COMMENTARY
Humanity must put an end to killing

By Glenn D. Paige

Most humans who have ever lived have never directly killed anyone.

The global lesson of Sept. 11 is that we humans must learn to stop killing each other, from domestic homicide to war. We must stop praying, planning, training, arming and threatening to kill. We must stop celebrating killers and the killed and begin compassionately to recognize that they and we are victims of our failure to learn how not to kill.

For just as humans can learn to kill, we can learn not to kill. Just as we are capable of killing, we are capable of not killing. But as long as readiness to kill is abroad on our planet no one will be safe in home, community, nation, region, and world. Offensive lethal ingenuity has been able to penetrate every form of lethal defense. In conflict we must make it absolutely credible to each other that we will not kill.

Some of the world's greatest experts in the profession of killing have called for courageous creativity to realize nonkilling conditions of human life.

In 1955 Gen. Douglas MacArthur warned that weapons of mass destruction had made the "abolition of war" an urgent task of "scientific realism."

"It is no longer an ethical question to be pondered by learned philosophers and ecclesiastics but a hard-core one for the decision of the masses whose survival is at stake ... The leaders are the laggards ... We are in a new era," he said.

"The old methods and solutions no longer suffice. We must have new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts ... We must break out of the straitjacket of the past."

The task of self-liberation from lethality is an ancient one, but the globalization of hostilities and unprecedented technologies for annihilation make it increasingly imperative. The task of nonkilling transformation must be global:

• Global in discovery, creativity and effectiveness.
• Global in nurturance of creative leadership and empowerment of all to take and support initiatives that celebrate life.
• Global in compassionate commitment to solve problems in response to human needs.
• Global in determination to end killing everywhere or no one will be safe anywhere.
• Global in participation for no science, vocation or society has all the wisdom, skills and resources required.
• Global in commitment to local well-being, for in particulars lie the liberating seeds of universals.
• Global in respect for diversity and in loyalty toward the well-being of people in one's own and other societies.
• Global in mutual support among all who act to end the era of lethality that produces colossal waste of lives, economic deprivation and environmental devastation.
• Global as in viewing our planetary home from the moon, conscious of each of us among billions as potential contributors to a free, just and peaceful nonkilling world.

We need to combine the power of the nonkilling spirit of all faiths.

Whereas Samuel Huntington finds the greatest threat of war in the "clash of civilizations," he also sees the greatest hope for peace in "finding commonalties among civilizations." We need to combine the discoveries of all the sciences on the causes of killing, the causes of nonkilling, the causes of transition from killing to nonkilling and on the characteristics of completely killing-free societies.

We need the skills of all who are courageously engaged in actions to bring about nonkilling social change. We need the creativity of all the arts, not only to lament lethality but to liberate human capacity to celebrate and bring forth nonkilling alternatives. And we need to nurture leadership and citizen competence to understand and support nonkilling transformational tasks.

To facilitate transition to a nonkilling world, existing institutions will need to be modified and new ones created. A significant innovation that merits global attention and emulation is the proposal to establish a Cabinet-level United States Department of Peace (H.R. 2459) introduced in the House of Representatives on July 11, 2001, by Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, D.-Ohio. The measure now has 56 co-sponsors.

The secretary of peace would be assisted by an undersecretary and seven assistant secretaries for peace education and training, domestic peace activities, international peace activities, technology for peace, arms control and disarmament, peaceful coexistence and nonviolent conflict resolution and for human and economic rights.

There would be a four-year Academy of Peace with a five-year postgraduate public service responsibility. Although there is as yet no co-sponsor in the Senate, this would be well-understood by Hawai'i's late Sen. Spark Matsunaga, who first stood alone in his pioneering efforts to establish a Peace Department and a national Peace Academy. That effort fell short but did result in the establishment of the U.S. Institute for Peace.

In Hawai'i, the effort to establish a small, creative, and catalytic nonprofit Center for Global Nonviolence — encouraged by Nobel laureates and associates in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East — represents another attempt at nonkilling innovation.

A seven-person working group will monitor and share advances in nonviolent research, education-training and public policy in worldwide cooperation with individuals and institutions. There will be an associated short-term Global Nonviolence Leadership Academy. The center will seek to serve transition to a killing-free Hawai'i as well as to a nonkilling world.

The ancient lesson of the atrocities of 9/11 and other such incidents in history is that the benefits of preventing them far outweigh the costs of perpetual cycles of counter-atrocity.

The greatest obstacle to breaking this cycle is the belief that a nonkilling world is impossible. The only sure security lies in the absence of the will to kill by everyone on Earth.

Glenn D. Paige is professor emeritus of political science, University of Hawai'i, author of the recently published "Nonkilling Global Political Science" (Xlibris 2002) and is president of the Center for Global Nonviolence, www.globalnonviolence.org.