八、战争

    Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.（46）There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve any good at all. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political and spiritual disillusionment. A world war will leave only smoldering ashes as mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. （47）If modern man continues to toy unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into a hell such as even the mind of Dante (但丁) could not imagine.

    （48）Therefore I suggest that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence becomes immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation states, which make war, which have produced the weapons that threaten the survival of mankind and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.

    We have ancient habits to deal with, vast structures of power, indescribably complicated problems to solve.（49）But unless we resign our humanity altogether and yield to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as possible and as urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to poverty and racial injustice.

    I do not minimize the complexity of the problems that need to be faced. （50）But I am convinced that we shall not have the will, the courage and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual re-evaluation, a change of focus which will enable us to see that the things that seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under sentence of death. We need to make a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world, which is now possible, “the city which hath foundation, whose Building and Maker is God”.

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