Should we bother about the UN’s International Day of Peace today?

We saw a latter day example of a colonial wars in the invasion of ancient Australia, where the opposing sides were totally unequal in terms of having weapons of mass destruction.

Here the invading colonising settlers robbed the nomadic first nations of the means for the continuation of their nomadic way of life by forcefully dispossessing them of their land.

They established a settled society across the continent so that the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of the first nations have become progressively impossible, resulting in the displacement and impoverishment of Aborigines.

Although over the last ten thousand years there have been many wars resulting in the frequent absence of peace in many countries overall, the rate of wars and violence globally has been going down even during this period.

Nevertheless, nations continue spending ever more on armaments even though the opportunity cost of such expenditures is enormous in terms of resources being syphoned away from even making a dent on resettling the over eighty million displaced people, on reducing poverty, on spending the money on Covid 19 vaccine for strife prone and impoverished nations and on effectively combating the causes of disastrous global warming.

Dwight Eisenhower's advice in his famous 'A chance for peace' speech offered in 1954, has largely been ignored by nation states. He said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

In 1968 Mahalia Jackson sang the famous spiritual, 'There shall be peace on earth' at the greatest symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, that divided East and West Berlin.

She sang:

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.
The peace that was meant to be.
I walk with my brothers in peace and harmony.
Let's take each moment and live each moment in peace eternally,
Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.

After she finished, a journalist told her:

I never believed in God, but when you sing it gives me goose bumps.