Thinking Big: Tearing Down Walls and Building Peace

April 25, 2015

On a journey this past week to East Asia, one of my goals as a traveler was to visit that man-made wonder of the world known as the Great Wall of China. Being there, seeing it for the first time, after reading about it and studying its history while doing research on ancient China was a truly impressive experience. And, I have to admit, since it coincided with the launching today of my latest book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords, as well as in print distributed worldwide by Amazon, it got me thinking. Not so much about the wall itself, mind you, but about the effort that went into it, a centuries-long effort built entirely on the premise of separation, isolation and division among peoples.

More than a monument to human ingenuity, the Great Wall is that, a monument to isolationism, to divisions among peoples, to the risk of invasion and domination and to the meticulously expressed desire of one group of the world’s inhabitants to shut themselves off from others. Don’t get me wrong, the Great Wall is an incredible work of persistence, commitment and amazing engineering. Construction of the wall began as early as the seventh century BCE and it was built ever larger and stronger from then on, with perhaps the best known era of ancient construction taking place from 220 to 206 BCE under Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Few remnants of that wall remain, since the imposing edifice has been rebuilt, enhanced and restructured over and over again throughout history.

Much of what remains standing of the Great Wall today dates back to the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years, from 1368 to 1644 CE, succeeding the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty following that government’s collapse. Some historians consider the Ming Dynasty to have been not only a great era in Chinese history, but also one of the greatest times for conscientious governance and social stability in the entire history of humankind.

What the Great Wall is, in fact, is a series of massive fortifications built in a more or less easterly to westerly direction all across the historical northern border of China. The idea was for it to serve as a barrier to keep out nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe lands that historically raided, marauded through and invaded the Chinese states from the north.

Once built, however, successive emperors used the wall for other purposes as well—as a sort of endless toll booth for the collection of duties on goods transported along the Silk Road, as a control station for incoming and outgoing migration, as a site for the construction of security watch towers, as a transportation corridor through the rugged terrain of northern China and as a place to garrison troops for use as rapid intervention forces.

During the Ming Dynasty, China’s Great Wall snaked its way along a course of about 8,850 kilometers (around 5,500 miles). To give westerners an idea of just how far that is, think of a wall 26 feet (8 meters) high and 20 feet (6 meters) wide at the base running the entire length of the border between the United States and Canada. But the convoluted construction of the wall over the centuries meant that it also ended up having branches off of the main course so that, according to archeological estimates, if the wall and its branches were laid end to end, they would actually have stretched nearly two and a half times further (a total of about 21,000 kilometers or about 13,000 miles).
Needless to say, I was duly impressed. In fact, I literally marveled at the unimaginable time, effort and resources that went into the building of this amazing phenomenon of human culture. But despite my awe, I also couldn’t help reflecting that some of the world’s greatest efforts continue to go into separating rather than unifying peoples and into developing ever more powerful defenses and ever more incredible ways of destroying each other. Nor can we even write off the building of towering walls as a long forgotten ancient idea aimed at preserving security, but more at “preserving cultures” by avoiding diversity. We need only cite the post-World War II construction of the Berlin Wall that stood until the late 1980s as a symbolic and, indeed, physical barrier between the communist and capitalist worlds, or, still today, the 1,900-mile (3,057-kilometer) border fence erected since 2006 and still maintained on the border between the United States and its southern neighbor, Mexico.

Today, there are at least 29 active conflicts worldwide in which between 100 and 50,000 people die per year. In the worst of these, the Syrian war, 200,000 people, many of them innocent civilians, have been killed over the course of the past four years.  But these conflicts know no geographic boundaries and are taking place in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. There are currently over 50 million refugees of wars or human-related ecological disasters. And today’s war and “defense” spending are costing the world economy nearly 10 trillion dollars, roughly enough to feed to planet’s 900 million starving people for 200 years, or to find scientific and diplomatic solutions to the ecological and political problems that are causing the famines that are starving those millions to death.Such walls, however, are, despite their “practical” uses, mere symbols of a much deeper malady. They symbolize the insistence of human beings on rejecting a basic law of nature, that of diversity as the key to planetary and human health and prosperity. They symbolize the misuse of our human free will as a license to do as we please in detriment to other human beings and to the planet itself. They are emblematic of Man’s persistently wrong choices to pursue short-term, greedy interests and to impose the will of the strongest on the ultimately enslaved weakest of our species, and to strip nature of its diversity with no thought of what its carrying capacity will withstand or of how it will recover what we use of its resources.

The premise of my book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, is that the world’s people can no longer afford the “luxury” of remaining isolated and at odds with each other. In a world in which the very planet we live on is warning us daily that we have the option of choosing peace and cooperation to find solutions to the problems we, as a species, have created or face extinction (much sooner than later), war is no longer a viable political alternative. Peace and worldwide cooperation are the only sane choices for the future of Humankind.

And yet, on writing this book and receiving the first comments on it from reviewers to whom I provided it in English or from those who read it in Spanish in its first two editions distributed in print in South America, it is disheartening to see how many people congratulate me on my “altruistic spirit” but who are convinced that world peace is the mere pipe dream of naïve idealists.

So let me ask you this: Imagine China’s Great Wall didn’t exist and, even today, I brought you a well-planned project to build it. Wouldn’t you think I was insane? You might think, “What ambition! What an incredible project! But it’s nothing but a pipe dream.” But if you can imagine it and can get others to imagine it and get others enthused and get them to cooperate in peace and harmony, anything is possible! The Great Wall exists. At some point it was the vision of a single person or small group of persons, and then it became the vision of China’s first emperor, and it became a reality because no one dared tell him he was crazy.

Standing on the Great Wall this past week, imagining it wending its way five thousand incredible miles through the rugged terrain of northern China, then, I couldn’t help also thinking of world peace and cooperation as a great edifice that it is within our grasp to construct, for our own future and the future of generations to come. All we have to do is each let ourselves imagine a better world, believe that it can work and actively convince others of the viability of such a worldwide project, convince others not to follow or empower the war-makers and instead to actively support the peace-makers and peace-builders while shunning and punishing the preachers of hatred and violence.

Standing on the Great Wall and thinking about the conviction and focus it took to build it, I realized that this was the kind of conviction and focus needed for world peace and cooperation to prosper, not at the service of isolation and separation, but of unity and cooperation in pro of a common cause: the survival of our species.

It’s time for all of us to start THINKING BIG!