(The Nationalist, 8 June 2001)
When the United Nations Organization was founded in San Francisco at the end of the Second World War, its founders were driven by a powerful determination to create a new international system which would exclude war from the political process. In their opening declaration, they said they were setting up the new body ‘In order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…’ That was their hope.
The reality is very different. Since the founding of the UN, there have been about two hundred and fifty wars world-wide. Most of them are now forgotten, their causes and course unremembered. Many were a by-product of the Cold War, in which the superpowers struggled for supremacy, not by direct conflict, but fighting wars by proxy in the Third World, sponsoring one side or another. When I lived in Zambia, a landlocked country, there were wars in seven of the eight countries on its borders. And there were at that time fourteen wars underway in Africa.
As a result there were problems of coping with the needs of refugees, who often suffered great hardship. Sometimes they went without food or medicine for a long time. The usual explanation given was that the wars themselves, and bad roads, made transport difficult. True, but why was the supply of food and medicine a problem that could not be overcome, when the supply of arms was a problem that was overcome?
Some of the answer may be found by looking again at the UN. The five permanent members of the Security Council – the USA, Russia, China, Britain and France – have the prime responsibility in the UN for preventing wars and keeping peace. But they are the five largest arms exporters in the world. Does that make sense? Unfortunately it does – not in moral terms but in money terms.
When challenged about arms sales, their usual answer is to say, ‘If we don’t sell arms to so-and-so, someone else will. By selling them arms, we gain leverage with them and we use it to urge restraint’. That type of brass neck argument is not new: it was used during the slave trade. Trading countries used to argue, ‘You have to deal with the world as it is. If we don’t trade, someone else will. Besides, our slaving is more humane than our competitors’, so it’s better that we do it rather than they.’
Arms traders say, ‘Be practical and deal with the world as it is, instead of being a dreamer, wishing the world were the way you would like it’. Yes, indeed. Well, here are practical points: since the Industrial Revolution, most wars have been lost by the nation which started them. And the Soviet Union collapsed partly because of the burden of military spending.
The Gospel put it this way: ‘They who live by the sword will perish by the sword’. (Matthew 26.52)