Friday essay: Are wars and violence inevitable, or is there another way to live?

Most of us want to live in peace and safety. Yet violence is in epic proportions, particularly towards women and children. The Israel-Palestine conflict is now escalating into Lebanon. This week, Israeli troops entered southern Lebanon. Iran has launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for its actions, and Israel is now vowing to retaliate against Iran. These latest escalations in the deep-rooted conflict emerged after the bloody Hamas attacks on Israel a year ago, on October 7, and subsequent war in Gaza. Hamas cited decades of Israeli expansionism and oppression as motivation for the attacks. However, like Israel’s attacks, the Hamas attacks involved the targeting of civilians and probable war crimes. More than a thousand Israelis were killed, and some 240 Israeli and foreign nationals were abducted. In Gaza, more than 16,000 Palestinian children have been killed, including 2,100 under the age of two. One Palestinian man living in Gaza lost his wife and four of their children. All he could find of his baby daughter, Safa, was her hand. There are currently wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar. In the United States, there have been two recent attempts to assassinate former president Donald Trump, and just last week yet another mass shooting. In Sydney, there was another knife murder. In France, there is the ongoing trial of 50 men who allegedly raped Gisèle Pelicot, facilitated by her husband, who admits to raping her too. The list goes on. Every day, a new atrocity blares from the radio or across huge screens in gyms, railway stations and homes, causing widespread fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair. Is this violence just human nature, and inevitable? Should we rely on governments and the United Nations to provide solutions? Or are the causes – and solutions – closer to home: in our cultures, thoughts, words, behaviours and everyday life? Politicians repeatedly urge us to “change the culture” of violence. But what exactly does this mean? How can it be achieved? And don’t governments send mixed messages when they spend far more on nuclear submarines, weapons and fighter planes than on violence prevention? Cultural violence underlies direct violence These questions were first starkly brought home to me in 2014, as I was flying to Türkiye for a peace conference, hoping the benefits of attending would outweigh the carbon footprint of flying there. Below, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Palestine/Israel, were horrendous, ongoing armed conflicts. All around me on the plane, residents of those countries were watching films filled with violence. Was there a connection? I wasn’t the first to ponder this question. Elise Boulding was a pioneer of cultural peacebuilding – exposing the “cultural violence” that underpins direct violence. This happens through violent movies, militaristic language and discourses, authoritarian parenting and war journalism, which all create pro-war narratives. Examples include Nazis calling Jewish people “untermenschen” (subhumans) or, prior to the Rwandan genocide, Hutus on radio and in print calling Tutsis cockroaches. Words, and cultural violence, are powerful. “Come and see the violence inherent in the system,” says a politically aware peasant in the 1975 film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Most societies are drenched in cultural violence, and we can be unconsciously complicit in it. In 2016, actor Matt Damon visited Australia to shoot a violent, gun-filled Jason Bourne film, featuring an Anglo hero out to rid the world of a psychopathic Venezuelan. While here, he said he wished the US could have gun laws like Australia’s, seemingly unaware his films almost certainly reinforce and spread US gun culture. Militarised histories obscure other stories Histories and museums can glorify war and patriarchy, or commemorate effective nonviolent movements such as the suffragists. Australia has more war memorials than any other nation. They’re often in the middle of towns (like the War Memorial in Sydney’s CBD), making them a central part of our lives. “Remembrance Driveway”, the highway between Sydney, Australia’s economic powerhouse, and Canberra, the nation’s capital, has 24 rest stops dedicated to Victoria Cross war heroes. All were men. Our new and former parliament houses are in line with the avenue to the Australian War Memorial. There’s no shortage of funding for upgrades to the War Memorial, including more than $830,000 from arms manufacturers in three years, meaning its histories are unlikely to be objective or anti-war. At the same time, many other national cultural institutions, such as the National Museum of Australia, the Museum of Australian Democracy, National Gallery of Australia and National Library, have faced major funding cuts. The militarisation of Australian history means other stories go untold. One under-recognised figure is Wiradjuri resistance leader Windradyne, who in 1824 led a delegation to Parramatta to call for peace. He addressed the governor, calling for an end to the killing, wearing a hat with “peace” written in English on it. There’s no major road or museum in Australia recognising the effectiveness of suffragists and nonviolent movements, often led by women, for land rights, social justice, the environment and peace. Globally, however, there are many museums dedicated to peace, such as the Kyoto Museum of World Peace, whose mission statement says we need “to eliminate not only the causes of conflict, but also all barriers to human development so that we can build a peaceful society in which human potential can blossom”. Other notable peace museums, connected through the International Network of Museums for Peace, are in Bradford, Tehran, and throughout Africa and Asia, with 68 in Japan alone, including a confronting one in Hiroshima. Australia has an online Living Peace Museum. War museums sometimes feature anti-war perspectives, such as the Peace, a Shrine of Remembrance exhibition in Melbourne (2012–13), and People Power: Fighting for Peace (a contradiction in terms) at London’s Imperial War Museum (2017), about the British antiwar and peace movement. In New Zealand, Auckland