Archive for the ‘peace’ Category
slowly slowly catchy monkey
As we approach the rather significant US election on November 5 (and the fact that they hold their national elections on Tuesdays is very stupid, but one of the least stupid things about their elections in general), I’ve been indulging in absurd fantasies – though I prefer to call them thought experiments – about a future electoral system. ‘Absurd’ isn’t a term I like to use about myself, but I must admit that when I mention this thought experiment, I get a ‘please go away and stop bothering me’ response. So what do I do when nobody wants to listen? I post it on my blog and pat myself on the back.
So my idea is that, perhaps under the influence of some soma-type happy drug, or perhaps just because there’s a near world-wide irritation with male political leadership, at least in the democratic world (let’s not get too optimistic), laws are passed in quick succession banning males from standing for political office and banning males from voting (ok, let’s leave aside for now all the gender-bending categories… if you identify as female you can vote?…but what if you’re pretending to identify…?)
Anyway, in justification of such an absurdity, in the US Presidential elections, which began in 1788-9, 45 separate individuals have been elected, none of them female. Women weren’t given the right to vote until 1920, under the 19th amendment, after decades of heroic struggle. Hilary Clinton became the first woman to stand for election, in 2016, after nearly 230 years of elections! She won, of course, on the popular vote, but that don’t matter in the US of A.
So how would such an impossible scenario go? And, yes, of course I’m going to invoke bonobos.
Well of course there are fascist-style, ‘I alone can fix it’ type women, but they’re far out-numbered by the men of that type, and there are collaborative-style, non-adversarial men, but women are generally better at working together. Just look at the stats, from any country you prefer, on male versus female violence. Just look at the Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace organisations, which have been struggling together for decades, with no male alternative. Just look at the hooliganism associated with men’s soccer games, in some countries, and its absence in the women’s game. Just think of (projected) 30% rules in the various military organisations worldwide, because it’s known that female boots on the ground are more effective at winning hearts and minds, and finding collaborative solutions. Actual peace-keeping.
Of course, banning men from this or that organisation or activity is coercive and won’t happen (to men), but it’s certainly a pleasant thought experiment. An all-female military? Imagine it if you can. You certainly won’t have trouble imagining an all male one. It fact it doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. Any more than an all-male Presidential system, an all-male Politburo, or an all-male dictatorship.
So while I’m not trying to create a new SCUM manifesto, I do think that cutting down severely on male domination, in politics, finance and every other power-making activity, something that the WEIRD world is oh so gradually doing, is pretty well essential for our long-term survival. And bonobos provide something of a template.
It’s easy to scoff and point out that we’re so vastly superior to our language-deprived, tree-climbing closest rellies. After all, look where patriarchy got us – eight billion plus people, world domination, and geniuses like Donny Trump and Vlady Putin. But today’s human aims – sustainability rather than endless increase, sharing the resources of the biosphere rather than exploiting them, peace, persuasion and preservation rather than domination and destruction, and so on, are obviously more suited to the nurturing sector of humanity than the murderers and blowhards.
So how to give power to the bonobo possibilities within our human natures? By noticing, that’s the first thing. Actually taking note. Not only of how bonobos bring up children, deal with families, and treat (bonobo) strangers with guarded friendliness and peace offerings, but of how similar behaviour in humans, led predominantly by the females, bring about a similar bonding, mutuality and trust. Think of the waste, the desolation created by Putin’s territorial nonsense, by Xi’s pretended ‘need’ to take back Taiwan, by the hapless hope of many ‘Arabs’ and ‘Israelis’ of winning and ridding their world of the other. Think how very male it all is.
Of course, I’m being very idealistic, or at least too impatient. Humanity evolves, and, I’m hoping, in a good way. Yes we’re facing, or I should say creating, huge problems – climate change, over-population, species depletion, the nuclear threat, the lure of fascism, and still, decisions are being made here and there, that are worsening the situation. I don’t quite believe in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity depiction of humanity’s future, but I do think that, overall, we’re evolving in the right direction. Patriarchy is coming under pressure, and the pressure is very gradually growing. And bonobos, those dumb primates, are putting us to shame in that department.
So – slowly slowly catchy monkey.
References
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
NATO’s troubles and possible solutions – plus de femmes peut-être?
I’m coming to the end of Peter Apps’ big book, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO, which seems to be a fairly balanced account of the successes and failures of that organisation since its formation in 1949. Of course NATO was a product of, and inevitably led to the heightening of, the ‘cold war’ that more or less still persists today between democratic and democratising countries and the world’s dictatorships. One very unsurprising feature of the book, and the history it explores, is that it’s overwhelmingly dominated by males. A handful of female leaders get a mention of course, such as Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and Hilary Clinton as US Secretary of State, and Apps does refer to at least one female troop deployment in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but then warfare, and even defence against warfare, is generally (with the emphasis on generals) not-so-secret men’s business.
