Will War Ever End?

by Chappell, Paul K.; Grossman, Dave

• ISBN13: 9781935212225
• ISBN10: 1935212222
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-01-25
• Publisher: Easton Studio Pr

Summary

Once in a great while, a book is written that substantially changes the way people think about a particular subject. Will War Ever End? is such a book. Written as a "manifesto for waging peace" by an active duty captain in the US Army, Will War Ever End? challenges readers to think about peace, war and violence in radically new ways. "Are human beings naturally violent?" "What is hatred?" "How can love overcome the power of hatred?" "How does nonviolence overcome the power of violence?" "How can we prove that unconditional love makes us psychologically healthy and that hatred, just like an illness, occurs when something has gone wrong?" "How does violence against the natural world relate to violence between human beings?" These are all questions that Captain Paul K. Chappell leads us to consider in a strikingly new way. In Will War Ever End?, Chappell demonstrates that human beings are naturally peaceful and that world peace can become more than a cliche. He lays out a practical framework for transforming the way we think about war and violence, enabling us to begin the real work we must do in order to achieve true peace for mankind. Will War Ever End? is a deeply personal story of a soldier's search for human understanding that will lead to universal transformation. Its message is one of hope, offering practical solutions to help us build a better world. We can all make change. Now is the time to begin.

Excerpts

THE FIRST STEP ON THE ROAD TO PEACE
Trying to end war without understanding human
nature is like trying to go to the moon without
understanding the laws of physics. Now that we have
better defined human nature and our potential for
peace, we have taken a first and crucial step on our
journey toward creating a more peaceful world. To
build this brighter future, we must rely on unconditional
love and our large brains, rather than hatred and violence. We must remember that war never fully
solves a problem and that peaceful ends always require
peaceful means.
My experiences in the military have taught me not
only that war can end through peaceful means, but
that war must end if humanity is going to survive in
the twenty-first century and beyond. The suffering of
my parents and the trauma I endured during my
youth are responsible for these realizations and
my obsession with understanding war. Because these
experiences led to a deeper understanding of what it
means to be a human being, I now have an obsession
with transforming our shared hope for a peaceful
world into a brighter future.
Although I have learned that war is not inevitable,
I have realized that a peaceful future is also not inevitable.
War will not magically end on its own, and
our world will never know peace if we sit around and
do nothing. War will only end if we end it. War will
only end if we stand up and make a difference, if we
take crucial steps to ensure our survival and prosperity
as a global community.
Exploring human nature to explain why we are
not naturally violent opens up a wide range of hopeful
possibilities for our future, but this is just one
among many necessary steps on our journey toward
global peace and prosperity. For us to truly answer the
question, will war ever end? we must create world peace by continuing this journey and cooperating with
the countless people who still have faith in humanity.
By working together, we can transform our shared
hope for a peaceful world into a reality within our
reach.