Making Peace With Enemies

Rabin was a moderate Prime Minister of Israel who had been assassinated by the extremist Zionist Party that still holds power there. Rabin once said that “one does not make peace with one’s friends”. This was a simple statement but it addressed a profound problem that still lingers on, that is that especially in democracies it is hugely unpopular to sit down with enemies in order to try to come to accommodations and compromises – the only avenues for any viable peace or reconciliation.

Democracies tend toward extremism, and attempting to make peace with one’s enemies is simply not extreme enough for popular democratic tastes, and so it is that War can be far more politically viable than Peace. No Right Wing Radio Personality ever boosted his rating by appealing for Peace and Understanding. And then, War mongers can spout such slogan as “Support Our Troops” which can be difficult to argue with, while it can be said of any Peacemaker that he is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Well, yeah, as peace talks are indeed the first and most significant move away from War.

So we can begin to discern a trend, that while Peacemaking correlates so closely to political suicide in any democratic nation, we can begin to see why the History of Democracies are so punctuated with Wars.

And such wars tend to be more severe and devastating than they really need to be. Why? Well, since Democracies cannot make peace through negotiation, then if peace is achieved at all, then it is by means of the unconditional surrender of their enemies, that is, the enemies are driven to total despair and are apparently willing to sign off on any humiliation, agreeing to possible genocide, probable slavery, the desecration of their Religions. You see, unconditional means unconditional. Enemies must be willing to accept any fate. But is this really likely that anybody would agree to such a devastating proposition, or is it a fact that enemies don’t surrender at all but rather that they arrive at the point where they simply have no further means to resist, and that their entire nation has been laid to ruin.

The United States established the practice of demanding unconditional surrenders. It started honestly enough with one of their Civil War Generals who did not feel that he had the political authority to negotiate terms of peace, as that would have been in the province of his own civilian political overseers. So he specified that his opponents would simply have to surrender and trust that the civilian authorities from both sides would work out the appropriate details later.

But nowadays it is the American Executive Branch and State Department who refuse to negotiate and insist upon unconditional surrenders. This makes no sense, as they are exactly the people who are politically positioned to come to terms with an enemy for the sake of making peace.

There are several motives I can think of for why a Government would not negotiate for peace but insist upon an unconditional surrender – first, that the Government may have some secret agenda for its War which it wishes to remain unspoken and unspecified. For instance, if America really wants all the Oil in the Middle East and will go to War for it, but can’t ever say so, and hides its real agenda behind various ideological missionary concerns – the wish for Democracy and Human Rights in the Region. But then America goes on to kill hundreds of thousands of citizens of a country ostensively so they can be politically free, while half of them are sent to American prison camps to be tortured and held without any political or judicial rights. Well, the stated objectives of the War are totally at odds with what we see happening on the ground. Such inconsistencies point toward their being unspoken war agendas. Secondly, a government may demand an unconditional surrender in order to guarantee that a nation will be completely and utterly destroyed. We had such a situation in what is still called World War II, where the Germans had been repeatedly suing for peace since 1941, while the war continued on until 1945. You see, America and Great Britain had determined that the Post War World would be dominated by only a few Super Powers – Britain, America, Russia and China. It was felt that Germany would be so much more tractable to the plan if they were totally destroyed, starved out in an effective genocide – the best Germans would be dead Germans. What are called the Death Camps were probably more or less refugee centers where feeding stations could be set up. Food was getting low on the Continent and the Germans knew it, and the Camps were their response to the waves of starvation that were anticipated and expected, if Britain and America still insisted upon not ever negotiating a Peace. Yes, when the food ran out, these camps provided points of control where food riots could be easily suppressed, and the starving peoples warehoused to die. But where was the choice? The German Armies had TRIED to surrender but the Allies had refused to talk. Roosevelt and Churchill presided over the complete embargo of Europe and knew to a certainty that they were starving out millions of people, all while they rejected peace initiative after peace initiative.

As bad as it was, it could have ended far more badly. You see, before the war ended the obviously demonic Roosevelt died, no doubt because of the efficiency of prayers from some good souls somewhere, and that drunken killer Churchill was thrown out of office (remember that no Government in the history of the World had deliberately targeted more civilians for death than Churchill’s government during the war – dozens of purely civilian urban centers were firebombed with the express intent of maximizing civilian casualties). So, without Roosevelt or Churchill in power to maintain their plans for a complete Western European Genocide, relief supplies were sent into Europe and the millions of starving people were given food. But then the War Crimes trials went forward with never a single lawyer asking or answering the question of why it was thought that the NAZIS would deliberately kill millions of people who were starving to death anyway. Would so many millions have died in the Camps if Roosevelt and Churchill had allowed for humanitarian food shipments to be imported into Continental Europe? Since most deaths were of starvation, then the answer is clear, that the brunt of the so called Holocaust can be attributed to the Allied food embargo and to the ally’s refusal to discuss terms of peace, prolonging the War for 3 or 4 more years.

