Monthly Archives: December 2014

Adventure 7: Criticism of United Nations

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Critics of the United Nations have mainly focused on the organisation’s perceived inability to carry out the job it was established for: to effectively handle international conflicts and maintain world peace and security. However, the U.N. has also come under fire for its perceived bias, elitism, corruption, and for actively pursuing a globalist agenda. Let’s quickly consider each of these criticisms in turn.

In terms of inability to do its job, the U.N. has been accused of losing the sense of moral clarity and purpose it had upon its immediate formation after World War 2. In the decades after its establishment, particularly following the rapid growth of membership in the 1960s, the U.N. was accused of having become diluted with countries less in favour of freedom and democracy and more amenable to the requirements of dictatorships, leading the organisation as a whole to a position of moral relativism (a shifting perspective of what’s right and wrong) as opposed to taking decisive action in the face of aggression, genocide and terrorism. Continue reading Adventure 7: Criticism of United Nations →

Adventure 6: Cold War

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The Cold War was a sustained period of political and military tension during the mid-late 20th Century (roughly 1947-1991) between what became known as the Western Bloc (the US and its NATO allies) and the Eastern Bloc (the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies). It was known as the Cold War because no direct fighting ever occurred between America and Russia, although several regional ‘proxy wars’ were fought. The period has even retrospectively been described as World War 3.

Following a brief alliance against Nazi Germany during World War 2, profound ideological differences between the US and the USSR – essentially capitalism and democracy on one side versus socialism/communism on the other – made it clear that cooperation and collaboration between the two ‘Super Powers’ of the post-war world would be all but impossible. Worse, both sides began to arm heavily with the newly invented super-weapon, the deadly Nuclear Bomb that annihilated Japan and ended World War 2. We’ll get onto nuclear weapons later in the blog. Continue reading Adventure 6: Cold War →

Adventure 5: Vatican City

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Vatican City, the only fully recognised sovereign state not to be a member of the United Nations, is a walled city enclave within the larger city of Rome, Italy. It is the smallest state in the world both in terms of size and population, an ecclesiastical state run by the Bishop of Rome and head of the worldwide Catholic Church – also known as the Pope. It is the official home of the Holy See (the Pope’s episcopal jurisdiction dating back to early Christianity) and accordingly the central reference point for the 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. Although the city-state was only formally established in 1929, Popes have been associated with the geographical area of the Vatican for almost as long as Christianity itself. The Pope in fact had direct control over large territories of modern Italy – known as Papal States – for over 1,000 years between the 8th and 19th Centuries. So, why’s it now limited to a walled enclave? Let’s go way back. Continue reading Adventure 5: Vatican City →

Adventure 4: United Nations

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As you just read in Adventure 3, the United Nations is an intergovernmental organisation formed in 1945 to promote international co-operation. It was established towards the end of World War 2, essentially to prevent another such conflict from ever occurring again. Its formation was suggested by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a successor to the previous (ineffective) League of Nations body. 51 member states in 1945 grew to 193 today, membership increasing particularly significantly in the 1960s following widespread decolonisation and independence.

As well as the six principal organs established by the U.N. Charter that we already know (General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, International Court of Justice, Trusteeship Council and Secretariat), other United Nations agencies now include the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation) and UNICEF (the U.N. Children’s Fund). Continue reading Adventure 4: United Nations →

Adventure 3: United Nations Charter

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The U.N Charter is the treaty that founded, unsurprisingly, the international organisation known as the United Nations. It was signed in 1945 by the original 51 member states towards the conclusion of World War 2 and ratified later that year by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the US, the USSR, China, France and the UK – the Security Council are for all intents and purposes the ‘winners’ of World War 2).

As of 2014, the vast majority of the recognised countries in the world (currently 193 out of 196) are now members of the United Nations and bound by the articles of the U.N. Charter. The three outliers? Kosovo (declared independence from Serbia in 2008 but not yet universally recognised as a state); Taiwan (the formerly recognised government of China); and Vatican City (which chooses to retain ‘observer-only’ status). The status of Palestine is also hotly disputed – I’ll come back to the Israel/Palestine issue later on in the blog as it’s unquestionably one of the World Peace biggies! Continue reading Adventure 3: United Nations Charter →

Adventure 2: Backcasting

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Backcasting, I have now learned, is the opposite of forecasting. Makes sense. It’s the process of starting with a desirable future then working backwards to achieve it, while forecasting is predicting the future based on current trends.

