Advancing the Common Good by Philip Kotler

Author:Philip Kotler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

PEACE MOVEMENT

Men seem more given to fighting than to making peace. Wars have always occurred. Two disastrous world wars took place in the twentieth century. Yet, any polling of the majority of men and women find them urgently preferring peace to war.

With the talk of a war, many people argue against it. Yet the war starts and the citizens fall in line. Eventually one side starts to lose. More on the losing side increasingly call for a settlement, for peace to replace war. A peace movement starts up to end that particular war.

We need to recognize a longstanding peace movement calling to end all wars. President Woodrow Wilson pressed his European allies to set up the League of Nations to prevent future wars, but this failed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt successfully pressed for the building of the United Nations to end future wars. However, the United Nations never received the funding to build a strong armed force to end belligerent clashes.

Yet there remains a global affiliation of activists and political interests engaged in securing world peace and that are antiwar. They advocate pacifism, nonviolent resistance, diplomacy, boycotts, peace camps, and moral or religious pressure. They urge voting for antiwar political candidates. They favor banning or controlling guns and armaments. They want more transparency to open up on the military-industrial complex. They see war as carried out in the interests of profiteering at the expense of young lives. Peace activists use political lobbying to create legislation. They favor whistleblowers, war crime panels, and cooperating with green and other organizations to pursue peace.

Peace activists have different ideas over what “peace” is or should be. Pacifists want their government not to start or participate in a war. Nevertheless, what do pacifists suggest when their country is about to be attacked? Should their country just surrender? Alternatively, should they fight back with nonviolence rather than with guns and armaments?

Those in the global peace movement favor securing human rights and ensuring all people of access to air, water, food, shelter, and health care, as well as social justice for people who have been marginalized. Many oppose the proliferation of guns, machine guns, grenades, and dangerous technologies and weapons of mass destruction and would ban nuclear weapons and biological warfare. Many have joined green parties that are found in many democratic countries.

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century gave rise to a variety of new Christian sects centering on peace, including the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren. The Quakers repudiated violence in all forms and held to a strictly pacifist interpretation of Christianity. The Quakers would not serve in the army and militia or even pay fines. Many drew inspiration from the Enlightenment period and Christianity. Among them were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant (in his Thoughts on Perpetual Peace), and Jeremy Bentham, who proposed the formation of a peace association in 1789.

The first peace movements appeared at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815–16. The New York Peace Society and the Massachusetts Peace Society were founded in 1815.

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