Curiously, it is a serious infringement of German Law, even today, to do any research into German History of the War. So history is left to believe the arguments of Lawyers from the War Crimes Trials. Well, would that not be the first time that lawyers had ever presented the truth about anything. What we actually suspect is that lawyers will say anything they can get away with in order to win their case. But now the History of that War is almost entirely based on such a suspect basis, that we should believe lawyers about anything. And then the lawyers took it one step further and have made it illegal to research or inquire beyond into the Truth. And yet the propaganda insists that we are Free.

The new variation on ‘unconditional surrender’ is the demand that opposing governments renounce all violence and surrender all arms and submit to complete inspections before any peace negotiations will even be considered. Well, again, this is perhaps the only viable path for any democracy which depends upon the extremist vote and extremist constituencies. As we have already established that it is political suicide to discuss peace – where enemies are defined as evil, and then the next step is to insist that to compromise with evil is in itself evil. So once such a war begins, the politicians have no choice but to keep dropping bombs forever. But then, there may be an element of deliberate genocide involved. The English told the Irish Catholics that peace would not even begin to be negotiated until the Irish had already totally surrendered which they knew would never happen, and so the English were then able to continue killing the Irish, which is probably what they wanted all along. Equally, the Israeli Zionists insist that there will be no peace negotiations until the Palestinians totally renounce violence and, furthermore, totally concede every political demand ever placed before them by the Zionists. Such is a puzzling demand, and one would wonder why any Palestinian would ever agree to it, because, well, isn’t it obvious, that if the Palestinians agreed to disarm, and agreed to surrender all of their rights to all of their old land and properties, that the Israeli Zionists would then have absolutely everything that they had ever wanted. Then, as far as the Zionists would be concerned, no peace negotiations would be required. If they already have everything they want, then what’s there to talk about? So I suspect that Israel makes impossible demands simply to keep up the killing, and for the fact that Israel continues to use its perpetual war to push out its borders more and more each decade, more and more each year. To them War is how they thrive. They are institutionalized predators. And it must be some incentive for Perpetual War that the Americans give Israel 5 billion dollars each year providing that the Israelis should never make Peace. This makes War their biggest money making business, the largest chunk of their GNP. Perhaps the Americans should consider paying for Peace rather than War.

America used somewhat the same strategy with Iraq. While Saddam Hussein repeatedly tried to negotiate terms of Peace – ‘if I did this, this, and this, then what would I get in return’? Well, America’s reply, from Bush, and even from Clinton, would be ‘You must do everything imaginable to surrender to every imaginable demand, and then we will tell you when you have finally done enough, if that should ever happen, and then we will decide what we will give you’. It was simply America refusing to talk. One can only conclude that the America’s true agenda was to destroy the Iraqi economy with its sanctions, and of course to eventually have Saddam Hussein hanged.

And then America wonders that the World has subsequently become so destabilized. America selected out Iraq, destroyed its economy and had its Leader murdered and its leading political party outlawed and run into exile. All while refusing to talk to anybody about it. It was all a foregone conclusion – America would destroy Iraq.

Then George Bush makes an announcement that Syria, Iran and Korea are just as bad as Iraq ever had been and that America would ‘retain the option to do the same thing to any of them’. My God! But isn’t that tantamount to a declaration of war? What do we expect of these Nations but that they would instantly prepare to defend themselves. Now, if America was predisposed toward Peace, then America could do exactly what it has been demanding of everybody else, and that is they could “renounce violence”. But again and again and again the Executive Branch and the American State Department repeat like a mantra “America reserves the right to exercise any option”. This means that America insists that it ultimately wants to resort to War, regime change, and murder.

If America really wanted Iran, Syria and Korea to settle down, then America could very easily achieve this end simply by guaranteeing that all Regimes would be respected and that bombing raids and invasions would never be resorted to unless in response to precisely the same kind of provocation. “If you do not resort to War, than we will not resort to War”. In short, if America could only finally renounce violence itself, it would be the first and most significant step toward World Peace. But that is the one thing America absolutely refuses to do, Democrat and Republican alike.

But it may be politically impossible. After all, what politician will not remember that George Bush won re-election simply because he was a ‘war-time’ president. Democracies may have so much invested in War that peace has become impossible. And with Democracy spreading throughout the World, perhaps the War Fever will only spread. We can see in the Palestinian election of their most extreme War Party, Hamas, an instance of this morbid trend in Democracy at work. When Palestine was a One Party Government it was able to approach the Peace Table, but now that it is a Democracy, it is just as intransigent as Israel, also under the sway of its own extremist parties that swept into power on the tide of blood lust.

I wish I could conclude with a hopeful note, but no end seems to be in sight for this continuous disaster.