Give peace a chance

There's a potential nuclear stand-off with North Korea, Syrian carnage continues, President Trump intends to enlarge his military arsenal, Britain and the US conclude more arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Collective punishment of the Gazans becomes more severe, destruction and famine destroy Yemen, starvation persists in Somalia and Sudan.

In lockstep with America and to show consistency in the me-first, only-me policies, Australia cuts its overseas aid contributions and joins the chest beating nationalist race to close borders and express indifference to other countries' miseries.

In the various might-is-right attitudes and policies, peace-making values and language are absent. According to the New York poet Denise Levertov, that's not surprising. She wrote that peace is an energy field more intense than war, that in contrast to a build-up of arms in preparation for war, promoting peace required different values, a different literacy and language.

Consistent with Levertov's views, the Sydney Peace Foundation has always been interested in peace but far more committed to the goal of peace with justice.

In addition to references to justice, a peace vocabulary includes words such as non-violence, dialogue, inclusiveness, civility and human rights. Steps towards resolving current conflicts could be achieved if this language was used.

Genuine commitment to human rights would be displayed by outrage at the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Emphasis on the value of inclusiveness could replace bullying by Minister Dutton, could open minds and borders and challenge hostile perceptions of the other.

Respect for human rights and belief in the indivisibility of peoples also highlights the links between the health of human and the protection of a precious environment. That view needs advocacy not least because powerful corporate operators have a habit of treating nature's gifts only as a resource to be exploited.

Interest in isolationism is apparent in Trump's determination to build a wall, in Turnbull's linking of Australian values to his proposal to limit the entry of foreign workers, and in the UK's Brexit vote to recover Great Britain by leaving Europe. Yet successful peace negotiations have always depended on recognizing the interdependence of all peoples.

Striving for cooperation and mutual respect between previously hostile neighbours was meant to be the abiding lesson from the carnage of the Second World War. It is too easily forgotten that peace, not free trade, was the impetus for the creation of the European Union.

In similar vein, the April 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland brought together all the warring parties in that country and insisted on similar dialogue between the British and Irish governments.

In the current North Korea impasse, the leaders of the West must have realized the irony that the potential great enemy China, is the country that seems able to express the value of dialogue. Chinese leaders don't seem impressed by Trump's swagger. They urge caution and argue that military force won't halt the North Korean threat. The Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi says, 'Amid challenges there is opportunity. Amid tensions we will also find a kind of opportunity to return to talks.'

Talk of peace usually leads to insistence on crafting and sustaining a civil society, even though that view may offend those who think that trade is always more important than human rights, that running an economy is the foremost responsibility of government.

Reference to the civil society raises the thesis that social security provides more safety than participation in an arms race, that affordable housing gives greater protection than nuclear arms, that paying for universal health insurance provides more certainty than purchasing F35 stealth fighters, each said to cost a staggering $160 million US.

Mahtma Gandhi demonstrated that civil policies and relationships were fuelled by the philosophy, language and practice of non-violence. He insisted that adherence to those values and that vision produced a way of living which amounted to a law for life.

In terms of commitments to non-violence, efforts to outlaw domestic violence have been significant, but so too are negotiations concerning nuclear disarmament. The possession of 15,000 nuclear weapons remains the greatest global danger, which the Australian government seems to recognize by joining the US in opposing North Korea's nuclear missile progamme. Yet in the same breath, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have made the mind-boggling decision to boycott the New York negotiations for a new global treaty to ban nuclear weapons.

At least one leader is familiar with the vocabulary of peace. In Egypt to promote religious tolerance and to defend the interest of Coptic Christians, Pope Francis embraced Muslim leaders and referred to people of different faiths as brothers and sisters. He spoke of dialogue as 'oxygen for fraternity.'

The Pope's conduct expressed a poetry which Denise Levertov would have recognized. She wanted to give peace a chance by replacing the fascination with violence and war with stories which needed different words. She reminded us, 'A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses.'