The Long Road Beyond War |
Still from the film of Graham Greene’s “The Comedians.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Looking at just eight conflicts today, the words feel less like fiction than prophecy. The challenge for the world should be to find paths to peace. Instead, we walk an endless corridor of killing. We are voyeurs in a perpetual dance of death. And yet, when conflicts are studied with a humane eye, the routes to peace appear. The greater tragedy is not that peace is impossible, but that ambition and ego outweigh every mechanism meant to restrain them.
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal,” raged John Steinbeck. The latest Israel–Gaza crisis may have begun with Hamas’s October 2023 attacks, but it has spiralled far beyond: Gaza lies in ruins, Lebanon and Yemen are entangled, Syria and now Qatar pulled in, tens of thousands dead. A ceasefire once seemed possible, until the strike on Hamas leaders in Doha convinced the last remnant of doubters that war, not compromise, is the aim. And yet the path to peace is not invisible: a truce that holds, food and medicine delivered without obstruction, mediators willing to endure the slow labour of dialogue without being bombed.
From the eastern Mediterranean to Africa’s interior, the pattern repeats. “The war tried to kill us in the spring,” wrote Tim O’Brien. In Sudan, the war has no season. It eats each harvest, every breath of relief, until survival itself feels like rebellion. The Sudanese Armed Forces........