War, in the name of peace…

The thought is bewildering, paradoxical, and also quite present in our world, both now and in the past–even if it has been defined differently throughout time. Recently, Patrick Cox mused over the meaning of the word “peace” in his podcast, The World in Words (which I’ve cited several times before–great listening), starting with President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In itself, this oratory does a number on the definition of the easily-rattled-off but elusive-to-conceive word.

Here’s a segment from President Obama’s speech:

“We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or on concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem, it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’ As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive, in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King; but as a head of state, sworn to protect and defend my nation, and I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world.”

Maybe it’s a side-effect of my historiographical debates class, where we examine the words of great orators of the past, and where we’re reading and arguing weekly about Hegelian and Marxist views of history as an up-hill march towards perfect societies, but President Obama’s speech incited several things in my mind: as Patrick Cox says in the podcast, these things, phrases like “evil exists,” and “morally justified use of force,” are all things we have heard before in political speeches. Joseph Stalin defended force and violence many times, as a means of improving the Soviet state; Mao Zedong incited suspicion and approved violence amongst his Red Guard youth devotees. These are keywords used by politicians that justify a nation’s actions, and also ensure that the people are enthralled and uplifted by the leader’s response to evil. This means of inspiration, that we are improving, that we see our goal in sight and so violence is justified, appears throughout political oratory, and indeed nearly every leader in every country in the post-Enlightenment modern world harks back to the idea that we are improving, moving towards something better. Classic, and proven to be effective.

Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolence

One may write the whole thing off to being a political speech written to speak to both sides, the peacekeeping America and the two-wars America, and indeed the sentiments somehow seek to provide both at once. And that is not such a terrible thing, for nothing exists in a vacuum and nation-states tend to be bundles of juxtapositions.

So how do we define peace, within ongoing global disunity and war? What is its nature? Does it in fact, contain war, as has been argued? “The word ‘peace’ is either taken as a given or used very lightly,” said Dennis Ross, a U. S. diplomat and author. Can you have a commitment to peace but never come through, or in fact, consistently perform opposite to such peaceful notions? And on a larger scale, is progress the ability to reduce both good and bad in the world?

Listen to the entire discussion and hear the speech in the World in Words podcast #79 (the peace discussion begins around 11:30 minutes in). Then tell me what you think.

The last two weeks I’ve learned some random interesting things about Wikipedia. While the English Wikipedia has over 2.8 million entries, the next-largest is the German Wiki, which lags far behind that in size. However, host Patrick Cox points out that it is no less thorough in its encyclopedic knowledge. What the German version is lacking that accounts for the massive size difference is the thousands upon thousands of “stubs” and entries explaining very tiny elements of American or English pop culture. Stubs themselves are incomplete articles that might eventually be deleted, defining very trivial parts of culture. And the other, more extensive but equally as trivial entries might be credited to people who are experts on very specific things– say, for instance, if I wrote a whole huge entry on every detail of the Home Alone movie series. The distinction between German-language Wiki and English-language Wiki is this stringent weeding out of trivial knowledge. The German focus is to make Wikipedia the same caliber as any printed, published academia-based encyclopedia. The English-language one is, therefore, much larger, and filled with much more specific detail. This is not a bad thing– plenty of times I have needed a random factoid answered that has been a bother in my head, and have eased my mind with Wiki. It’s just quite an interesting cultural thing to consider.

It also baffled me to learn of the barriers that some language systems have overcome to streamline their own Wikipedias. Chinese language, for example, has two writing systems– traditional characters and simplified characters (the latter has been pushed and taught since the mid-20th century). Some articles were being written in simplified, some in traditional, and the characters are different enough to cause a problem for readers who can’t read both systems. Chinese programmers hastily developed a way to duplicate the articles into both, solving the issue. The predicament only gets tougher for Kazakh speakers, though: they have three writing systems. This is an element of global language barriers that I have never thought of before– that one language when spoken could have three possible translations into writing. The language in Kazakhstan can be written in the Cyrillic alphabet (like Russian), the Roman/Latin alphabet (like English), and in the Arabic right-to-left format. Adapting a system this complicated to modern world is breathtaking.

And one more trivial bit of knowledge lies in the Spanish-language Wiki. Drama erupted in 2002 after a mere mention of putting advertising on Wiki article pages enraged a group of contributors; they split from Wiki and began their own user-written encyclopedia Web site, Enciclopedia Libre. Eventually things were mended (because it had been literally just an online conversation that contained the thought of advertising), but the remarkable thing is the power of the individual in something as big as Wiki, on something so big as the Internet.

I am, after all, just one person, putting my thoughts here.