Contributing to the cause of peace
December 28, 2010 6:09 PM Subscribe
What can one person do to lessen the amount of war in the world, either with money or actions?
I'd welcome charity suggestions, organizations that are really making a difference, etc.
I'd welcome charity suggestions, organizations that are really making a difference, etc.
Friends Committee on National Legislation
posted by various at 7:02 PM on December 28, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by various at 7:02 PM on December 28, 2010 [1 favorite]
Googling "organizations that prevent war" got me a few leads, such as Global Action To Prevent War, the PeaceWomen Project, and Wikipedia's list of anti-war organizations. Don't know anything about them, but you can look into any of them that pique your interest. I'm sure any of them would gladly accept your donation.
One other tack might be ye olde think-globally-act-locally technique. If you believe that struggles for the control of oil/gas lead to war, for example, you could convert to total or near-total use of renewable energies. Most people probably can't or won't take large enough steps to retrofit their houses to use solar panels, windmills, hydro, geothermal, or whatever, or give up their car, but you have a range of options open to you. You'd be doing your small part for the environment as well.
Your vote also matters, as is demonstrated when a candidate wins or loses by just a handful of votes. There are people who are far less likely to angle for or vote for war. Some make it a visible part of their campaign platform and others less so, but you have options.
posted by Askr at 7:06 PM on December 28, 2010
One other tack might be ye olde think-globally-act-locally technique. If you believe that struggles for the control of oil/gas lead to war, for example, you could convert to total or near-total use of renewable energies. Most people probably can't or won't take large enough steps to retrofit their houses to use solar panels, windmills, hydro, geothermal, or whatever, or give up their car, but you have a range of options open to you. You'd be doing your small part for the environment as well.
Your vote also matters, as is demonstrated when a candidate wins or loses by just a handful of votes. There are people who are far less likely to angle for or vote for war. Some make it a visible part of their campaign platform and others less so, but you have options.
posted by Askr at 7:06 PM on December 28, 2010
Move to a country where your tax dollars won't support war. Costa Rica doesn't have an army.
posted by novalis_dt at 8:00 PM on December 28, 2010
posted by novalis_dt at 8:00 PM on December 28, 2010
George Clooney and friends are putting together www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on December 29), as an organization to buy private satellite time to monitor movements of government and rebel troops in South Sudan, at the time of the upcoming referendum on secession of South Sudan.
""We are the antigenocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."and
"Clooney, who has made four trips to Sudan since 2006, believes Sentinel might have applications in other global hot spots. "This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, 'O.K., if you guys don't want to do anything about it, that's one thing,'" Clooney says. "But you can't say you did not know."posted by paulsc at 8:39 PM on December 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
Peace is best served by making the financial cost of waging war more expensive than not. European wars are unthinkable now because the EU did what it aimed to: intertwine the economies of each country so tightly that no individual nation would be willing to risk its own interests across the border. Advocate for free trade agreements, cross-border investments, and other international financial cooperation.
No one hates their enemy more than they love their own money.
posted by holterbarbour at 8:45 PM on December 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
No one hates their enemy more than they love their own money.
posted by holterbarbour at 8:45 PM on December 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
First: identify causes of war.
Then: deal with causes of war.
That sounds flippant, but it's the only way to deal with anything in a permanent manner. If you get cut, it's good to put a band-aid on it, as that will keep it from getting infected and help it to heal. But if you don't address what caused you to get cut in the first place - such as being are careless when chopping vegetables - you are going to keep getting cut. If you don't mind getting cut sometimes, then maybe you just live with it. If getting cut REALLY bothers to you, then you take a kitchen safety class, you keep your blades sharp (so as to not allow irregularities to form and thus introduce unpredictability into the blade's performance), and you might even switch to a safety knife of some kind.
So let's look at war; we'll make up a war because quite frankly I don't know enough about any actual, historical wars to use them as an example.
