World Peace through the Town Hall

Introduction

1) The difference between "peace" and "culture of peace" and a brief history of the culture of war

2) The role of the individual in culture of war and culture of peace

3) Why the state cannot create a culture of peace

4) The important role of civil society in creating a culture of peace

--Peace and disarmament movements

--Ecology movement

--Movements for human rights

--Democracy movements

--Women's movement

--International understanding, tolerance and solidarity

--Movements for free flow of information

--The strengths and weaknesses of civil society

5) The basic and essential role of local government in culture of peace

--Sustainable development

--Human rights

--Democratic participation

--Women's equality

--Solidarity

--Transparency and the free flow of information

--Education for a culture of peace

--Security and public safety

--Some ongoing initiatives

6) Assessing progress toward a culture of peace at the local level

--Culture of peace measurement at the level of the state

7) Going global: networking of city culture of peace commissions

8) The future transition of the United Nations from control by states to popular control through local governmental representatives

9) What would a culture of peace be like?

References

Continued from previous page

It can be concluded from all of the preceding that the state cannot promote a culture of peace as long as it maintains a military force to protect and preserve in the last resort the inequities of wealth and power that it represents. At the present time, this question, the issue of internal military intervention, is rarely discussed, let alone addressed in an effective way.

Other great peace leaders have come to similar conclusions about the impossibility of arriving at peace through the state. Gandhi said the following in an interview with Nirmal Kumar Bose published in Modern Review, October 1935 and reprinted in UNESCO (1960):

"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. . . . It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coil of violence itself and fail to develop non-violence at any time."

And Johan Galtung (1996) has come to a similar conclusion in recent years, calling the state "basically incompatible with peace":

"One reason why the state system today is basically incompatible with peace lies in the state patriarchy, in the arrogance and secrecy, in the causa sua mentality of being their own cause not moved by anybody else (and certainly not by democracy), in having a monopoly on the ultimate means of violence and being prone to use them ('to the man with a hammer the world looks like a nail'). All this is bad enough, even if generally less pronounced in smaller states, more in the larger ones, and even more so in super-states.

"But in addition states are also sustaining themselves by a specific belief system that runs roughly as follows:

* the world system is basically a system of states . . ."

"* the sum of mutually adjusted state interests is the world and human interests (like male interests = human interests)

. . ."Both are blatantly wrong. . ."

End of chapter

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The History of the Culture of War

What is culture and how does it evolve

Warfare in prehistory and its usefulness

The culture of war in prehistory

Data from prehistory before the Neolithic

Enemy images: culture or biology

War and the culture of war at the dawn of history

--Ancient Mesopotamia

--Ancient Egypt

--Ancient China

--Ancient Greece and Rome

--Ancient Crete

--Ancient Indus civilizations

--Ancient Hebrew civilization

--Ancient Central American civilization

Warfare and the origin of the State

Religion and the origin of the State

A summary of the culture of war at the dawn of history

The internal culture of war: a taboo topic

The evolution of the culture of war over the past 5,000 years: its increasing monopolization by the state

--1.Armies and armaments

--2.External conquest and exploitation: Colonialism and Neocolonialism

--3.The internal culture of war and economies based on exploitation of workers and the environment

--4.Prisons and penal systems

--5.The military-industrial complex

--6.The drugs-for-arms trade

--7.Authoritarian control

--8.Control of information

--9.Identification of an "enemy"

--10.Education for the culture of war

--11.Male domination

--12.Religion and the culture of war

--13.The arts and the culture of war

--14.Nationalism

--15.Racism

Summary of the history of the culture of war

References