“The war unfolding in the Ukraine is not a product of capitalism, patriarchy, or technology” says Howard Bloom, the man Britain’s Channel 4 TV calls the Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud of the 21st century.
“War,” says Bloom, “has been built into our biology ever since the evolution of our first ancestors roughly 3.85 billion years ago.”
Bloom explains that, “Bacteria, our first foremothers, lived in colonies of seven trillion, more bacteria in one tightly-knit society than all the human who have ever lived. And those colonies made war with rival colonies, particularly over food.
“Seemingly peaceful sea anemones on coastal rocks,” Bloom points out, “make war. Many of them are born as warriors and equipped with poison harpoons to attack rival colonies. These anemones fight over territory. Ants make war. Even apes make war.”
Says Bloom, “But humans are unique. In the civilization of the West, we’ve invented something new: anti-war movements. And the Western System has increased the peace in the world by a factor of ten. In other words your odds of dying a violent death at the hands of a fellow human being would have been ten times what they are today in one of those indigenous societies that we imagine live at peace with their neighbors and in harmony with nature. And your odds of dying a violent death at the hands of a fellow human would have been ten times what they are today if you’d been born in 1650.
“Now the trick,” says Bloom, “will be to find a peaceful way to keep Vladimir Putin’s ambition in check. Putin’s goal is to retake all of the Eastern European territory that Russia controlled before the fall of the USSR. That includes the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Romania and more.
“Economic sanctions may be one way to resolve a potential war peacefully. But sanctions have a limitation. Russia has reserves of over half a trillion dollars. And if the West shuts Putin out of our economy, Russia has another source of finance, a new 30-year deal announced at the opening of the Olympics. A deal in which China will buy massive quantities of Russia’s chief source of income, oil and gas.”
For more on the biological origins of war, see Bloom’s book The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (Atlantic Monthly Press).
References:
Vladimir Putin, Address by the President of the Russian Federation, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828
Vladimir Putin, Article by Vladimir Putin ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,“ http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.