War and education

Since 1945, wars and other conflicts have killed more than 20 billion people, one million in the last twenty years, 600,000 of them civilians. Experts estimate that between 65 and 110 million anti-personnel land mines remain uncovered, ready to kill or maim in the most atrocious way. Their victims number 26,000 people a year, or one every twenty minutes. In Angola alone, there are more than 10 million land mines, one per inhabitant.

In 1997, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign for the Ban of Land Mines and its coordinator, Jody Williams. The Campaign brings together more than a thousand non-governmental organizations. Since then, many countries have committed themselves to clearing and destroying land mines, but several large nations - the United States among them - refuse to follow.

It is time to think of international security from a perspective other than that of armed aggression. It is absurd to spend enormous amounts of money on armament that will protect us from threats which no longer exist while a quarter of the population on the planet is lacking the most elementary goods and services. Political, economic, social, scientific, cultural, environmental, military and even spiritual considerations must feature in the way we look at security today.

To ensure long-lasting peace, nothing beats education. Leon Blum, then leader of the French Socialist Party, made this clear back in 1946 at the London conference that saw the establishment of UNESCO: "Education, resolutely oriented towards peace, must be at the heart of our action."

When a government is more preoccupied with issues of strategic security than the security of its citizens, and favors military rather than social expenditure, things will go wrong, sooner or later. Among the countries where the gap is widest between military expenditure and health and education expenditure in 1980 were Iraq (ratio of 8 to 1) and Somalia (ratio of 5 to 1). Vietnam has always kept its defense budget a secret but it is well known that the majority of its resources go to the Army.**

How much do developing countries spend on armament? In 1994 alone, the United Nations estimated this expenditure to be in the region of US$ 125 billion. 12% of that amount would have been enough to "provide basic services for all, vaccinate the children, eliminate serious cases and reduce benign forms of malnutrition, and make drinking water available to all around the world". With even less - 8% - "basic family planning services could be provided to all who want it and would stabilize world population in 2015". And only 4% would "reduce adult illiteracy by half, make primary education universal and give women a level of education comparable to that of men". In 1997, developing countries spent three times more on weapons than on what was needed to guarantee basic education for their children.***

In Vietnam, the communists seized power through war and attributed their victory to Marxism. The war is invoked at every turn to glorify the feats of long ago, and to awaken a young generation more preoccupied with getting rich than with following the party's directives. Writers like Duong Thu Huong, Bao Ninh, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Phuong Quan and countless others who fought in the ranks of the People's Army, openly write about their disappointment and bitterness. They all feel betrayed and keenly resent the fact that they are not free to write as they please. In a recent article , Freedom - Dream of survival for the pen, which was smuggled out of the country, Duong Thu Huong writes: "In any society, it is the writers and the artists who most need the freedom to create. To extinguish the flame of liberty is to destroy what is essential to literature and art, it is destroy their mission." In The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh observes that "People of our generation have no right to lecture our youths about our victories. We never achieved what we fought for… Like all the other combatants, I used to go back to my village to visit my old mother. A day of joy, full of emotions. Then I would get back to the dreariness of every day. Despair and doubt followed." Reading Nguyen Huy Thiep's books, especially his allegorical novel The Retired General, one is struck by the fierceness with which he ridicules Marxist heroes. According to Thiep, heroism in the Vietnam of today is a bore - "a heavy hand strangling all the necessary options for an acceptable way of life." Heroism does not exist now. Did not exist then.

The peace dividends are development itself and the resulting freedom. To promote a culture of peace as UNESCO does is to demand that the poorest countries ensure a better future by no longer investing in war and instead focusing on the well-being of their citizens, educating them, giving them health benefits, taking care of them, offering them the opportunity to have a life.

