I Want World Peace
Ask anyone about their vision of "World Peace" and you'll probably get a load of far-fetched-frippery involving happiness rainbows and children dancing in the streets singing songs of shiftless jubilee. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this is nothing more than a world of pure imagination. If you want to view paradise, simply pop in your old DVD of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and replay the Chocolate Room scene as many times as it takes for your brain to melt.
Don't get me wrong, I want the need for humans to fight and kill one another for political reasons to cease just as much as the nearest tree-hugger*. However, I think many activists are thinking about the dilemma the wrong way.
Happiness is NOT a proper goal for World Peace. Statistically, people are not very happy. Roughly one in four people (though, of course, this is American statistics) have suffered from a severe form of depression at some point in their lives. Unless it were possible for Tom Cruise to personally exorcise all the supposed "bad thetans" in our collective brains, there's a pretty damn good chance that sometime in the near distant future, you WILL be chemically unhappy (this is to say nothing of the idea that some form of suffering is necessary for personal growth).
You will also hear many professed peace activists claim that another way to achieve this ideal is through the eradication of certain value systems in favor of a society that has "no need for greed or hunger; a brotherhood of man." This is, for all intents and purposes, communism, which can really only work on the level of small communities and towns (case in point: the collapse of the Soviet Union), where the division of labor creates its' own form of intrinsic goodness.
However, if you INSIST on the idea of all nations in the world no longer fighting, then you really ought to be in favor of free trade between nations. Before you get all uppity and start calling me nasty words (like "conservative" or "Republican"), think of it this way: France and Britain have, for almost the entirety of their collective existences, been at each others' proverbial throats. Nobody hates a Brit more than a Frog, and the feelings are definitely mutual. However, at some point in their history, sometime between the American Revolution and World War 1 (possibly the Treaty of Paris), they seemed to have patched things up. For nearly the entirety of the 20th century, they were allies; trade between both nations flourished. To this day, they still hate each other's guts, but they cooperate, and choose not to break out into open war. You can easily find many more numerous examples throughout history, but you might as well do your own homework, for once.
Perhaps World Peace could be achieved in a similar fashion by taking Free Trade to the global level. If it becomes economically infeasible to make war on a trade ally, it may follow that many world conflicts could be averted simply by the power of the Benjamins**.
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* Anyone who sees need for killing another human being that has nothing to do with self-defense is nothing more than psychopathic dipshit.
** Rap slang for "money."
