We are being inundated with demonstrations, protests, webinars, conferences, and numerous face-to-face and virtual events calling for peace, opposing war, and warning of the danger of conflicts that could escalate into a third world war or a first nuclear war that could end humanity and all forms of life on the planet. However, there are too many people in the world who do not know or do not want to know about this reality. For the citizens of the Latin American continent, the wars in Europe and the Middle East are a very distant reality that is not perceived as something real or possible and therefore does not deserve as much attention.
The consequences of such a world war are unlikely to affect us so terribly, Latin Americans mistakenly think.
The mainstream media report this reality, but they do not, or cannot, emphasize the need for all world leaders to unite in demanding that genocidal countries immediately stop the massacres and threats of war that could endanger humanity. So, the ordinary citizen thinks and feels that we just have to resign ourselves.
To resign ourselves. That has always been the case historically, and they continue to live their daily lives with their problems and challenges, which are too great for them to deal with in any serious way with additional problems that they can hardly do anything to solve.
We watch helplessly and powerlessly as a terrible genocide goes on day after day, and no one in this world has the power or the will to stop it. The power of arms and money has taken precedence over human life, even that of children and the elderly, international law has been systematically violated, creating anarchy without precedent in international relations.
Or rather, it has shown that certain countries have the full right to violate it with impunity, without being accountable to anyone for their actions, and even threatening anyone who dares to condemn them in court rulings.
This leads us to the conclusion that there are countries that declare themselves to be above international law, and that therefore they should be considered as mafia countries, terrorists, and criminals that do not deserve to be considered within the United Nations, and therefore they should be excluded and the member countries should be obliged to break off their relations with this type of state. It is a hard, expensive, economically inconvenient, but essential force to try to save humanity from its ultimate destruction. It is a non-violent measure of absolute justice and full respect for the human rights of all human beings.
At the level of civil society, the time has come to move on to other kinds of strategies, which necessarily involve joining together in a kind of international coordination of movements and coalitions for peace and the end of wars, along the lines of ICAN, to demand that states put a definitive end to current wars, a new international treaty to prohibit them, and the strengthening of a new international law, and the strengthening of a new international law that obliges states to submit their disputes to the International Court of Justice, to be irrevocably settled by that body. In other words, a law that obliges states to resolve their conflicts diplomatically or judicially, but by non-violent means, because wars and armed conflicts would be definitively outlawed.
To impose this order, it is necessary to unite the whole of civil society, with the support of like-minded states, and to promote non-violent measures of force such as civil disobedience and national and international strikes, if necessary to provoke a collapse of the world trade and the world economy, the only measures that can put pressure on international imperialism in its deepest interests and with very painful and unacceptable consequences for it.
All of this creates enormous stress for all of us and our families and societies, but it is the nonviolent way to end this neo-liberal system in crisis that is leading the whole world to its final apocalypse. We will likely have to adopt different, non-consumerist ways of living as a consequence of all this, but we will emerge alive into a better, more just, more humane world, in harmony with the nature of which we are a part.