It is useless to speak about human rights to a people who are starving to death! What is the use of telling someone about freedom of movement when he or she is too weak with hunger to even walk? Isn't it comical, ridiculous even, to talk about freedom of expression and communications on the Internet in a country of illiterates and paupers? Primum vivere, deinde philosophare - physical and moral health must come first. Authoritarian regimes in general and communist regimes in particular like to wave the threat of invasion as an excuse to deny their citizens their basic rights. They like to create and maintain a psychotic state of insecurity. Their dictatorship can only survive under these conditions.

In an interview granted to the Journal de Lille in France on November 5, former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali (now Secretary General of the 55 francophone-country bloc, somberly predicted that the Berlin Wall would eventually be replaced by the Wall between the rich North and disadvantaged South. He believes that this confrontation will be exacerbated by new technologies and free market economy. One part of the world is developing in leaps and bounds and the other is stagnating. "If everyone speaks the same language, eats the same sandwich and drinks the same cola, you have an authoritarian regime… Only the weak rely on diplomacy. For an imperial power, diplomacy is a waste of time and prestige, and a sign of weakness… Multilateralism means the democratization of international relations… What matters most for me is the protection of cultural diversity."

Boutros Ghali makes no reference to another threat, that represented by the Islamic Bloc whose power is constantly increasing. Islam has the largest number of followers on the planet and controls strategic areas and resources. Political and territorial demands by a number of Islamic groups are causing real headaches for Russia, China and the United States and creating hot spots in Africa, Asia, the Middle East: Libya, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia… This issue will be the subject of a future article.

In a public debate at the cultural center Circulo de Lectores in Madrid on November 6, 1997 on the subject "What can literature do?", two renowned writers, Juan Goytisolo (from Spain) and Gunter Grass (from Germany, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature) had gone further than Boutros Ghali. For Goytisolo, the winners of the Cold War have brainwashed the planet through a clever combination of "technoscience" and "technomarket". And he asks: what can literature do to protect humankind from this well-programmed catastrophe?

As for Gunter Grass, he gloomily observes that "We live in a world of unbridled capitalism, and it is clear that the system is moving towards self-destruction. And our destruction. The cry all around the world is "Get rich!". The capitalist system is truly a fundamentalist system. If something doesn't belong inside the market (and the market decides what is in and what isn't), it's dismissed. This principle is defended with great fanaticism but with more subtlety than fundamentalist Islam. There is no need to resort to terror. Everything is decided at the stock exchange, with the help of a whole new catalog of terms, like globalization, as if this represents a full-proof recipe, as if our destiny was unavoidable. Fortress Europe is more a nightmare than a beacon of hope."****

In his essay The Second Cold War. This one is internal. Culture is the battleground, published in The Wall Street Journal on February 4, 1999, Hilton Kramer (author of the book The Twilight of the Intellectuals, Ivan R. Dee Publishing Co), writes that a new Cold War has started, this time in the United States itself, with culture as its battleground. According to Kramer, the "bourgeois democracy" represented here by the main pillars of American culture, based on the principles of virtue, merit and accomplishments, is the target of the post-modernist group represented by academics, the liberal mass media, the entertainment industry and many artists and intellectuals.

To achieve a culture of peace is, as we can see, an arduous process. Real peace cannot exist so long as conflicts can flare for any reason, so long as the problems of hunger and diseases remain unsolved. Those around the world who value culture and make it their ideal are well aware of the problems. They have to fight for peace. Culture can blossom only in freedom. If the circumstances and the environment are unfavorable, artists and writers still have the responsibility to behave like free, dignified human beings, and create freedom for themselves. And they have to do so not only for themselves but also for the future of humankind.

November 25, 1999

* Federico Mayer, A New World, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris 1999; Ramon Luis Acuna, For a Culture of Peace, Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1999, p. 33.

** Lam Le Trinh, The Misery of Education in Vietnam, France-Vietnam Culture, Paris, 4.18.1997 and Thoi Luan Times, Los Angeles, 4.30.1997.

*** World Report on Human Development, United Nations Development Program, New York, 1994.