More war?

Again it seems politicians in the West are considering attacking a foreign country so that they may bring peace or whatever else they are planning by force of will and power.

How many times in the course of history have nations taken aggressive action under the name of justification for an earlier atrocity carried out by the attacked country?

Violence begets violence. There is never, ever any justification for it. Yet we continue mulling over the details and the justifications for attacking. When will we say enough of violence, not 'well they started it' or whatever the pathetic reason is. All killing of people can be condemned whoever's side you take for convenience of religion or nationhood.

The media seems to be oblivious that there are people opposed to such action and there are those who question the whole idea of retaliation as they talk on looking for evidence to support their particular governments intended action. Where is the intelligence? Why is any talk of peace and alternatives drowned out by the increasingly loud thumping of the war mongers drum?

Does this warring behaviour solve anything? We are surely running away from the truth that we are indeed also the aggressors. This 'who is right and who is wrong' is so immature and perpetuates the madness and neurosis of war.

The problems of the world are many. There is corruption in many places and the most powerful are not the great and the good. What are we the ordinary people to do with such tyranny and injustice all around us? Should we rise up with a new system to replace the current one? How are we to do this, with aggression because those in power do not walk away and let us take over? Would our new system just replace the old one with another set of institutions that over time would become as corrupt as the current ones? Is this a clue to the problem: that to overthrow the current system does not solve the problem. So it must follow that to try to change the current system is also not going to solve the problem. We are not saying that change is not required; it is the awareness that change must be something other than superficial change using knowledge, which is the past, which is change that hasn't put a stop to the suffering and cruelty.

It may be the current system is very corrupt and in the hands of a powerful few who keep a tight reign on the rest of us but if we replaced them with ourselves without first transforming ourselves the problem would surely persist.

Let’s look into this. Let’s say we devise a fairer system on paper and ‘sell’ it to the population. They like the idea and if we live in a democracy we can be voted into power. With our new power we start to change the laws to ‘fit’ our fairer system. Those dispossessed and those who did very nicely out of the old system would soon be fighting to stop our so called fairer laws and very soon we would be put in the position of defending our new measures with whatever ‘democratic’ means we had at our disposal. What would be the difference between our system and the old system? At best it would be an incremental change that might benefit a few more people but there would be some who were dispossessed and would want to overthrow our system just like we had done earlier.

So can we see the problem of effecting change when we ourselves are in the same prison as the current law makers and keepers? The walls of our prison have to come down and once that has happened they may not be any need for talk of systems. To change the current system with another is still from the same prison. Only when we transform ourselves can there be real change. We have been forcing external change for thousands of years and we are still fighting each other. Surely we can see that external modification is unhelpful and see that what must be required is internal transformation which does not mean rationally changing one set of values for another and telling everyone to follow them. 

The truth is the injustice throughout the world, not the justification of what we have got with our institutions, nationalities, religions and cultural conditioning which continues to bread hate wherever one is.