Shiloh is at war with Gilboa. Shiloh was the first to declare war, and thus might be considered the aggressor, but there had been flare-ups along the border for years before that. Why was that the case? Because of lots of things. It's ALWAYS because of lots of things.
* Slights and insults, fed by a society that needs to win and dominate (we're better than you; no you aren't; yes we are; goddammit I will punch you in the mouth; bring it on nancy), without any moderating cultural STRUCTURE to cool the hotheads. It's not enough to have Members of the Community Calling for Peace; there has to be underlying structure in place that allows people to cool down in the first place i.e. makes it "okay" to "give up" or "surrender". Neither Shiloh nor Gilboa has these, instead placing a premium on being The Best (with the understanding that there is only, ever, one #1, and all others are less-than also-rans).
* Basic resource competition (they've got better fields over there, and anyway weren't those ours Years Ago? and/or should be ours by Divine Right; you got no right to these; yes we do, because a) we're better than you (see above) and b) because they're OURS). The border between the two countries is farmland, shares certain water sources. Pollution from both countries affects the farmland roughly equally, but each side blames the other for the majority of it, whether or not this is true (and it may be so). In addition, each country has certain natural resources - metals, fossil fuels, and the like - that the other lacks and which are important to a "competitive" standard of living.
* Poverty. This spins out forever and is tied to resources, obviously, but this is what allows armies to exist. You've got no better prospects except to sign up (yes yes drafts, but the culture is bringing you up to okay the draft, because let's face it: that bastard drill sergeant couldn't do much if his 50 new recruits decided to gang up, beat the crap out of him, and walk off the base) and stick with it. You get fed (probably) and have a chance to maybe not be killed, and it's better than starving at home. Farming is looked down upon as menial work, fair prices are not paid for goods, and the place is just not very prosperous, despite the fact that the farming is generally good. Also, being poor is bad, because it means you are not The Best.
* Power, by which we mean money. Money money money money money. Somewhere, in each of these governments and militaries, are many people who make a great deal of money - and thus have a great deal of influence, power - in their countries.. and perhaps even in their neighbour's country. It is great business for them to have a reason to keep building the military, because that keeps money rolling in. They want to keep this power, and indeed grow more powerful, because they want to be The Best. The Best is defined as the person/group with the most power (see above). The fact that this military support exists allows the poor folk to staff it, who have been fed a steady diet of being The Best by proxy (not, you know, the Best Best on an individual level, but at least The Best country), and then take all that hardware over to a certain geographical area and use it to kill every other living person that is not from The Best place.
This could go on for awhile. These are not the only things feeding the war between Shiloh and Gilboa. EVERYTHING is feeding the war between Shiloh and Gilboa. Nothing exists in isolation. Also, again, I'm not nearly educated or researched or experienced enough to make claims about these things applying to every war, or even a single war in particular, aside from this made-up one. But it should serve to illustrate that the things that cause war to happen can be numerous, complicated, and interconnected.
If you want to get really nitty-gritty and blatantly philosophical, you might draw the conclusion that the reason ANY of this happens AT ALL is that all biological life is programmed to do exactly two things, and to do them in this order: survive and procreate. All other behaviours are refined expressions emergent from these two things. Life survives by consuming resources. Its progeny does the same thing. Resources are (currently) finite and thus competition arises between organisms struggling to fulfill the first biological commandment (survive).
The problem with most "STOP WAR" groups I've run across has been that they treat war as a thing in and of itself, perpetrated only by bullies and militaries. It's not. There is so much SHIT that is required to happen to support the complete mobilisation and acquiesence of a population it boggles the mind. The groups that acknowledge aforementioned shit - including that Global Action to Prevent War - essentially say, "That shit? That shit is hard. It is too hard. We're going to do the band-aid thing, and hope that's enough to let someone else do the heavy lifting."
Except that clearly isn't working.
