Free Peace by Antony Adolf Page A

tomorrow.
    Peaces of World History
    Three years into the US Civil War (1861–5), in a private letter, President Abraham Lincoln as cleverly and concisely as ever confided:
    Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. 3
    Here, he does not use the word “victory” to describe the aim of the Northern Unionist States he was leading against those of the separatist South, and his absolutist first use of “peace” as the cessation of the ongoing war is balanced by his conditional aspiration thereafter. Upholding confederative constitutional principles and affirming the abolition of slavery throughout the country were not secondary considerations to Lincoln in this appeal, but part and parcel of the meaning of the worthwhile peace he hoped the war’s end would bring about. No doubt, the peace imagined by his slave-holding opponents was different in these respects and others.
    The second part of Lincoln’s statement, in which the coming peace would “prove” that successful democracy is innately a deterrent of and cure for war, is somewhat more problematic. A shift has occurred from peace being a post-war condition meeting predefined criteria to the justification of a political system, however positive. Peace in world history has rarely if ever been an apolitical topic, but to lose sight of its non-political meanings is to overlook many of the other drivers of, and advantages derived from, peace and peacemaking. Religion, economics, philosophy and law have all been active arenas of pacific endeavors, to name a few. “War,” in the famous words of German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, may be “the continuation of politics by other means;” in world history peace has been only partially so. 4 Monarchical, theocratic, socialist and totalitarian governments as well as non-governmental societies have all also claimed to act in the name and for the sake of peace. States that have actually done so with “proven” results share more than their propaganda would ever allow them to admit.
    What are the proofs of peace and how can they be identified, evaluated and applied? If clear-cut answers to questions like these existed then making and maintaining peace would be cumulative scientific enterprises, and this book would be a purely empirical study. They are not. Grasping how peace and peacemaking have shaped and been shaped by world history calls not only for a selective re-presentation of “facts” (in our case, events, ideas, individuals, movements, etc.) in their light, but also for a comprehensive re-interpretation of them outside the shadows in which they have previously been cast. History, it is often said, is written by the victors in war, and as a general rule this tired dictum may hold true. The champions of peace, momentous and everyday, intellectual and activist,expert professional and lay, have for too long been considered exceptions that prove this rule, when in actuality without their efforts there may not have been a history to live, let alone write. Their stories are put together here as vital pieces of the puzzle of world history so that we can better piece together the present and future (puns intended).
    The dire dichotomy of war and peace portrayed in Tolstoy’s novel of that title cannot be sidestepped because it is inseparable from the human experience, documented from prehistory to the Cold War’s hot rhetoric and beyond. However, following this narrow chasm to the exclusion of other paths leads us neither to the purgatorial point at which humanity finds itself today nor to a more accurate overall picture of