and Wellington have Peace Heritage Walks, and around the world there are many gardens dedicated to peace. War gardens are oases of peace which people create in the midst of fighting to maintain a hint of normality and colour. “To garden in a time of crisis and conflict is to escape to ‘a world within a lost world’,” writes Lalage Snow, a photojournalist, writer and filmmaker who has covered war and unrest in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He continues: It is to rise above the ‘horrid wilderness’ – to treat war as an inconvenience. It is a refusal to accept a world defined by violence and destruction but instead create life. Other promising signs include the increasing use of Aboriginal place names on road signage, and on ABC Classic and Triple J radio stations. Name changes, such as from Ayers Rock to Uluru, and inner Melbourne electorate from Batman to Cooper (after Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper, replacing controversial Melbourne founder John Batman) make Australia more inclusive. 90% of films contain violence Ninety per cent of movies contain violence. Even children’s stories, such as Peter Rabbit, The Cat in the Hat, Peter Pan and the Tintin adventures, are often made violent or more violent when adapted for the screen, even though their original authors, such as Dr Seuss and Hergé were increasingly pro-peace. Violent films often glorify weapons and make people more fearful – and likely to accept the narrative that armed violence is necessary and more effective than nonviolent action, despite strong evidence to the contrary. This narrative is actively pushed by the military-industrial complex, (the individuals and institutions involved in the production of weapons and military technologies), and by the media and entertainment outlets it influences and supports. Militaries want films like Top Gun because they make the armed forces seem glamorous, exciting, social and sexy. So they often give filmmakers cheap or free access to billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded jet fighters, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. In return, the movies serve as sophisticated, enticing forms of recruitment propaganda. The military-entertainment complex supports such movies because they encourage a favourable view of militarism, “defence” spending and the purchase of their products. As psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay observes, “what we call entertainment is really propaganda for violence”. He continues: “If you manufacture guns, you don’t need to advertise, because it is done by our entertainment industry.” Arms dealers also do this through the media companies they own or influence. General Electric, which has ties to Mobil, owned the NBC TV network until 2013. Disney Entertainment, which owns the American Broadcasting Company, collaborated with Boeing to create flying X-Wings to soar over their Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park in California’s Disneyland Resort. Inevitably, the editorial leanings of military-linked media are pro-war, biased and critical of peace activism, if they cover it at all. Media can also be influenced by think-tanks sponsored by arms companies and “defence” departments. For example, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has numerous arms-related sponsors, was behind the Red Alert series of front-page articles in Australia’s Nine newspapers, which argued for more military spending to resist a supposedly imminent war with China. The military-industrial complex, with its “revolving door” relationship with governments, is gaining influence in universities and schools. The University of Melbourne trumpeted the arrival of a new laboratory in partnership with Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest and wealthiest arms corporation, with a history of bribery and corruption. The university wants to “work together to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems” with Lockheed Martin. But will this include reducing phenomenal levels of defence spending, or addressing the global scourge of war? Lockheed Martin has also been infiltrating schools, such as Armidale Secondary College, with what is mooted as a space-focused educational program. But the Australian Defence Magazine reports it as having an underlying motive of building a workforce to create “next-generation, sovereign military satellite communication”. The aim is not just to draw students into the sciences (and away from the arts and humanities), but into military science in particular. Countering military influences Peace journalism, peace education and artistic activism, although far less wealthy or politically-connected, attempt to counter this influence. Peace journalism explores how a conflict has formed, avoiding de-humanisation. It offers nonviolent responses to conflict, such as boycotts. It reports nonviolent initiatives occurring at grassroots levels, and follows the resolution, reconstruction and reconciliation phases. Peace education ranges from preschool to tertiary levels. UNICEF has established hundreds of early childhood education centres in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, improving social cohesion and peace. Peace Education Centres in the conflict zone of Armenia have trained more than 1000 schoolchildren, their parents and hundreds of teachers. They integrate peace and conflict resolution education into school curricula, using a range of materials, games, drills and visual aids. Positive changes are being observed both in the pupils’ behaviour and in their academic progress. The Seeds of Peace project involving Arab and Israeli children, and Japan’s Peace Boat have similar aims. There are university Peace Studies departments around the world, including in Australia, with 200 in the US alone. There is even a UN-mandated University of Peace in Costa Rica. Although our research, publications and teaching inform UN peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction and effective social movements, we’re rarely consulted by mainstream media. Artivism (artistic activism) involves everything from colourful, witty banners, replicas of Picasso’s anti-war painting Guernica, and giant satirical puppets at protest marches to Peace