20 September 2001, 12:05am IST
C Jayanthi.
Since time immemorial, humankind has strived for peace. we all know we can thrive only in peacetime. for culture and civilisation to flourish and for us to experience the kind of well being we have over the past several decades, we need peace. to think of matters, material and spiritual, we need to harbour peace. now that we seem to have a war virtually on our doorstep, we need to understand that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. if through centuries of war, the human civilisation has not achieved eternal peace, one more show of strength might not provide the answer to the world's woes. "where there is peace, god is," says a proverb. those who declare war in the name of religion or a cause or simply to wreak revenge should understand that it will only lead to more hatred and more wars. no religion advocates war, all religions advocate peace. very often, human suffering is caused by just a handful of people because of their brutal interpretation of religion and dogmatic policies. this is done by a few in the name of the majority who are just ordinary, peace-loving people who go about their lives without harming a single soul. yet, in their name armies are raised, armaments are sold, war cries sounded and people killed en masse. the buddha has said, "many are those who are not aware that one day we all must die. and those who are aware of it appease their quarrels''. we should, therefore, remember that quarrels or wars do not get over in a day and seldom are they won. the scale of suffering that ordinary people are subjected to in their wake is unimaginable. however, we never seem to learn. we have made this world into a theatre of war rather than a theatre of peace. how many more widows and orphans do we need to prove the futility of war? the qur'an has said, "god invites you to the home of peace. he guides whom he will to a straight path. those that do good works shall have a good reward, and more besides. neither blackness nor misery shall overcast their faces. they are heirs of paradise: in it they shall abide forever''. need one say more? no religious text therefore advocates war. yet over and over again, we seem to believe that the only solution to any of our problems is through war. one day a nation's pride is hurt, another day a territory is snatched, the third day lives are destroyed in a terrorist strike -- and the solution we have figured out is war? are we plotting the extinction of the human race? we say, `let's negotiate, let's talk', yet in the end we are too impatient to resolve our issues through peaceful means. one man, mohandas karamchand gandhi won independence for this country through peaceful non-cooperation. hasn't the world seen it work? haven't we learnt anything at all from it? the bible has said, "glory to god in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men''. which religious text therefore advocates hunt out every single person, do not rest until there is bloodshed and, destruction spreads until the ends of the earth. no text. war therefore is in the minds of men. we let it invade our personal spaces, we let it invade relationships and we let it destroy people. we even use words as weapons in the absence of arms. we do not strive towards peace, we only talk about it, pay lip service. in the end when there is war, we feel justified as we have then extended war zones to larger spaces to encompass the entire world. no one should be untouched by it. settling scores, that's the way we see it. what right then do we have to bring children out into this world? are we able to promise them any better than what we have experienced? we anyway are at war with each other and sooner or later we will throw them into it. we have taught them that they are living in a sane world but then that world is meaningless fiction, it does not exist. harm and destruction is the reality and our children who were brought into this world with hope will experience the opposite. but then, we forget that. the german dramatist bertolt brecht has said, "the wickedness of the world is so great you have to run your legs off to avoid having them stolen from under you''. let us run then, let us run like mad from the rumbles of war and create the religion of love that god intended for us and the apostles of peace advocated. the violent images and the shrill demands for war that are beamed day in and day out on our television screens only serve to aggravate the situation. however, as john milton said, "peace hath her victories/ no less renowned than war''. let us then sound the bugles of peace.
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