There Won't Be War

Afterword: The End of War

There was a time when science fiction writers seemed to be inventing all of the new ideas. Youthful SF readers in the thirties were inspired to become rocket engineers—then went on to build the rockets that up to then had existed only in fiction. Atomic power and, unhappily, atom bombs were science fiction commonplaces, along with television, personal radios, and many other devices and concepts too numerous to mention; many of which exist today. It is however the regrettable fact that in recent times SF invention has given way to a rather mindless repetition that produces uninspired copies of copies of Tolkien, rehashes of ancient plots strung out in mind-numbing volumes. Even more depressing are the military-minded writers, and even publishers, who consider war to be a Good Thing, almost a commonplace event. They tell us over and over again that violent conflict and destruction will be with us forever. The idea that there will always be war is an abomination and an insult to human intelligence. War is about fear and death—and nothing else. Those who write about the glories of future conflict are writing the pornography of war.

This volume is an attempt to correct that false assumption, to balance negative with positive. The most imaginative science fiction writer today is named Gorbachev. He invented a story plot called Glasnost and Perestroika—he made the story come true. No other SF writer ever managed to produce a story with such daring and novel concepts.

The authors of the stories in this anthology have risen to Gorbachev’s challenge. All of them are aware of that very simple yet tremendously vital concept:

We are what we think we are.

External reality is created by internal opinion, attitude and prejudice.

The Cold War is now over—though many politicians still need to be convinced of that fact. It began as a state of mind, grew strong as it fed on fear and greed, until it became a monster that divided the world, fanned prejudices, bred war machines that impoverished us all. There never was a physical threat—no matter what the Cold Warriors told us with their fictional theories of Domino Effects, “lost” countries, Evil Empires.

Stalin’s paranoid fear of the threat of invasion had a basis in reality. He was well aware that Napoleon had invaded Russia and had been turned back only with the greatest difficulty and loss of life. He was there when Russia was invaded by America, Britain and other western countries at the end of the First World War, when the Allies fought on the side of the Whites during the revolution. He rose to power fighting the invading Germans in the Second World War. He believed, and proved to his own satisfaction, that force was the answer to every problem. He murdered his enemies, and those he believed to be his enemies, filling the Gulags as well. When the Soviet forces drove the German invaders back to Berlin he saw to it that all of the Soviet occupied countries had communist governments—whether they wanted them or no—to act as a buffer against any future invasions from the west.

The right-wing politicians of the west responded to the “threat” with enthusiastic paranoia of their own. The Red Beast was coming and had to be restrained. Capitalists have always seen socialists as a threat to their very existence—completly ignoring the fact that Marx was wrong and there is no eternal war between the classes. Socialism and capitalism have blended quite happily in Scandinavia for decades. Despite the fact that the exhausted Soviet Union not only had no desire to invade Western Europe, but was physically incapable of doing so, the Cold War began. What a boon for the armament industries this was! America became a socialist country at last—although the benefactors were these big business that produced the weaponry, not the people. So it began.

And now it has ended. Yet nostalgia still exists for those bad old days. Stalin the murderer is a hero in Georgia. Lawrence Eagleburger believes that “For all its risks and uncertainties, the Cold War was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relations among the great powers.” Oh, really. The fear that I and all of the world felt during the Cuban missile crisis—to take a single example—was imaginary?

This attitude is unacceptable. There is no time for nostalgia, no going back. We must accept the fact that the armistice has been signed; the Cold War is over. There were no winners—only losers. We must think deeply about what Georgi Arbatov—a longtime Soviet observer of American attitudes—said after all the Soviet cutbacks. “We deprive you of an enemy ... This compels you to introduce many changes in traditional political thinking.”

That’s it in a nutshell. We must analyze our attitudes and our prejudices and when they prove worthless or dangerous they must be rejected.

There is nothing new in this; dreadful examples litter history. The Irish potato famine was caused by a fungus infection. But the thousands of deaths were caused by social and political attitudes. To begin with, the English viewed the Irish as inferiors and foisted a slave economy upon them. Forcing them to exist on the monocrop of potatoes, a simple slave food that they could grow themselves. So when the blight came there were no other food supplies available. In Ireland. There was plenty of food in Britain, but that was not carried across the Irish Sea because of Victorian work-ethic values. You must work for what you receive. No work—no food. Starvation and death followed.

Nationalism is in reality mankind’s biggest enemy; jingoism and the national state the continuing threat to world peace. How we love to hate each other! During the Second World War, when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, the guerrilla bands fled to the mountains. Where they killed each other, not the Germans. Serbs slaughtered Croats, Moslems killed Christians. The same thing happened again when glasnost reached Azerbaijan. What did they do with their new-found freedom? Why they killed each other, of course. National and religious prejudices, long submerged by force, instantly emerged with deadly consequences.

Before we sneer at their simpleminded hatreds—let us think of our own. No less of an authority than George Kennan, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, firmly believes that the “Soviet Threat” never existed. In all his years of close observation of the USSR he has

“... Never seen any desire, intention or incentive on the Soviet side ...”to attack Western Europe or initiate a first nuclear strike. If what he says is true—then the entire Cold War had no basis in fact. We were playing out another set of prejudices. It is chilling and very frightening to realize that General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, did not have the power to throw helpless women out of windows, as they recently did in Baku, but instead he bragged that he could have reduced the Soviet Union to “... a smoldering, radiating ruin in two hours.”

