Real Peace

The President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins made a speech to the United Nations General Assembly a few days ago in New York.

It was a quietly brilliant speech.

The United Nations like the old League of Nations was born out of war, war is in its system. If that were not so it would never have contemplated giving major powers of decision-making, or of hindering decision-making, to their members who were biggest, potentially the richest and militarily the most powerful. But that is what they did. Being born out of war the UN was concerned with opposing aggression, and "aggression" was often defined by its most powerful members, not its weakest; with stabilising fragile ceasefires, creeping gradually towards the idea that, as one of those great powers' leaders Mr Trump says, The answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; trying to stabilise power between  nations who have nuclear weapons rather than courageously and effectively working to ban  nuclear weapons altogether; supporting commercial sanctions in full knowledge that trade and loss of trade are two important causes of war not of stopping it.........

The strength of President Higgins' speech to the UN this week was that he looked above and beyond the idea of trying to beat war-makers at their own game, that is, condoning or encouraging the international arms race in the inhumane hope that the "good guy" will always have a bigger nuclear button than anyone else. He or she may well have a smaller range of moral responsibility.

Michael D Higgins did what real peace makers do,  proclaimed the difference between stopping wars and making peace. Wars are stopped when one side is defeated and we human beings are never content to stay beaten, so ending wars by defeating enemies will be a game to last forever. The United Nations has presided over  international  destruction of peace by permanent war, international tragi-comedy of powerful leaders behaving like children and  arms manufacturers forcing children to behave like soldiers. The United Nations needs, and never has had, an ideal of making peace. Managing wars, or even managing cease-fires is a tactic not an ideal.

From time to time a ray of light appears in this gloomy Nursery of Nations. Perhaps we have become too easily satisfied. It is reasonable to suggest then that if the United Nations really wanted to make peace, or knew about making peace as distinct from letting people taunt and torture each other into war and then pretending to stop  the unstoppable, it would constantly engage its members in the practical tasks of international good behaviour and sanction their members for refusing to do carry them out.  Providing enough water for the world population is a do-able task and in many places could be done for thousands of people for the price of a single missile.  So which government  will instruct its  representatives at the UN to say this, and keep saying it until even the United Nations listens and shouts with rage to the scientists and the merchants and the powerful not just to get our people out of poverty but to help our people advance into prosperity, to stop using your genius to make profits out of death, start making life out of your profits.

"The young of the world are appalled by any suggestion... that the strut of the powerful and the wielders of power can prevail in the UN Security Council........... It is an affront to humanity that, in these first decades of the twenty-first century with all its promise, at a time when we have the capacity to abolish all forms of human poverty, we share a planet with hundreds of millions who are, even as we speak here today, deprived of their most fundamental rights...........It is not nothing less than a moral outrage that our boundless capacity for creativity and innovation, and the fruits of new science and technology, are turned, not to the promotion and preservation of peace, but to the pursuit and prosecution of war"  (President of Ireland Michael D Higgins, April 24th 2018).

The war-makers have shown the United Nations how powerful they are.

The small nations of the world can be powerful too and now they must show it.

President Higgins needs our support.