OVERVIEW

The slogan of this helpful series is: "Those who do not know their opponent’s arguments do not completely understand their own." During and after 1991’s "Desert Storm," a young high school student plastered his car with peace stickers and slogans. He was a good student, active in sports and the school play. On one window he wrote, "What right do we have to kill?"

The book begins with an introductory essay on thinking and reading skills—evaluating sources; distinguishing fact and opinion, bias and reason; identifying stereotypes; and recognizing ethnocentrism.

A variety of essays offer differing viewpoints in chapters asking these questions:

• Are humans aggressive by nature?
• What causes war?
• Is nuclear war ever justified?
• What is a war crime?
• Are peace movements effective?
• Can war be eliminated?

RELATED QUOTES

The quotations speaking to the above questions in this book are valuable in their own right:

 

ARE HUMANS AGGRESSIVE BY NATURE?

 

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debating it.
—Joseph Jourbert (1754-1824)

We know more about war than we do about peace—more about killing than we know about living.
—General Omar Bradley

The somber fact is that man is the cruelest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.
—Anthony Storr

Man is not programmed to kill and make war.
—Richard E. Leakey

Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.
—Robert Ardrey

No human being has ever been born with aggressive or hostile impulses.
—Ashley Montagu

Men are...creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
—Sigmund Freud

 

 

WHAT CAUSES WAR?

 

In general, those who plan do not kill and those who kill do not plan.
—Richard J. Barnet

We crave scapegoats, targets to absorb our self-doubts, our feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness.
—Robert Coles

Sheer hunger has driven men into battle much more often than people brought up in opulent countries can imagine.
—Stanislav Andreski

I deeply believe that war is a sickness, though it may be mankind’s sickness unto death.

The first general theme that compels attention is that no nation that began a major war in this century emerged a winner.

In our time, unless the vanquished is destroyed completely, a victor’s peace is seldom lasting. Those peace settlements that are negotiated on a basis of equality are much more permanent and durable.

Turning to the problem of the outbreak of war, the case studies indicate the crucial importance of the personalities of leaders...the most important single precipitating factor...is misperception...There is a remarkable consistency in the self-images of most national leaders on the brink of war. Each confidently expects victory after a brief and triumphant campaign...This common belief in a short, decisive war is usually the overflow from a reservoir of self-delusions held by the leadership about itself and nation.
—John G. Stoessinger

 

 

IS NUCLEAR WAR EVER JUSTIFIABLE?

 

Those who pray that they will never have to use nuclear weapons must be willing to use them if necessary...we value the freedom to rear our children in religious faith and to preserve for (all possible) a measure of political and social freedom.
—Kenneth S. Kantzer

Can anyone seriously conceive of Jesus dropping nuclear bombs or launching an ICBM which would kill or cripple thousands of mothers and children?
—Reo M. Christenson

Our nation’s only hope of remaining free is to be prepared to go to war even at the risk of being destroyed.
—H.O.J. Brown and George Mavrodes

No all-out nuclear war can ever be a just war and no provocation...can justify our beginning one.
—Lewis B. Smedes and Arthur F. Holmes

 

 

WHAT IS A WAR CRIME?

 

The essence of war may be an expression of lawlessness, but surely, but surely it does not obviate the need for basic human decencies...obedience to basic laws of God and man.
—K.G. Kehl

War is kill or be killed...It is the avowed purpose of the Army to make killers out of you.
—Lesley J. McNair

The American crime of dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities is without parallel in world history.
—Shigetoshi Iwamatsu

Experience whispers that the pity is not that we used the bomb to end the Japanese war but that it wasn’t ready earlier to end the German one.
—Paul Fussell

Lt. Calley was unfit to be put in charge of the operation at My Lai (Vietnam). He is not guiltless. Even if his intellect was inadequate, his feelings ought not to have been. Some of the soldiers under his command abstained from taking part in the massacre, in defiance to his orders...Calley is not innocent, but his superiors’ guilt is (much heavier).
—Arnold Toynbee

Mylai was known as ‘Pinkville’ to the U.S. troops and the members of Charlie Company were afraid of this village...If I tell you we lost 28 men wounded and four killed in that minefield (planted by the guerrillas of Mylai) that’s not the same as you being there and watching us lose those people. Hendrickson (blinded by a booby trap) also lost two legs, the use of one arm, a finger on his other hand and most of his hearing, and was also wounded in the genitals...I’d rather be dead than to come home decapped.

The men were frightened, but they believed they would end the guerrilla harassment and avenge the death of their comrades and the atrocities committed on people like Henrickson.

Instead of finding cold-blooded killers among the former members of the company, I found stunned, dazed guilt-ridden boys. Most of them had been reluctant draftees scooped from the ghettos, the farms, or the poor neighborhoods of working-class American. The reason they didn’t act like professional killers was that they weren’t.
—Martin Gershen

Well-adjusted people may get caught up in a tangle of social forces that makes them goose-step their way toward such abominations as the calculated execution of six million Jews and the systematic elimination of the elderly and other unproductive people. It may be comforting to believe that the horrors of World War II were the work of a dozen or so insane men, but it is a dangerous belief, one that may give us a false sense of security.
—Molly Harrower

 

 

ARE PEACE MOVEMENTS EFFECTIVE?

 

Our survival depends on worldwide concern and political mobilization forcing governments to view nuclear proliferation as irrational behavior.
—Mark E. Tompson

It was the peace movement (as Hitler began his aggressions) that paved the way to war.
—Ed Fredricks

Our objectives must be to free Europe from confrontation, to enforce detente between the U.S. and Soviet Union, and, ultimately, to dissolve both great power alliances.
—European Nuclear Disarmament Committee

A study of the history of peace movements challenges one’s ability to be optimistic.
—James Clotfelter

 

 

CAN WAR BE ELIMINATED?

 

The most feasible approach to drastically reducing the possibility of war is to limit armaments to those useful only for defense.
—Harry B. Hollins

Necessary changes will come only when people...press government officials to end the deadly war system in favor of a global peace system.
—Robert C. Johansen

The method of nonviolent resistance...does not leave a sense of frustration and it brings a more perfect peace.
—Richard B. Gregg

Civil-based defense could break the technological weaponry spiral, and bypass the major problems of negotiated disarmament and arms control agreements.
—Gene Sharp

The United States could now take unilateral actions that would...increase the safety of the...rest of the world.
—Linus Pauling

It was first proposed at the close of the Revolutionary War...George Washington advanced a similar idea...Today a peace academy should be an even more compelling idea than it was to the founding fathers.
—Don and Lynn Leverty

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

• What are your attitudes and beliefs about war and peace? To what extent have you tested these in serious study and understanding of those who take a different position?
• Which above quotation challenged you most? With whom do you most agree? Explain. How would you like to respond to the authors of those compelling quotations?
• About what issue would you like to know more?
• How would you like to see these issues about war and peace discussed?

 

IMPLICATIONS

• Few matters are of graver concern to the world than the challenge of war and peace. It follows that few issues are more difficult to discuss honestly among people who may violently disagree.
• It is important that families, schools, churches, and youth groups provide opportunities for children and young people to express their fears and to explore their ideas about war and peace.
• Human experience, history, the social sciences, economics and politics—each of these perspectives unite in one’s theology or philosophy of human nature and in one’s interaction in considering global survival.