But that's okay! We've identified war as a symptom itself, which means you need to be looking to organisations that are not about "stopping war", you need a network of organisations that is about bettering humanity (I say network because it's unlikely we're going to get an Instrumentality of Mankind anytime soon to deal with all of this on its own). This network is dedicated to the wholesale psychological, biological, and sociological engineering of humanity and its environment.
Except I don't think one of those exists, and I have no earthly idea how to approach this mess and do something about it all.
Your question is about what one person can do, with money or actions, to lessen war. I don't know how much money you have or how action-able you are, so.. Be a good person. Encourage the people you know to be good people. Start talking and thinking about where we are as a species and where we want to be. Talk to everyone. Talk all the time. Understand. Learn. Do not shy away from any of the hard things you find. Remember that things like war and crime and hate are not weather. These things DO NOT JUST "HAPPEN". They are caused by people, for people-reasons. Everything can be done. Nothing is impossible.
tl;dr: "lessening war" is triage and symptoms management. "bettering humanity" is treating the disease.
posted by curious nu at 9:13 PM on December 28, 2010 [4 favorites]
Then: deal with causes of war.
That sounds flippant, but it's the only way to deal with anything in a permanent manner. If you get cut, it's good to put a band-aid on it, as that will keep it from getting infected and help it to heal. But if you don't address what caused you to get cut in the first place - such as being are careless when chopping vegetables - you are going to keep getting cut. If you don't mind getting cut sometimes, then maybe you just live with it. If getting cut REALLY bothers to you, then you take a kitchen safety class, you keep your blades sharp (so as to not allow irregularities to form and thus introduce unpredictability into the blade's performance), and you might even switch to a safety knife of some kind.
So let's look at war; we'll make up a war because quite frankly I don't know enough about any actual, historical wars to use them as an example.
Shiloh is at war with Gilboa. Shiloh was the first to declare war, and thus might be considered the aggressor, but there had been flare-ups along the border for years before that. Why was that the case? Because of lots of things. It's ALWAYS because of lots of things.
* Slights and insults, fed by a society that needs to win and dominate (we're better than you; no you aren't; yes we are; goddammit I will punch you in the mouth; bring it on nancy), without any moderating cultural STRUCTURE to cool the hotheads. It's not enough to have Members of the Community Calling for Peace; there has to be underlying structure in place that allows people to cool down in the first place i.e. makes it "okay" to "give up" or "surrender". Neither Shiloh nor Gilboa has these, instead placing a premium on being The Best (with the understanding that there is only, ever, one #1, and all others are less-than also-rans).
* Basic resource competition (they've got better fields over there, and anyway weren't those ours Years Ago? and/or should be ours by Divine Right; you got no right to these; yes we do, because a) we're better than you (see above) and b) because they're OURS). The border between the two countries is farmland, shares certain water sources. Pollution from both countries affects the farmland roughly equally, but each side blames the other for the majority of it, whether or not this is true (and it may be so). In addition, each country has certain natural resources - metals, fossil fuels, and the like - that the other lacks and which are important to a "competitive" standard of living.
* Poverty. This spins out forever and is tied to resources, obviously, but this is what allows armies to exist. You've got no better prospects except to sign up (yes yes drafts, but the culture is bringing you up to okay the draft, because let's face it: that bastard drill sergeant couldn't do much if his 50 new recruits decided to gang up, beat the crap out of him, and walk off the base) and stick with it. You get fed (probably) and have a chance to maybe not be killed, and it's better than starving at home. Farming is looked down upon as menial work, fair prices are not paid for goods, and the place is just not very prosperous, despite the fact that the farming is generally good. Also, being poor is bad, because it means you are not The Best.
* Power, by which we mean money. Money money money money money. Somewhere, in each of these governments and militaries, are many people who make a great deal of money - and thus have a great deal of influence, power - in their countries.. and perhaps even in their neighbour's country. It is great business for them to have a reason to keep building the military, because that keeps money rolling in. They want to keep this power, and indeed grow more powerful, because they want to be The Best. The Best is defined as the person/group with the most power (see above). The fact that this military support exists allows the poor folk to staff it, who have been fed a steady diet of being The Best by proxy (not, you know, the Best Best on an individual level, but at least The Best country), and then take all that hardware over to a certain geographical area and use it to kill every other living person that is not from The Best place.
