HAS VIOLENCE MADE LIFE BETTER?

Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was
a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as
eating another's flesh(martin Luther king).

Alfred Nobel believed that peace could be maintained if nations possessed deadly weapons. After all, nations could quickly unite and bring gruesome ruin to any aggressor. "This could be a force that would make war impossible, " he wrote. According to Nobel's view, no sane nation would provoke conflict if the consequences to itself would be devastating. But what has the past century revealed?

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they are separated by nature.
I have always believed that war is peace because tracing from history, you will find out that war united nations in various era.


Less than 20 years after Nobel's death. World war I broke out. This conflict saw the use of new deadly weapons, including machine guns, poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, airplanes, and submarines. Nearly ten million soldiers were killed, and more than twice that number were wounded. The barbarity of World war I caused renewed interest in peace.
This lead to the formation of League of Nations. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, a prominent figure in this cause, won the Nobel Peace prize in 1919.

Yet, any hope that war would end once and for all were dashed when, in 1939, World War II broke out. In many respect this was even more horrendous than World War I. During this conflict Adolf Hitler expanded Nobel's factory in Krummel into one of the Germany's largest ammunition factories, with over 9,000 employees. Then, at the end of the war, Nobel's factory was completely annihilated by an Allied air raid that dropped more than a thousand bomb. Ironically, those bombs were developed with the help of Nobel's own invention.

The century that elapsed after Nobel's death saw not only two world wars but also countless smaller conflicts.

posted from Bloggeroid