Attacks on Nice and Munich What Next?

Trying to understand the various attacks that have taken place on innocent people in the past month

One cannot help but wonder whether there is some form of mania behind all this.

The responses from various leaders, Newt Gingrich of France, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton have been vocal about their intention to hit back albeit in different degrees. The question we pose is will hitting back solve the problem.

Albert Einstein’s message on November 2, 1948 to the Indian Peace Congress was,

“Brutal force cannot be met successfully for any length of time with similar brutal force,…. Let us do whatever is within our power so that all the people of the world may accept Gandhi’s gospel as their basic policy before it is too late.”

And again on June 18 1950 in a question and answer session in the United Nations sponsored series “Pursuit of Truth” he said,

“The remedy doesn’t lie in preparing oneself for the possibility of a future war. We must start with the conviction that security against military disaster can be realised only through patient negotiation. …..An armament race is the worst possible method of preventing an open conflict. On the contrary, real peace cannot be reached without systematic disarmament on a supranational scale.”

Roosevelt once said ” More than an end to war we want an end to the beginning of all wars.” As we speak we know that we are no longer safe, people are being bombed killed fleeing from terror of war, and living in circumstances indescribable and ones which we can only understand if we are subjected to such conditions. Is it possible that it is in fact these conditions that lead to the kind of mentality where killing innocent people no longer makes one flinch or feel any remorse or repugnance.

Does it not logically follow that we need to look for other solutions than revenge and punishment. Perhaps one needs to look into how the conditions which brutalise people can be changed.

Is this not the message conveyed by Roosevelt, by Einstein and by Gandhiji. “An eye for an eye can end up making the whole world blind”