Roots of war - Letter to the Editor

While Barbara Ehrenreich's column "The Roots of War" (April issue) contained a great deal of very interesting information and insight, it contained some common fallacies regarding human beings and their relation to the waging of war.

Somehow we have forgotten hundreds of thousands of years of human existence where war as we know it simply did not exist. Conflict yes, but not the planned extermination of other societies and peoples that our culture compulsively engages in.

Far from being an "inescapable part of human experience" as Ehrenreich claims, war is an inescapable aspect of our culture, which is consuming the life of the Earth.

That vast numbers of humans courageously reject war and the systems that support it speaks to the fact that war is not an inescapable aspect of the human experience or embedded in the human spirit.

Don Kliese
Madison, Wisconsin

Barbara Ehrenreich takes up a crucial question, but misses a perspective that is equally crucial for developing an answer. While she notes that "war begets war," something we are all painfully aware of, she fails to help us understand where the "first" war came from. What prompted that initial act of aggression? The article fails to analyze the glaring truth that war arises out of fear, out of illusion, out of craving. Buddhist and Vedic philosophy detail how we are vulnerable to these colorings of perception because we are out of touch with our own divine nature and therefore make mistakes, sometimes monstrously destructive ones.

Ehrenreich's article invites us to delve deeply into one of our most horrific creations so that we may find our way out. I urge The Progressive to return to the topic and take it up again in earnest.