The International Day of Peace is observed annually on September 21st. But with multiple wars and genocides all happening at the same time and thus top of mind for many Americans, it might seem like nothing more than a thought experiment. Still, we cannot hold our peace when it comes to neo-colonial violence.
Whether in God’s name or our own, over identity or interests, from hunters versus gatherers to us versus them, humans have a long history of violence. Ten thousand years later, we have only changed our weaponry. From spears to military drones, the aim remains to kill and to kill them all— just to prove that they are dead wrong.
Yet, there has been no shortage of pacifists, peace activists and prophets calling for an end to the bloodshed. Even though they didn’t live by the sword, many of them died by it— all while calling for nonviolent resistance. So, what was the actual threat since they were not the target audience?
Armed with words rooted in principled nonviolence, it seems they only won the argument. The war-making of global capitalism continues over their dead bodies.
Even el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X, argued, “If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad.” But it depends on who is being violent and who is being protected by this armed defense, right?
He continued, “If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”
Because self-preservation is the first law of nature. And it’s only natural except when we dehumanize those we remake as our enemies, as villains, as the antichrist. It’s unacceptable except when they have something we want and they won’t give it to us so we take it— “by any means necessary.”
As part of a three-pronged approach to peace-making, which includes democratic and institutionalist arguments for peace, some theorists argue for capitalist or commercial peace and believe that an open market economy will lend itself to more peaceful behavior. They believe an unrestricted market would ensure everyone keeps their hands to themselves. But “cash rules everything around me,” which makes this an unlikely option due to greed and the insatiable need for power.
“American history is characterized by its exceptional levels of violence. It was founded by colonial occupation and sustained by an economy of enslaved people who were emancipated by a Civil War with casualties rivaling any conflict of nineteenth-century Western Europe,” Kellie Carter Jackson wrote in an article titled “The Violent History of America.”
She continued, “Collective violence continued against African Americans following Reconstruction and high levels of violence emerged in American cities in the twentieth-century postwar period. What explains America’s violent exceptionalism?”
One answer is that the country was seeded in violence, the ground soaked in the blood of the Indigenous and African people after violent land-grabbing and kidnapping. In a chapter titled “Altruistic Evil,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued in “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence”: “Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. … What he (sic) says at times such as this is: Not in My Name.”
Unchecked and unexamined violence, their deaths remain largely unanswered for. Yet, they still cry out for justice.
So don’t you hold your peace on World Peace Day or any other. Say their names and then speak up for them.
Don’t hold your peace. Speak up for the 973 children who died in federal Indian boarding schools, for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre survivors who were denied reparations, for the 250,000 people who are injured and the 600 people who are killed by police each year, for all of the victims of mass shootings, 261 currently and counting.
Don’t hold your peace. Speak up for the more than 40,000 Palestinians who have been murdered during the Israel- Hamas war, for the nearly 15,000 people who have become “causalities” of the Sudanese civil war, for those who have suffered human rights abuses in Tigray and the Congo.
Because violence must be confronted and accounted for. Brute force demands that we keep silent but no more.
Peace and quiet are an impossible pairing when injustice is present. So let me hear you!