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After being here for a while and reading various post on war in sci fi and in the real world, I thought I would pose this question.


What is your defination of peace? Is it the absolute absence of violence or a more structured idea involving military necessity and how far does it go? We all know what Shep's is but for the more moderate and even international types, what do you think.


To be fair, I think peace is not a natual occuring condition and that the application of force is always needed to attain peace. IMHO.

Peace, quite bluntly, is a cessesion of fighting between nations.

The time between wars when the hippies take over

Peace can neither be achive nor defended, It is mearly a period where the dogs of war are safly chained away before the next idiot cuts them free

Peace is something, which can never be lasting, or truly achived.

True................
very true.

Knife wrote:After being here for a while and reading various post on war in sci fi and in the real world, I thought I would pose this question.


What is your defination of peace? Is it the absolute absence of violence or a more structured idea involving military necessity and how far does it go? We all know what Shep's is but for the more moderate and even international types, what do you think.


To be fair, I think peace is not a natual occuring condition and that the application of force is always needed to attain peace. IMHO.

Peace has several definitions:

a) The definition of peace everybody throws away their guns, automobiles, and nuclear power plants, and sings kum-ba-ya around a big fucking campfire. This view is espoused by college students who shower once every 22-1/2 days, chain themselves to gas stations and vote Green. Needless to say, these people are fucking nuts.

b) The definition of peace were everybody throws away their guns and works out all their differences, no matter how great, at the bargaining table. This view is held by some in the US State Department, and in the UN. These people, sad to say, are also fucking nuts.

c) The definition of peace which states that peace is that thing that happens when people aren't fighting. It is the view held by people who realize that while mass-cooperation has evolved it's way into the human midbrain, it hasn't developed that much since it first appeared in Homo eragaster or Homo erectus (These are the hominids who first seriously developed tools and spread around the planet. They're also the first who disposed of their dead and may have even built boats.) The only way peace can be maintained is to make the fighting of war too costly for the other guy. This can be accomplished through negotiation, economic/cultural assimilation, or a properly maintained military/intelligence infrastructure.

Peace is an absence of violence. The question, then, is what is violence? I see violence as one of two forms

Personal (Direct) violence, such as the action of one person physically attacking another (the most common definition of violence). The lack of this kind of violence is called a negative peace.

Structural (Indirect) violence - when people are dying prematurely or have measureable living standards lower than what they could be as a result of their governing system. The lack of this kind of violence is called a positive peace. [Sometimes called "social justice."

The definition of peace, then, depends on what one is aiming for.