The organisation’s name has obviously become a teeny problem too. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was an agreed militarily defensive co-operative thingy between nations more or less bordering the north Atlantic – the USA and Canada on one side, western European nations on the other – and it was created in particular to protect against the Bad Guys further east, in Eurasia. This was all very vague, understandably so, and the principal bad guy, post-WWII, was Stalin and the Soviet Union. Of course it would be undiplomatic to be so blunt and black-and-white, so it has generally presented itself as a defensive-protective organisation with a more or less flexible mandate, aiming to promote stability, democracy and peace via defensive alliances. However, since the persistent threat has always been from the east (of western Europe), it’s not surprising that those regions close to the USSR and later Russia, who saw themselves, rightly, as most in need of protection, would want to join the NATO club. And it’s also not particularly surprising that the least threatened nations, those on the other side of the Atlantic, would be less keen to spend money and resources on distant eastern Europe.
Of course there are many other forces at play, such as nuclear arms, expansionist motives (both from a democratisation perspective and that of dictatorial land-and-resource grabbing), and historical squabbles regarding ethnicity, nationhood, religion and so forth. In NATO’s 75-year lifetime, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact have disappeared, as have Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East and West Germany. Spain, Portugal and Albania have fully democratised, Greece has wobbled, and the nations of the former Yugoslavia, and surrounding regions (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo) have all gone though experiences barely imaginable here in sunny Australia. But the countries today, and generally throughout NATO’s lifetime, that are most exercised by NATO’s politics and plans, are those on the front line vis-a-vis Putinland – the Baltic States, Finland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Turkiye. Generally not considered North Atlantic states, but all, I would argue, deserving of NATO protection and support, in spite of a couple of them being currently ruled by thugs. Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest nations, and with a female President (Maia Sandu) is particularly vulnerable and divided between pro-Russian and pro-EU factions. It isn’t a member of NATO. On the other hand, Turkiye has been a NATO member since 1952 but its conservative ‘strongman’ President has been unpredictable in dealing with the organisation, though forceful in opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hungary, under the awful Orban, is another unpredictable problem.
The best thing about NATO is that it’s aggressively defensive (the bonobo way). The most problematic thing is that it’s a combo of different nations with very different histories, very different languages, different economic capacities, and different views regarding threats and opportunities, trying to work as one. It also has to work alongside other common interest organisations such as the EU and the UN, with its peace-keeping forces. Its ultimate aim, if it has one, is to reduce tension by having every nation on the same side, basically the democratic side. In that respect, it seems to me, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq present an even bigger obstacle than Russia, which, once Putin is gone and discredited, is more likely to turn democratic than most Islamic countries. Then again, he could always be replaced by someone even worse, and Russia is more of an existential threat than any Middle Eastern nation.
Of course, NATO would benefit, as would the human world, from far more female involvement at the highest levels (and, needless to say, they’re also more effective at ground level, in the winning of hearts and minds). And I have to say, having now finished Apps’ book, that as we get to the past decade or so of NATO’s life, more female voices come to the fore, as foreign ministers or spokespeople for NATO or associated organisations. But there has, of course, never been a female Secretary General of the organisation. Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg has just ended his ten-year stint in the job and handed over to the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte at the beginning of this month. In a recent interview, Stoltenberg was asked what could have been done differently, especially with respect to the Ukraine-Russia conflict:
He answered that he regrets that NATO allies and NATO itself did not do more to strengthen Ukraine before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Potentially, the threshold for Russia to attack would have been higher if Ukraine had been militarily stronger. The USA, Canada and the UK trained Ukrainian soldiers in a training center in Ukraine, but NATO did not. NATO could have given much more training and equipment.
No doubt all this is true, but he made no mention of Ukraine’s long-stated desire to join NATO itself. Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO covers the organisation’s history up to around mid-2023, so including the invasion of Ukraine by Putin. Here’s what Apps has to say about the situation more than a decade before:
Following the Georgia conflict, Ukraine’s President Yushchenko said protecting his country’s sovereignty would require stronger defence and better relations with NATO – membership if possible. When alliance defence ministers met in November 2008 in Estonia, the question of whether to speed up Ukrainian admission was top of the agenda. European members remained divided, Germany and France still unquestionably opposed. Bush administration officials suggested both Georgia and Ukraine should join quickly. The Europeans rejected the proposal.
No explanation given. Those countries bordering Russia, especially the Baltic states, were constantly warning other NATO nations about the Putin threat, largely to no avail. I’m no expert on this sort of diplomacy, for want of a better word, but it seems callous in the extreme to have left recently democratic Ukraine without proper support when everyone knows that Russia, more than anything else, is what NATO is all about.
I blame the male psyche… just because it’s my favourite target.
References
Peter Apps, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO, 2024