Sometimes, when they are supposed to, things fall into place. Sometimes they even fall into your lap.
As war was looming, I saw a bumper sticker on the back of a car on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand that said: ‘Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
The quote, the bumper sticker said, was from Albert Einstein, the man who invented a variety of theories that have made it possible for us now to be a collective force of mass destruction on planet Earth.
As far as I understand it, Einstein’s theory of relativity and so forth made it possible for a bunch of scientists working for a bunch of superpowers to take the next logical, scientific step to making the nuclear bomb.
In recent days, watching the obliterating invasion of Iraq unfold on international television news networks, one thinks back on all these images, and wonders what to make of them.
What did the scientists whose works of introspective, intellectual curiosity led to the pulverisation of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki think of the all-too public articulation of their deeds? What does one do with the accumulation of know-ledge, knowing to what evil ends its publication or manipulation for other purposes can be applied?
We are focused on this, in a furiously helpless way, as the war against Baghdad enters its final phases.
Am I taking sides? Well, tell me first of all, what sides are there to take? Which begs the question: is this a war?
It is not. As the unimpeachably straightforward Judge Richard Goldstone has said, it is an illegal invasion of a sovereign state by a hostile foreign power that is prepared to flout the conventions that it was itself a signatory to — including the Geneva Convention, which that same invading power was shamelessly prepared to refer to when its own soldiers were captured and shown on the TV screens.
Following his argument, one might go on to talk about the killing of civilians, the media lies and the general outrage cited by leaders of the invading forces at the fact that the armies of the people being invaded actually had the temerity to resist, and go so far as to fire back at and kill invading soldiers. This was disgusting evidence of the enemy’s dastardly cowardice, said the invading regime (comprising American and British troops from thousands of miles, and millions of philosophies, away).
One struggles to find some logic in the philosophy of the invaders. One can only see, once again, the attitude of colonialism and domination by sheer force of military might-is-right that one thought had long been discredited.
So one goes back to that quote from Einstein, a genius of science and philosophy, when he made that humanitarian comment about the limits of human accountability, to be applied with or without the benefits of the thrust of scientific advantage: ‘Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
The world is in an uproar. The scientific advances that were struck by Einstein and others are seen only in the application of war. The peaceful applications of science are a sub-plot to the practical ways in which it is now being used.
The pretext for this war that is destined to kill so many innocents is that Saddam Hussein is in possession of weapons of mass destruction, based on chemical and nuclear technology supplied by his former Western allies, who are now arrayed against him in a new, ferocious alliance (poor Saddam — choose better friends next time, if you happen to survive this lethal round).
But who is saying a big thanks to Einstein for paving the way for the creation of the cruise missile?
I guess the reason they aren’t is that, at the end of the day, the father of this kind of scientific breakthrough would turn in his grave if he knew what his genius was ultimately being used for. He was, after all, a man of peace, not a man of war. United States President George W Bush would have made him puke — not just because he (Dubya, that is) is a man who believes in war rather than intellectual argument, but because he is a man who has no intellect at all. And nor do those around him, who are ultimately pulling his jerky strings.
‘Peace cannot be kept by force,” Einstein wrote. ‘It can only be achieved by understanding.”
There is no desire to achieve a higher level of understanding in this highly scientific, missile-guided attack on Iraq — and who knows who’s next, of course?
The governments of Britain and the US have publicly shown their contempt for the already shabbily compromised concept of a United Nations. The Security Council is bunk. Koffi Annan is just another Negro dead in the wash.
So what next? One should ask oneself what one means by Einstein’s comment on ‘understanding”.
The one side in this one-sided conflict takes it to mean that the world should buy into its own world view, and roll over and die, if necessary.
The other side (which is the one I think the great philosopher would have sooner bought into) is that ‘understanding” means trying, by hook or by crook, to understand the other guy’s point of view.
So I guess Einstein would just have rolled over and died.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza