Pacifist Rant.

Everyone is concerned about the recent events in eastern Europe, as well they should be. Many are expressing confusion about who to blame. Even more are putting the blame squarely on Putin. Don’t get me wrong, Putin is by far the worst actor in all of this, but there are provocations. Russia, at the core of the old USSR, lost the Cold War. Some of the territories that split from the USSR at the end of the Cold War have joined their prior adversary, NATO. Now there is talk of Ukraine joining NATO as well. If you look at a map, it is apparent why an authoritarian ruler in Russia would see this as a threat. Russia, which lead the USSR, and the wider Warsaw Pact would be surrounded by NATO. Do they fear being attacked by NATO? I don’t think so. The west would, however, dominate economically, and this could be making Russian leadership feel like a cornered animal.

It is important to consider that I have been speaking about the leadership of the parties in all of this. War is not in the interest of ordinary people like you and me. It never is. It never was. War is representative of the march of human progress. Throughout the march of history, populations of this country, and that, have been convinced to go along because “right is on our side.”

In many conflicts, like this one, and that thing in the 1940s, there is clearly a major aggressor. This may have been the case in many of the bloodbaths down the ages of human experience. It doesn’t have to be. The people who are actually slated to do the fighting and dying are not from the ruling class. They are you and me. Our families and neighbors. Once in the recent past, many of them were convinced to fight and die to save their fatherland from a non-existent Jewish conspiracy. Many were convinced there was such a threat by rulers who knew how to play on their prejudices and phobias.

I am not a believer in any literal interpretation of scripture but have found some relevant truth in the Christian Book of Revelation, which starts with an address to the “seven churches in the province of Asia.” Chapter two addresses specific regional churches.

The author, John of Patmos, commends Ephesus in modern day western Turkey for worshiping the proper god but admonishes them for some backsliding. He likens the leaders of the church in Smyrna to Satan. He has similar critiques of the churches in Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. What strikes me from looking at the world today is that if the author had been based in Smyrna, the good guys and the bad guys would be different.

The point I want to make is that the information we get to see about our leaders is usually controlled by those leaders. Even in our American democracy, the true government, large corporations, control most media content. The broader point is that while Revelation predicts the end times, we have not seen these things come to pass in the nearly two thousand years since it was written. This doesn’t mean I believe the human race will continue on forever. I am, in fact, certain that our civilization will eventually collapse. I fear, as did many people in biblical times did, that I may live to see it. August 1945 was a huge global wakeup call on that point.

The citizens of Roman occupied Judea certainly knew that Rome was the seat of an empire larger and more powerful than any that had been seen before. They understood that plagues, famine, and drought came and went. Combined with the growth of human civilization that even they witnessed, it instilled fear that it would all come crashing down. Crash down it did, several times over the last few thousand years.

Then came Darwin. He became famous for describing the ways in which life came and went over the longer history of the planet. In his seminal work he describes how organisms tend to reproduce in numbers too great to sustain themselves in an environment, and eventually must be ‘destroyed,’ in some cases to the point of extinction. In the last two hundred years humankind has developed technical means, in industry and agriculture, to grow the population to numbers that would not have been possible before. The industrial revolution was about a hundred years old when Darwin presented his findings, and he took note of the accelerating growth of the human population.

What will save us? I have hope the human race will survive, but that is possible only if two things happen. First everyone will need to start questioning what they are told by their leaders. Then they will have to acknowledge that growth of our population, especially at our current levels of consumption, and the effects of that consumption on the environment, is not sustainable. Modern warfare could certainly accelerate our demise.