'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Violence begetting violence in the Middle East

One of the truest teachings of the Dalai Lama and of other nonviolence activists throughout history is that the use of violence to attain one's goals will always cause more violence to cascade down into the future. And one of the most tragic things about gross inter-group power imbalances such as the one the world has known since the dawn of European-origin imperialism is that systems of violence initiated and maintained by the powerful nearly always end up resonating with particular harshness among those groups excluded from exercizing any meaningful power on the world stage...

Hence the fact that during the time of "White" colonization and colonial rule in Africa or the Americas, the vast majority of those killed by direct physical violence or through the imposition of damaging systems of administrative or 'structural' violence were the indigenes of the continents being colonized, not the colonizers... Hence, too, the fact that a large proportion of those indigenes killed by physical violence were killed in conflicts with their fellow indigenes-- conflicts that were very frequently stirred up by the colonial powers, who would also systematically inject into them significant amounts of high-lethality weaponry.

It is so tragic to see, in these early years of the third millennium of the "common era"-- that is, the era that is dated from the presumed year of the birth of the Middle East's prime teacher of nonviolence, Jesus of Nazareth-- the return to the Middle East of those older dynamics of violence begetting violence, and to see once again that the people on the receiving end of the killingwho are quite disproportionately those who were already impoverished and marginalized from power.

It is depressing, too, to see the seeds of further resentment, killing, and hatred being sown on a daily basis among the peoples of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Iraq by the violence that has settled like a blood-sucking vulture onto their nations, pulling so many people into its fanatical grip.

But what can we expect when the "deciders" in the most powerful nation on the earth have already, for the past five-plus years, turned resolutely away from the use of the many, many nonviolent means that are available to such a powerful nation, and have stuck instead to the employment of extremely lethal means of violence to win their goals?

The violence employed by the US administration in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past five years has not "succeeded" in the goal of winning any increase in the security of the US citizenry. On the contrary, it has created and helped to incubate nihilistic, 'cosmopolitan' terrorists in far greater numbers than existed back in August 2001. But what it has "succeeded" in doing is spreading the seeds of violence in a truly viral fashion to so many already poor, hard-pressed, and marginalized places around the world-- including Somalia, along with the nations of the Middle East.

All of us in the world need to take responsibility for working together to halt these now-spinning cycles of violence.

As U.S. citizen, I need to play my part to bring my government away from the truly major role it's been playing in spreading violence around the world. I know that in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and everywhere else where violence currently brews, there are citizens and political leaders who yearn to turn their communities and their countries away from the path of violence... But how much more powerful those nonviolence proponents elsewhere could be if the leaders of the most powerful country in the world would step up and say something simple and profound like, "The military means we turned to after 9/11 have not worked. We deeply regret the damage that we havecaused. And now we invite all the peoples of the world to a new peace conference where we can discuss how humankind can exit this phase of devastating violence and truly strengthen of the world's mechanisms and capabilities in the field of nonviolent conflict resolution."

And where are the voices of international conscience, meanwhile? Where is the new U.N. Secretary-General? Where are the leaders of the the world's other, non-US "big powers"? Why are they not all alike speaking out and saying that the tragedies of violence in the Middle East and elsewhere must be halted, the politics of accusation and counter-accusation laid aside, and a new way sought?