Why does this happen? What makes normal human beings into apparently bloodthirsty monsters? Is mankind forever doomed, forever damned? No. Absolutely not. The explanation is there if we only take the trouble to see it. Intelligence is basically responsible. The one characteristic that raised us up now threatens to destroy us. Intelligence begets invention—and finally attitude.

Mankind differs in only one vital way from the other animals. We may be physically related to the other primates, but we differ in kind. In all other animals function follows gene form. A bower bird does not have to be taught how to build its complex nest; a terrier will quickly and efficiently kill the first rat it ever sees.

We don’t work that way. We invented everything that we now do. We invented culture. That important fact must never be forgotten. Like our machines and our cultivated crops, obvious inventions, we invented culture as well. Many varied and different cultures. All of them work in a more or less satisfactory manner—or they would not exist. This was all well and good when populations were small, the distances between them great. This is no longer true. Populations grow without control, cultures and nations push against each other more and more.

Which would be all right if we respected each other’s culture, if we saw all cultures as being equal.

But we don’t. Once this culture, this artifact has been invented, it is hallowed with divinity. It is god-given, perfect, unchangeable. Change is the enemy; those who question their culture are rejected, often killed. Myth is defended against the heresy of fact. Each religion is correct; all of the thousands of others wrong. Each nation is best; all of the others enemies.

This is “received” intelligence and questioning it is heresy. The correct name for it is faith. Most of the time faith is believing in something because we have been told to believe in it. Faith is the continued acceptance of that belief in face of strong, real evidence to the contrary. Faith is strong because it had a very real function at one time. It made society possible and prevented anarchy. But now faith has become our enemy, science our only hope. So perhaps there is good reason for the word “science” in science fiction. Because science is the enemy of unreasoning faith. Science knows—it does not “believe”—it knows that all facts are challengeable, all theories subject to test. The bigots of religion twist and misunderstand this term. They say that since evolution is a “theory” their theories of origin must be entertained as well. No. They misuse the word. In this context “process” is to be preferred. The Process of Evolution has been proven time and time again. Details may change; the process exists.

I am not attacking religions. I am attacking all faith-structures that attack and threaten me. The complex, and incorrect, faith structure of soul-foetus-baby threatens world existence by overpopulation. Because one group would have us follow their belief that there is such a thing as a “soul” that enters a foetus 9 months before birth, therefore abortion is akin to murder—we are all under threat. Look at the reality; through science and medicine we have brought death-control into the world. Infant mortality is lower, diseases like smallpox no longer exist, people live longer. So we are breeding ourselves out of existence. To match death-control we must have birth-control. Family planning and zero population growth. Why don’t we? Primarily because of faith in a complex and completely wrong theory. Fertilized egg—soul-baby. It states that there is a thing called a soul. This is supposed to enter a fertilized ovum. Then this developing mass of growing cells is called a “baby” and it is forbidden to interfere with its growth. No matter what the cost to its mother and society as a whole.

The faith structure of fundamentalist Muslims threatens Salman Rushdie’s life. This same faith structure also chops off hands, stones women to death, kills thousands.

The faith structure of all-Reds-equal-and-bad caused the CIA to destroy the democratically elected government in Chile, to murder the president and thousands more. I do not attack Christianity. I don’t have to—it attacks itself. Christian Catholics in North Ireland murder Christian Protestants. And vice versa.

This list, tragically, can be extended forever. There are still conflicts of greed, where stronger power structures seek the control of smaller ones just because they have the strength to do so. There is no such thing as abstract evil—another faith-structure—but there sure are plenty of evil men. They grab power, then quickly come to believe that they are different, ordained to rule. Another faith-structure. All war, all intolerance in the world today, is the product of belief, the product of faith-structures. If we keep this always before us we may perhaps begin to do something about war.

Perhaps we can end it once and for all. The mere fact of our saying out loud that the end of war is possible is the first step. We must have new ideas about war and how to live with each other, alongside each other.

Which, to come full circle, is the idea behind this book. You will not find the solution to the world’s problems here. But you will certainly find plenty of ideas, food for thought, concepts to consider.

The idea comes first, then the action. We must produce new models for the postwar world. Perhaps some of them are on the pages you’ve just read. I do not know—but I am hopeful.

Science fiction writers are thinking writers who challenge, who hopefully challenge, outmoded and dangerous faith-structures. They not only know that change is possible and a continuing process; they know that you can change this change, make things happen to order. This is important. Change is not automatic or inevitable. If we see a negative change occurring—carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for instance—we have the intelligence and the ability to change that. If we have the will. That is the overpowering understanding that must never be forgotten. Beliefs must change if we are to survive. Dangerous faith-structures must be challenged. Intelligence must come before faith. Tolerance must take the place of intolerance. The true religion is one that believes in tolerance—not hatred. I’ll let you live—if you let me live. Never forgetting that we all live on spaceship Earth. There are no national boundaries visible from space. Live and let live. Let us seek out and find a way to put this into effect.

Let there be an end to war. Here is a beginning.

—Harry Harrison

[1] The title is excerpted from “A Short Poem” by Leonard Gontarek, and is used with kind permission.