[ Nor will they train for war anymore.” Isaiah2:3-4]
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THEY WILL BEAT THEIR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES  
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H Patricia Hynes
September 14, 2022
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_ Nor will they train for war anymore.” Isaiah2:3-4 _

Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares, a sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich
in the United Nations Art Collection, Wikipedia

 

What’s wrong, so profoundly wrong with war that compelled Isaiah to
implore for peace (without debate over just and unjust war) almost
3,000 years ago?

War breeds a plague of ills and evils.  Most immediate is the acute
tragedy for those directly killed, soldiers and civilians alike, with
civilian deaths often being in excess of soldiers’ deaths in recent
wars due to urban, aerial and guerrilla warfare.

For US veterans who have returned from war with “soldier’s
heart” (Civil War), “shell shock” (1st World War), “PTSD”
and “moral injury” (Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), Veterans for
Peace captures poignantly the lifelong agony of fighting and killing
in war.  “_Many of us continue to suffer physical and spiritual
wounds from multiple wars; we can tell hard truths.  War is not the
answer – it is mass murder and mayhem. War dehumanizes soldiers and
scars survivors for life.  Nobody wins in war but the profiteers. We
must end war or it will end us_.”

War fuels rape, sexual torture, and sexual exploitation of women and
girls by male soldiers and civilians.  Every documented war holds
accounts of this acute sexual injustice, including the current
Russia-Ukraine
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war. “For predators and human traffickers, the war in Ukraine is an
opportunity – and women and children are their targets,” states UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.  In Germany, where prostitution
and pimping are legal, social media has been soliciting Ukrainian
refugee women into the sex trade since the onset of the war.  Google
searches for terms like “Ukrainian girls,” “Ukrainian porn,”
and “war porn” spiked in the first days of the conflict. 
Further, men in border countries at train stations have been observed
offering refugee women with children transport and accommodation, only
to disappear when police arrived. 

War accelerates climate catastrophe. Militarism is the most
oil-intensive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster,
bigger, more fuel guzzling planes, tanks, and naval vessels. At the
outset of the Iraq War in March 2003, for example, the Army estimated
it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks
of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in
the four years of World War I.  Between 2003 and 2007, the Iraq war
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generated more carbon dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions
each year of the war than 139 of the world’s countries released
annually.  Re-building Iraqi (and Afghani, Syrian, Yemeni and
Ukrainian) schools, homes, businesses, bridges, roads, and hospitals
pulverized in these wars will require millions of tons of cement, the
most fossil fuel intensive of all manufacturing industries. 

Further, the global impacts of more drilling and fracking for fossil
fuels to offset sanctions on Russian oil and gas; war-related
inflation; and war-related extreme food shortages for millions in
Africa and the Middle East have undermined countries meeting their
climate targets

Yet, mainstream US and British media have all but eclipsed
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the record climate temperatures, drought, floods and fires of 2022
across the world with their preoccupation on militarizing Ukraine to
defeat Russia.  No doubt this same “monoculture media” will
sideline, as before, the many hundreds of Isaiah-like climate
scientists across the world, strategizing more non-violent, civil
disobedience actions, to wake up the world to the accelerating climate
emergencies.

“The first casualty, when war comes, is truth,” are the words of
Hiram Johnson (1866-1945), a Progressive Republican senator in
California, at the outset of World War I.  The current war in Europe,
illegally initiated by Russia, is no exception.  From the popular
media and government news releases, who knew that promising
negotiations
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to end the war in late March 2022-early April between Ukraine and
Russia mediated by Turkey, were torpedoed immediately after by Great
Britain and the US?  Both then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and
Pentagon chief, General Lloyd Austin met separately with President
Zelensky and insisted that Ukraine, with both countries’ providing
military weapons and training, should stay in the war to defeat and
weaken Russia and Putin, specifically.  Zelensky acquiesced.  Since
the war began neither the US nor Britain has ever engaged in or shown
any interest in diplomacy to bring an early end to this tragedy, with
_its plague of ills and evils_, that has by now grievously harmed
millions of lives.  This war is their war too and also a consequence
of a two-decade long broken commitment.

The US has failed
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in its promise given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, of “not one inch
eastward”- a commitment not to expand NATO east of reunified
Germany.  This assurance has been violated time after time with an
eastward expansion of NATO that is critically threatening to
Russia’s security if Ukraine joins NATO, given their shared
borders. 

“If Ukraine and Russia can negotiate grain exports, prisoner
exchanges and a nuclear reactor inspection, they can negotiate an end
to this crisis,” states the national feminist peace network
CodePink. But only if the US, the major provider of advanced weapons,
training and supplies to Ukraine (worth over $110 million per day),
supports peace negotiations.

US presidents and presidents-to-be used to boast that the US is the
greatest democracy in the world, a beacon to other nations, and the
greatest military in the history of the world.  Today, they mainly
vaunt our country for its military prowess – despite having barely
won a war since World War II, all of which wars the US has illegally
initiated.  Isn’t it time to repair our dangerously divided,
sinfully unequal country, besieged with mass murders and to join the
family of nations as a sibling, not a patriarch; time to become a
country that_ will beat our swords into plowshares, our weapons into
windmills…nor train for war anymore._

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_[PAT HYNES, a former Professor of Environmental Health at Boston
University, is a board member of the Traprock Center for Peace and
Justice and a member of Women’s International League for Peace and
Justice.  Her recently published book is Hope, But Demand Justice
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