You wish the world could be completely peaceful, and so do I.
There, now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can work our way
back to the real world, almost, and talk about the upcoming World
Peace Forum in Vancouver, Canada, which begins this Friday and runs
through June 28.
Here’s the basic description of the event from their website:
The mission of the Forum is to create a global culture
of peace. This is how we propose to implement our mission:
* Publish a World Peace Forum statement: ”Building a Culture of
Peace and Sustainability,” for the global community, outlining
what individuals, communities, cities, groups, and nations can do
locally to create a culture of peace and sustainability.
* Create an ongoing legacy of bi-annual World Peace Forums, in
cities around the world, to refine, promote, and expand the culture
of peace and sustainability.
* Encourage communities and nations to plan for peace, for
example, by inaugurating Departments of Peace at city, regional,
and national levels of government.
* Celebrate and protect diversity of culture locally and
globally.
* Make war abhorrent, peace popular, and the restoration and
protection of our global ecosystems a priority.
This all has the makings of some bumper sticker slogans that are
sure to be adorning hybrids everywhere in the coming year, but
after that we’re still stuck with vastly differing perspectives.
For example, I thought the U.S. did have a ”Department of
Peace,” and it’s called the ”military.” And who busted those
would-be terrorists in Toronto before they fulfilled their sick
dreams and killed who knows how many, perhaps including, heaven
forbid, peace activists? The world has yet to see a single tin-pot
wingnut or murderous thug brought down by a bumper sticker, picket
sign or bed-in.
The peace activist also has an inability, or more accurately
put, an unwillingness, to target the message to the proper market.
Consider Yoko Ono, wife of John Lennon, peace activist, and
“singer” whose shriek is the mating call of the Tinnitus
Warbler.
In 2003, Ono rented a billboard in London, which read: ”Imagine
all people living life in peace.” Now that cashiers at Piccadilly
Square gift shops and bellboys at The Conrad have read the message,
is the world that much closer to eliminating the threat of war?
Over the years, Ono has also performed what she calls a “cut
piece,” in which audience members come onstage and clip off pieces
of her clothing until she’s nearly naked. Does all of this
accomplish or prove anything, other than Newton’s Law of Gravity?
Supposedly, this all somehow promotes world peace — either that or
it’s a subliminal ad for Pepto-Bismol.
Yoko’s husband, the late John Lennon, was and is one of the
world’s most famous seekers of peace at any cost. Consider history,
however. Since John Lennon released the pacifist anthems “Imagine”
and “Give Peace A Chance,” the couple’s “bed in,” and Ono’s first
“cut piece,” we had a continuation of hostilities in Vietnam, the
tragedy at the Olympic games in Munich, the hostage crisis in Iran,
embassy bombings, hijackings, 9/11, continuous violence in the
Middle East and constant terrorist attacks around the world. Why
isn’t it working? The answer is simple: Terrorists, criminals,
warmongers and despots clearly don’t listen to FM radio, read back
issues of Rolling Stone or attend Paris theater nearly
enough.
The above history has offered repeated lessons that peace
activists should hold their events and display their billboards not
in Canada, London or New York, but in places where they can preach
to the sinners instead of the choir — places like Tehran, Beijing,
Pyongyang, Mogadishu and in the backyards of drug cartels. Say what
you will, our activist friends are smart enough to know that
unguarded pacifism is suicidal.
This is why peace forums will always be held in nations that,
for the most part, have been historically smart enough not to base
any policy whatsoever on the advice of the kind of people who go to
peace forums.
Whenever I write about pacifism, I get letters from readers
saying that pacifists have less to do with “world peace,” and more
to do with pushing communist, Marxist-Leninist, or some wacky
off-shoot thereof, political agendas. If this is true, then those
particular pacifists are among the biggest warmongers of them all,
because these types of regimes spend “Paris Hilton on a shopping
spree”-sized dollars on militarizing everything to the point where
even their pets are goose-stepping to the tune of “It’s hip to be
Tiananmen Square.”
Then again, somebody naive enough to believe that world peace in
the absence of sane strength is possible would almost certainly
predict that Communism without the iron boot is the next great
fashion trend.
