War No More - XI: Refuse To Go To War
In memoriam: Muhammad Ali (1942 - 2016)
"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."
[1]
As quoted, Muhammad Ali in 1967, on his refusal to go to war
[2] and do someone else's dirty work. A mighty statement, indeed, only adding to Ali's eligibility to become promoted to humanity's immortal ranks of Members of the Militant Order of Pacifist eXecutives, MEMOPAX for short, perhaps one of the most prominent World Peace organizations ever to rise in the Earth's near future.
Now, in our common present, it appears more clear than (n)ever: (t)here exist no other slave masters to obey but us, no other slaves to drudge but us, no other someone else than us, no other dirty work but our own, no other wars to win, lose or profit from, but ours.
[3]
Interesting though, how the tougher muscles seem to share a similar perspective with the tougher minds, when it comes to dealing with issues concerning our increasingly futile warfare engagement:
"Nothing will end war, unless the people themselves
refuse to go to war." - Albert Einstein
[4], 1931
Refuse to go to war. Nothing special, really.
Merely sharing the sentiment, once again.
[5]
When we fight, we fight ourselves.
When we go to war, wearing black or white uniforms, we attack ourselves; wielding red, white or blue shields, we defend ourselves. War equals Us vs Us.
We do not have to agree, in full, with one another, with another us, with ourselves, about the myriad varying ways we use to express what we may think or believe
[6], how we may feel inside, or to agree about the correct color of garments to wear when heading out to work or to the battlefield, to single out two of our favorite pastime destinations ... but, or rather, to reverse-paraphrase back to Ali:
"Hating people because of their color is wrong,
and it doesn't matter which color does the hating.
It's just plain wrong."
[7]
... and when we combine work and the battlefield
colors become
borders, and hate turns to
war ...
"Wars of nations are fought to
change maps,
but wars of poverty are fought to map change."
[8]
Change. No problem. Life has changed ever since long before we can remember. All it seems to need: a perpetual incentive to evolve. To thrive. To survive. And so, as quite a persistent specimen amongst Life-on-Earth's current expressions,
we have to adopt adaptation, adopt change in order to become more adept at changing, learning to employ a wider variety of options to solve problems we may encounter on our continuous path around the Sun.
Right now, it seems we prefer to keep struggling with our repetitive belligeronomic
[9] behavior. Throwing money at our problems
[10], throwing bombs on our family
[11]. Pure repetition of olden ways. Quite redundant, or obsolete, actually, for it does not take a philosophoetical boxer like Ali or a heavyweight thinker like Einstein to understand, that we have to come up with more fruitful ways to overcome our evolutionary growing pains, to resist the primal domesticated primate drive to keep up
our ages-old territorial squabbling, and to embrace the Earth as the
global village [12] that houses our worldwide family.
Signing off after a less sarcastic session than last time
[13], yet never with less love and not without quoting
The Greatest, one more time:
"I'm retiring because
there are more pleasant things to do
than beat up people."
Rumble in Peace,
mon frere d'une autre mere.
∞
References and resources, further reading and viewing:
[1] The Hidden History Of Muhammad Ali,
International Socialist Review; 2004 (
link)
[2] on Muhammad Ali's refusal to go to war, Wikipedia (
link)
[3],
[5] War No More - II (
link)
[4] A Peace Of The Pie (
link)
[6] reSS our BS (
link)
[7],
[8] unsourced Muhammad Ali quotes, Wikipedia (
link)
[9] belligeronomic - adj.,
relating to our managing or governing of/by the process of warfare
[10] Robert Anton Wilson,
Trajectories #13, (
link)
[11] current debate about obsolete race classification, Wikipedia (
link)
[12] Marshall McLuhan,
The World Is A Global Village (
link)
[13] Support All Troops (
link)
- Muhammad Ali:
resisting the draft /
sourced quotes /
unsourced quotes
A Powerful, Dangerous Political Force; LA Times, 2016 (
link)
- Albert Einstein:
Viereck 1931 interview quotes /
on pacifism
Albert Einstein Poems, Quotes and Epigrams; The HyperTexts (
link)
-
Race is no longer an issue, scientific panel agrees;
Cornell Chronicle, 2009 (
link)
- The Estate of Marshall McLuhan (
link)
- Robert Anton Wilson (
link)
☮
More War No More to follow
for as long as we choose
to divide, oppose and prod
one and other like cattle
link down to War No More - X
link down to War No More - IX
link down to War No More - VIII
link down to War No More - VII
link down to War No More - VI
link down to War No More - V
link down to War No More - IV
link down to War No More - III
link down to War No More - II
link down to War No More - I
☮
.: peace or perish :.
apart from the quoted:
all text ⓦ Satyr Barbarossa
(cc) 2016 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
