Is the modern world truly more peaceful than before in history?
Question from the Internet:
“Have we really, from 1945 onwards, entered an era of “long peace” as scholars call it?”
Humanity’s history is a constant chain of war, interrupted by temporary, failing ceasefires, peace treaties. It is true that there has not been a “world war” since 1945, but we had constant war nevertheless.
And war does not only mean the actual fighting, loss of human life and property, war is also the constant preparation, spying on each other, but all the provocations, elaborate traps nations, certain organizations also prepare for their enemies.
And do not forget about the so-called “proxy-wars” that are constant, when major powers do not fight with their own people but sacrifice others to fight for their cause instead. And such proxy- wars are endless and we can consider even the war in Ukraine as a proxy war between Western powers, especially America and Russia, Russia also representing the “East”. The Ukrainian people are the sacrifice, the cannon fodder and Europe is next as long as America achieves its goals and do not even have to sacrifice American soldiers for it.
(What people do not even consider is that in the last few decades America lost its proxy-wars against Russia — not to mention that the 2nd WW was also mostly won by Russia regardless of what Hollywood is projecting — this is why they are so obsessed to “wipe Russia” off the map and from people’s memory.)
Moreover, when we talk about casualties of war, the European, North-American people — who narrate, justify history — usually count their own losses by number, with faces and stories for each, while the numbers are not counted, people are not considered when thousands or millions of people die from wars or other causes outside of Europe and North America. So when only a few Europeans, North Americans die — regardless of who else is dying — we consider it a peaceful era.
The most important for us to recognize, accept is that war is in our DNA. We are all born with an inherently self-serving, self-justifying, individualistic and exploitative nature. We all thrive on ruthless, exclusive competition, surviving, succeeding at the expense of others, defeating, humiliating others, ruling over them.
It is this human nature that ignites the recurring wars and makes it easy for skilful politicians to rouse nations against each other, build unity on the collective hate towards a common enemy.
Thus it does not matter who the major players are, who stands on which side of each conflict, what we think individually or collectively.
True peace — instead of the temporary lack of war before war resumes — will come when we all become willing to change ourselves, learn and practice how to act above and against our original “warmongering” nature we cannot suppress or erase.
We will never be able to quench the disputes, the underlying differences of opinions, historic claims, seemingly justified demands and thirst for revenge on all sides. But we can learn and implement how to behave independently from our instincts, from our animalistic urges as Human beings.
And here the expression “Human” means learning how to make Human society similar to Nature’s integral template, where each diverse, seemingly incompatible element interconnects through mutual responsibility and mutually complementing cooperation in order to create peace and a unique, dynamically maintained “wholeness” that facilitates and sustains life.
Without learning how to reorganize Humanity in accordance with Nature’s laws that govern the general balance and homeostasis life depends on we will simply not survive, we will self-destruct like cancer.
Human beings are by default cancer cells with a unique intellect that can help us overcome our cancer-like nature and build a common, single, mutually integrated living organism.