If we - whatever "side" we happen to be on or geographical locationwe happen to have been born in - are to protect ourselves from having to kill,or be killed by, perfect strangers with whom we have no quarrel, being obligedto send our sons off to die for ideals so high they can only be delivered byhigh-altitude bombers and being forced to live our days in a global charnelhouse, we had better try and apply reason to our predicament.
We had better see if we can make a little more sense of who is doing what towhom before we get dragged into yet another nightmare. Once we understand thatwar is ALWAYS the result of the machinations of criminal persons and groups, wecan begin to unravel the mystery of war. We can begin to understand what suchcriminals have to gain and the goals and purposes that drive them.
Our lives, the lives of our children and the future of our civilizationdepend utterly upon us arriving at such an understanding and upon us learningto make the targets of our wrath, not our fellow men of good will but the smallminority who, for their own gain, seek to inhibit the survival of theirfellows.
We can choose not to make such an effort. We can choose to go on listeningto the voices of unreason, to warmongers and terrorists who all pursue the sameend: human conflict. They all labor hard to instill in us such fear and upsetwe will abandon just and reasoned conduct. We can allow ourselves to be dupedby such men yet again and led by our nose-rings into their depravedviciousness.
But thousands of years of doing just that teach us that it's not a verysuccessful action. Whenever we have done so, we have invariably suffered themost gruesome consequences. So the next time the loonies try to kick off again,why not just skip it?
We can choose to do something different, to break with the agonized, often fatalgoofs of our forebears. We can refuse to be suckered by those who woulddiscourage us from reason and good conduct towards our fellow human beings andmake the effort to increase our understanding of how and why we are lied to,manipulated, terrorized and upset Maybe we can finally alter that agonizedpattern of historical folly and establish a safe civilization that will lastmore than five minutes before some nut persuades us to blow it up.
If one advocates the long-term survival of the entire human community, onemust therefore advocate the application of reason to all problems of humaninterrelations because reason is the only way any survival problem was everresolved and ever can be resolved.
There is no problem of human interrelations that cannot be resolved byreason. WAR CAN ONLY OCCUR IF THE APPLICATION OF REASON IS PREVENTED and wefrequently witness the feverish efforts of various criminal groups to preventthat application.
To the degree that Man forsakes reason, he does not survive.
Man's primary enemy is not other men: IT IS UNREASON