This could go on for awhile. These are not the only things feeding the war between Shiloh and Gilboa. EVERYTHING is feeding the war between Shiloh and Gilboa. Nothing exists in isolation. Also, again, I'm not nearly educated or researched or experienced enough to make claims about these things applying to every war, or even a single war in particular, aside from this made-up one. But it should serve to illustrate that the things that cause war to happen can be numerous, complicated, and interconnected.
If you want to get really nitty-gritty and blatantly philosophical, you might draw the conclusion that the reason ANY of this happens AT ALL is that all biological life is programmed to do exactly two things, and to do them in this order: survive and procreate. All other behaviours are refined expressions emergent from these two things. Life survives by consuming resources. Its progeny does the same thing. Resources are (currently) finite and thus competition arises between organisms struggling to fulfill the first biological commandment (survive).
The problem with most "STOP WAR" groups I've run across has been that they treat war as a thing in and of itself, perpetrated only by bullies and militaries. It's not. There is so much SHIT that is required to happen to support the complete mobilisation and acquiesence of a population it boggles the mind. The groups that acknowledge aforementioned shit - including that Global Action to Prevent War - essentially say, "That shit? That shit is hard. It is too hard. We're going to do the band-aid thing, and hope that's enough to let someone else do the heavy lifting."
Except that clearly isn't working.
But that's okay! We've identified war as a symptom itself, which means you need to be looking to organisations that are not about "stopping war", you need a network of organisations that is about bettering humanity (I say network because it's unlikely we're going to get an Instrumentality of Mankind anytime soon to deal with all of this on its own). This network is dedicated to the wholesale psychological, biological, and sociological engineering of humanity and its environment.
Except I don't think one of those exists, and I have no earthly idea how to approach this mess and do something about it all.
Your question is about what one person can do, with money or actions, to lessen war. I don't know how much money you have or how action-able you are, so.. Be a good person. Encourage the people you know to be good people. Start talking and thinking about where we are as a species and where we want to be. Talk to everyone. Talk all the time. Understand. Learn. Do not shy away from any of the hard things you find. Remember that things like war and crime and hate are not weather. These things DO NOT JUST "HAPPEN". They are caused by people, for people-reasons. Everything can be done. Nothing is impossible.
tl;dr: "lessening war" is triage and symptoms management. "bettering humanity" is treating the disease.
posted by curious nu at 9:13 PM on December 28, 2010 [4 favorites]
Know where every product you purchase is manufactured.
posted by buzzman at 11:24 PM on December 28, 2010
posted by buzzman at 11:24 PM on December 28, 2010
I would vote for making contributions to organizations that work to educate girls around the world. It's the biggest "bang for your buck" you can find for your donation dollars. Educating girls has a direct impact on birthrate, poverty, political participation, and disease rates. Decreasing birthrates, poverty and increasing citizen participation in their governments are the best ways that I can think of to promote peace.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 9:59 AM on December 29, 2010
posted by The Light Fantastic at 9:59 AM on December 29, 2010
>>tl;dr: "lessening war" is triage and symptoms management. "bettering humanity" is treating the disease.
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.*posted by nrobertson at 5:19 PM on December 29, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
Running for public office, and then working up through offices of broader and greater power, can eventually put a single person in a highly influential position to stop/shorten wars. Barring that, using your money to finance a political candidate could give a good return on investment -- maybe even more if the potential leader is in a war-torn country and could bring lasting stability there.
In my opinion, the closer your money gets to the political leadership of countries at war, the bigger the effect can be. Most NGO's, by virtue of being non-governmental, usually don't affect the political conflicts which underpin war (not that they don't help in other ways).
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:23 PM on December 28, 2010