and 2. It is only now, with the Chunnel and the European Economic Union, that we can at last be sure that the various states of Europe have ceased their bloody and pointless feuding.

orld War Two was the last of these global wars between states. The reason is the appearance on the scene of a larger political unit, the nation of states. For a time, there were two "United States," the United States of America and the United States of Soviet Republics. Now there is only one, the USA, since the USSR unfortunately came apart at the seams. This is always unfortunate, because the internal states are soon at war, as in Chechyna. Soon, there will be two nation-states again, as the EEC and NATO evolve into a European nation of states. No individual state can stand up to a nation. Not only is NATO and the EEC steadily growing more united, it has steadily gained new members, and it now appears that the former communist states of Eastern Europe will also join, and there will be a de facto United States of Europe, which may include all of linguistic and demographic Europe.

issolution of the USSR and of Yugoslavia as well as the US Civil war sounds a cautionary note. Just because a group of sub-communities is temporarily united under a single government does not mean they have formed one community. Sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn't. Before our own Civil war, we had one government, but two communities. Only recently can we really call the USA a single community of states. This unity could be challenged if individual states decided to repeal the tyrannical War-On-Drugs, root of half the violence in this country since Prohibition.

oslem Mullahs have whipped up the ignorant and disenfranchised masses of the Middle East into a wholly irrational hatred for Israel and the United States. The events of September 11, 2001, were a wake-up call for the US. As I write this, the Taliban in Afghanistan have fallen, a new government is in place, but Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network have not yet been rooted out. This is a war the Mullahs cannot win. They want to turn back the clock to the 8th Century, when Islam was a great civilization, and the West was in a dark age. The US could easily turn the sands of the Middle East into radioactive molten glass, which glows in the dark for the next thousand years. Just as the Japanese made a huge mistake at Pearl Harbor, so the Radical Muslims made a huge mistake in bringing down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NYC. Once aroused, the US is a persistent and implacable foe.

eace will require bringing the Middle East into the modern world, with science, learning, liberty, and a clear separation of church and state. Clearly the actual terrorists must be rooted out, but that is only a beginning. In the Middle East, we have a string of failed states, and a people drunk on fantastic conspiracy theories and totally unrealistic dreams of the past.

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