War and Peace

Wolves, while circling the campfire figured their chance of survival would increase with a career move, trading their howl and fangs for a doggie door. That big bad wolf who made a meal of Red Riding Hood is now a man’s best friend fetching Frisbees, Yet, after all these years they still haven’t domesticated us.

We humans have yet to model a peaceable kingdom. By some estimates there are up to a dozen wars going on right now. An uncivil civil war right here looms as a possibility if Trump loses in November and challenges the outcome.

On June 6th we commemorated the second front landing at Normandy Beach which we call D-Day. Nobody is quite sure what that letter signifies. Eisenhower said the landing had a departure date, hence D-Day. The French regard it as Disembarkation Day. In any case it was probably delayed longer than necessary given the imperative of ending Nazi atrocities. We hesitated long enough for Russia to turn the tide and lose ten million lives.

One wonders which side Donald Trump would have been rooting for. He probably would have said there are good people on both sides and those 2,500 Americans killed in combat that day were losers.

In my view, wars of the past two centuries were largely fought over the acquisition of colonies. Carnage was a result of monarchial family squabbles in 1914 by European countries, naked aggression by Germany and Japan, and misadventures by the United States, from Chile to Vietnam to Iraq, to extend our own spheres of influence.. And now the new Czar of Russia is looking to restore those good old days of the USSR. At the  same time, we are living in the decline of the American century and that is not a bad thing as nations move toward parity.

I still hold to the belief that war is a failure of diplomacy in a general sense. With the current trend toward authoritarian rule, we are likely to see more conflict since dictators never met a territorial dispute, they hesitated sending other men to die for.

(Even WWII might have been avoided if you look at the root causes which gave rise to Hitler I'm thinking of Versailles which weighted Germany with reparations and set the conditions for a monstrous dictator. Contrast this with post-war Germany in 1945 which allowed for allied occupation and assured a rebuilding.)

Male domination gets extended to global hegemony. There is, of course, a countervailing force of our better selves. One wishes we might celebrate peace the way we memorialize war. 

One day we may also give up our howl and fangs, sit around the campfire and learn to share this orb of cosmic dust while passing it along as a livable habitat.