In this post I’m going to focus on attempts to create peace among nations, and the gap—a Grand Canyon, really—between the hopeful words of these attempts and the actual deeds of those nations.

In a previous post we looked at “civilized” societies, essentially those whose economies are based on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. In these societies the farmers’ surplus supports people who live in cities and don’t work the land—including a class of murderers, the nobility and kings. Traditionally, their job was to lead the men of their nation in battle against neighboring nations. Sometimes this was an honorable task, for defense, but often enough they marched off to slaughter the inhabitants of other places, reduce the survivors to slavery, and seize the land.

To Study War No More

Over the millennia our species became so much better at murder! We graduated from stone axes and obsidian arrowheads to bronze and iron, from catapults to guided missiles, from gunpowder to hydrogen bombs.

But throughout those years, at least some individuals dreamed of ways to end war. In the 8^th Century BCE, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah could only imagine peace coming about during the “last days,” and by divine intervention: “And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Twenty-six centuries flew by. In 1795 CE, seeing that God hadn’t stepped in yet, the philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a league of nations to ensure perpetual peace.  

In 1815, after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the dominant European powers formed the Concert of Europe. It was quite successful for almost 100 years, in that it maintained peace and relative stability among the European nations—while allowing them to suppress internal revolutions and expand and exploit their colonies in Asia and Africa. (This last is an important point—I’ll return to it later.)

The Concert of Europe fell apart in 1914, with the beginning of World War I. Although the war started in Europe, it involved colonies and allies all around the globe, from Japan to the United States, Australia to Brazil. In a mere four years we slaughtered around 20 million of our own species and wounded around 17 million others.

Most people were so horrified by the bloodbath that it was called “the war to end wars.” In 1919, at the Treaty of Versailles, the victors formed a League of Nations to establish peace. The organization lasted only 20 years. It did not prevent a number of civil wars in Europe and elsewhere, nor the wars between Greece and Turkey, the Japanese invasions of Manchuria and China, nor the Italian invasion and annexation of   Ethiopia.

The Treaty also imposed such harsh conditions on the losers of the first World War—on Germany, in particular—that it planted the seeds of World War II.

That war lasted from 1939 to 1945. During those six years we outdid ourselves! We piled up between 65 and 90 million corpses through combat, genocide, famine, and disease. I expect that many more who died subsequently, for example from radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, haven’t been included in that total. I haven’t been able to find estimates of the wounded.

The next attempt to create global peace was the United Nations. It prevented wars among the wealthy, industrialized nations of what we call the First World—the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Europe.

Unsurprisingly, like the Concert of Europe, the United Nations did not attempt to stop the wealthier, more powerful countries from invading, exploiting, and murdering the populations of the Third World, and from doing their best to keep former colonies from becoming independent. Some examples are the French-Algerian War (killing between 400,000 and 1.5 million), and the United States invasions and bombings of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (between one and two million).

Another outcome of World War II was the establishment of war crimes tribunals. I’ll look at that next time.

To be continued…