Earth's New Season by Guy Dauncey

As humans, at some point in time, we have to come to terms with the fact that we fight. As a boy growing up in England, my school required us to do military training one afternoon a week. Clutching old First World War rifles, we ran around doing make-believe exercises on the heath. I even became a make-believe sergeant, with three stripes on the arm of my rough khaki uniform. If boys were going to be ordering each other around, I thought, I’d rather be giving the orders.

As a child, I played with war toys. I had a complete set of Dinky army toys, a wooden fort, and small metal canons that fired matchsticks. I spent hours drawing steep cliffs being attacked by Germans, with machine guns firing pencil lines of bullets across the page. Tatatatatat! I devoured the comics, full of German soldiers saying stupid things like "Mein Gott!" before they were blown up. We were exorcising the ghosts of the war that had been fought 15 years earlier, when so many had died.

As soon as I left school, I became a pacifist. Warfare and killing seemed stupid and horrifying. I had a friend who raised her son to be a pacifist, and stopped him from playing with war toys. As soon as he left school he joined the marines. He is probably in the Kuwaiti desert, right now. In my thirties, after a period of introspection and therapy, I stopped being a pacifist. If someone was intent on killing me, I decided, and there was no way to disarm him, I would not shy from trying to kill him first. In trying to kill me, he had compromised the sanctity of his life. If I had been a teenager in 1940, when Hitler’s stormtroopers were ravaging Europe, I would have joined up.

Throughout history, human tribes have fought each other for territory, food, and power. All land is occupied land that has been stolen from another tribe at some point in time. We only enjoy life in lotus land because the immigrant European tribes took the land from B.C.’s native tribes by the force of numbers, guns and law courts. Looked at this way, it’s easy to grieve about the human story, and despair about the American government’s itch to make war on Iraq. Their military machine is so huge; their defence budget so vast; their control over their media so persuasive; their determination to dominate the world so strong.

But, wait a moment. Throughout history, our consciousness has evolved. By conquest, travel and trade, our sense of who we are has evolved from clan to tribe to nation to superpower-bloc, until it emerged at the dawn of peace with the realisation that we are all citizens of one small planet, and we don’t need enemies at all. There are still many tribal conflicts, from the Balkans to Indonesia, but the progress of consciousness appears to be one-way, from fragmentation to unity. As soon as we step across the final boundary, into planetary co-operation, our identity is no longer described by "us" and "them". There are no more sides. There may still be conflict, but there is no more war.

For the empire-builders in the White House, however, stuck in the steely enemy-consciousness of war, there has to be an enemy. They tried to make China their enemy, soon after Bush was elected; then Osama bin Laden attacked them, and made their day. Today, they want to dominate Saddam Hussein. If everyone is equal in one co-operative world, they feel, what use is it being an American? An American has to be better, as a fundamentalist Christian has to possess the only true religion, and orthodox Jews have to be God’s chosen people.

Half the world’s people are living in the dawn of peace, while half are living in the final darkness of war. The true struggle over Iraq is not about oil, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction. It is about dominance versus cooperation. Saddam and Bush want to dominate. France, Germany, and the thirty million people who marched for peace in February want to co-operate. This is the real struggle we are engaged in.

There must be a hundred ways to persuade Saddam to disarm without going to war. Germany and France came up with a pretty good starter list. To the planetary mind, war is a sign of total failure, a temper tantrum of the old order.

Our vision of a better world, where we use our wealth to heal our planet, is at risk. Now is the moment when we must write, email, protest, when we must lie under the incredible sky saying PEACE together with our naked bodies. Now is the time.

Guy Dauncey lives in Victoria. His website is www.earthfuture.com.




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