Sounds Radio. Midnight Oil’s anti-war songs, concerts for peace and climate art are all part of a constant stream of creativity flowing in the opposite direction to war, militarism and ecological violence. The diverse but unified #MeToo movement is also causing a high-profile cultural shift. It uses the digital arena’s ability to amplify personal narratives globally and advocate for systemic change. Humour is important. For example, the acronym AUKUS can be rearranged to USUKA (pronounced “you sucker”) to more accurately reflect the power dynamics of the military relationship, and the poor outcome for Australia. Words matter Diving down into the personal, our language is filled with violent terms, such as “to kill two birds with one stone”, which could instead be “feed two birds from one bowl”. At school barbecues, parents with large BBQ tools claim to be “bringing out the big guns”, before they “round up the troops” and tell injured kids to “soldier on”. People talk about a tennis serve “like a bullet” or how someone “killed it”. Avocado is no longer mashed but “smashed”. There’s a lolly called a Warhead, and Slap Ya Mama seasoning, which could be seen as a harmless joke or one more aspect of our culture that legitimises domestic violence. Joe Biden, when US vice president, led a task force exploring the issue of gun violence, and said, apparently without irony, that there was no “silver bullet” to solve it. We have a War on Drugs, and an unwinnable War on Terror, much like the oxymoronic “fighting for peace”, which some compare with “making love for virginity”. However, it’s probably fair to say arms dealers are currently “making a killing” and “getting away with murder”. Universities and society in general now discourage sexist language, recognising how it contributes to patriarchy. We can also decide to use more peaceful terms. Peaceful parenting Poor parenting and education can lead to damaged mass murderers like Stalin and Hitler. Both of them had violent fathers who terrorised and beat them, causing deep-seated emotional and psychological pain, which they later externalised in their genocidal campaigns. Living in fearful, authoritarian, male-dominated cultures accustomed to blind obedience added to the problem. Parenting can be authoritative without being authoritarian and violent. If it’s also compassionate and communicative, we can produce empowered, critical-thinking, nonviolent citizens. We can bring up our children with less TV violence. Following in the footsteps of Sesame Street and the Paddington Bear film series, the award-winning Bluey cartoon series shows that TV does not require violence to be entertaining (and educational). Bluey involves laid-back fun, but also has lessons for both children and parents. We can model nonviolent conflict resolution and discourage war toys, as Pakistani peace activists have been doing. We can encourage cooperative games and address our own screen addictions. As alternatives to crime, horror or the sexual sadism of Nordic Noir, we can encourage teenagers to read visionary “solar punk”, which is optimistic, empowering and imagines egalitarian societies built on sustainable technologies. Peaceful cultures already exist Not all cultures are violent. Peaceful cultures already exist throughout the world, ranging from small Indigenous communities to whole regions of relative peace. Costa Rica abolished its military 76 years ago and has thrived ever since, ploughing the money it saved into education, health, sport and the environment. Thirty-eight other countries and territories, including Iceland, Grenada and Samoa, don’t have a standing army. The Nordic countries, like Norway and Denmark, have deliberately built regional peace, and have not warred in more than 200 years. Cultivating peace systems has many challenges, but new and major initiatives do happen. The creation of the European Union has led to 446 million people across 27 countries now living without war in their region. Peace researchers Douglas P. Fry and Geneviève Souillac write that making a pan-continental peace system had never been attempted before the European Union. “Ridding the continent of war, the central purpose of European integration, has been a resounding success,” they conclude. We can learn from these examples that peace is possible. Religions can divide, such as in the Crusades and Inquisition. They can also bring people together in peace, tolerance and compassion, as with Pope Francis’s recent visit to south-east Asia’s largest mosque. He earlier said “it is our duty … to stop the arms trade”, calling it the “industry of death” and criticising profiteers for fuelling war. In 2023, he began an unprecedented joint “pilgrimage of peace” to South Sudan, with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a Church of Scotland leader. There’s a song in the peace movement that says: “There will be peace on Earth, when there is peace in our hearts.” In other words, cultivating peace within, such as through yoga and meditation, is essential for creating peaceful cultures. Inner peace provides a foundation for broader peace. Without it, our actions in the world (such as violent anti-war protests) are unlikely to result in sustainable peace. We can have great laws, policies and institutions – peace infrastructures – but these will probably not survive if most of us are aggressive, pessimistic or easily led, and if our community leaders are in psychic and emotional turmoil. Just as ceasefires are inadequate if the underlying causes of a conflict aren’t addressed, peace needs to be built at grassroots levels – and from inside us all. Each aspect of cultural violence, alone, may seem insignificant. But taken together, they add up to a milieu where violence is more likely to occur regularly. Understanding cultural violence and how it supports direct violence can help us transform our beliefs, choices and behaviours – to cultivate a more peaceful world, from the ground up. Wars and violence are neither inevitable, nor an inherent part of human nature. The power to reduce violence is in our hands, words and TV remotes. The research in this essay is drawn from Marty Branagan’s book, The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding (Anthem Press), published October 8, 2024.