War vs. Peace: How Efforts

War vs. Peace: How Efforts are being Made to Achieve the Latter

As Christine Schweitzer implies, peacekeeping is neither an easy nor a simple process. Peacekeeping itself has become a kind of extension of militarism -- or, in other words, one of the efforts of military occupation in foreign countries. The idea, of course, is somewhat absurd. As statesmen like Ron Paul point out, if one wants to create aggression and animosity between nations, the best way to do so is to occupy their land and send drones and soldiers in to destroy their way of life. As Schweitzer indicates, today's "peacekeepers are heavily armed, often sent under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, powerful countries participate in the missions, and the peacekeepers usually operate in an environment very different from those of classical peacekeeping missions -- an environment of intrastate conflict where one or both sides are hostile to the peacekeepers" (9). The effect is, essentially, Orwellian: war becomes peace.

Such peacekeeping tactics as the UN appears to ineffectively employ are, however, not the only means of suing for peace. Diplomacy has traditionally played a great role in establishing peace between nations. But with the rise of a worldwide central banking system, nations are controlled and manipulated by economic powers whose allegiance is dubious at best. Thomas R. Shannon states very clearly that today's world is governed by international policies, and peace must first take into consideration how nations are affected by international politics: "It is a mistake to view the world as a set of independent societies that can be analyzed by focusing solely on events internal to them. Rather…the social structure of individual societies has to be understood within the context created by a larger system. That system is the set of relatively stable economic and political relationships" (23). Essentially, world peace has much to do with the world economy, especially since the modern day worldview is one that is economically driven by materialistic ideologies.

Peace, therefore, is dependent upon the power-play between capitalism, socialism, consumerism and communism -- and often they all overlap. The problem arises when domination rather diplomacy becomes a tactic of certain world powers. Rather than working with other nations at the expense of commercial or ideological interests, nations (like the U.S.) revert to underhanded scheming, acts of espionage, terrorism, and war, and militarism to undue rival nations' hegemony. The Middle East is a prime example for the way the West has gone about ending "terrorism" and restoring "peace." The idea that the U.S. is at all interested in peace is a complete farce. It is interested in nothing but profits.