Forecasting is often bleak because it’s about the continuation of trends that are happening now. Using backcasting, we can create whatever future we want. Think of it like this: Imagine a future. Say, one of peace, equality, tolerance, prosperity, respect and freedom. Could be global, could be local. Now, from that vision of a better future, work backwards and try to figure out how you get from this present to that future then put a plan in place to make it happen. Continue reading Adventure 2: Backcasting →

Adventure 1: World Peace

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Before we get going, please read the ‘About World Peace Adventure‘ link at the top of the page. Is it sort-of clear what I’m trying to do here? Good, let’s get started. So, what’s World Peace? Or, at least, how is it currently defined? Well, according to Wikipedia (which, for all its faults, is generally a good starting place for most things) World Peace is “an ideal of freedom, peace and happiness among and within all nations and people; an idea of planetary non-violence by which nations willingly cooperate – either voluntarily or by virtue of a system of governance that prevents warfare”. We also learn that, since the conclusion of World War 2 in 1945, the United Nations has “worked to resolve conflicts without declarations of war”. All well and good in theory, but the reality is that there have been numerous violent wars and conflicts across the world since 1945, so something’s clearly failing in this world we live in. Why? Continue reading Adventure 1: World Peace →

About World Peace Adventure

Educating myself and the world at the same time – join the adventure and read my blog!

What’s this blog about and how should you read it?

The blog will very generally be about World Peace: what it might be, how we might achieve it, and what’s holding us back from doing so. It will be an Adventure because I’ll be educating myself as I go and have no idea what direction the blog will go in or where it will end up – hopefully as a book and interactive multimedia project if I’m ever able to finish it (though the necessities of work are making progress on this project rather slower than I’d like!). These blog entries/book chapters, I hope, will eventually capture 360 essential building blocks necessary to understand both the obstacles that hold us back from world peace, and the means to eventually surmount those obstacles. So that should be easy…

An adventure is defined as an unusual or exciting experience with an uncertain outcome, which is certainly what this blog is to me. It’s fair to say my intention is to explore light and shadow in the human experience to date. The blog may at times dwell on the shadow more than the light – humans, for whatever reason, haven’t tended to be great to each other, ever – but I’m going to try to keep the overall tone as positive and optimistic as I can. Thanks to the internet, the people of the world are more connected than ever before, yet somehow living side by side with each other peacefully seems to be as much an impossible dream as ever. Maybe even more so. Why?

Let’s bust out a quote: It was the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana who originally said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. That quote’s now immortalised at Auschwitz, a permanent reminder of perhaps the darkest shadow humans have yet cast on ourselves. There have been plenty more shadows in our collective history to date; cast both in the east and in the west, cast in the name of advancement, cast in the name of religion, cast for no other reason than man’s inhumanity to man. I hope this blog will help us remember the shadows of the past to better understand the present, while also celebrating the extraordinary light we human beings have at times proved ourselves capable of that can brighten the future.

How would I advise a reader to approach this website? Let me take a brief detour by paying tribute to the two sources and inspirations for the blog: 1) the Fighting Fantasy ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ books I loved as a child and 2) the Wikipedia website I now love as an adult. The idea for this blog started off as kind of a combination of the two: the fun of choosing my own path through a book (or blog) based on which parts of it I was actually interested in and wanted to read, combined with picking up real, factual knowledge of the world around me (from a mixture of Wikipedia and other online and offline sources) along the way. This is something I started doing in my spare time simply in an attempt to understand some of the reasons this crazy world of ours has become so messed up and whether anything can genuinely be done to fix it. Some of my more tech-savvy friends suggested I turn my naive and egotistical ‘world peace adventure’ into a blog and allow others to share the journey. So here we are. It will of course take a while to build up content so do please keep coming back regularly (I’ll aim for at least two or three new chapters a week). Jump around, follow the suggested links, dip in and out at random, look for areas of interest in the archive, or even read it from start to finish. But enjoy it, hopefully learn from it, and maybe even use the knowledge to change the world for the better in some way. That’s what I eventually hope to do.

My intention is also for the blog to be an entertaining read as opposed to a dry lecture, and I hope the ‘choose your own adventure’ format proves as enjoyable for the reader to follow along with as it is for me piecing it together. To bust out the swelling music for a second, I genuinely believe the human experience is an adventure we’re all on together, a journey, and we’re still very much at the beginning of it. We really can choose where we go next.

Why choose your own adventure? Because each person’s learning journey is unique. Because self-learning is the future of education. Because it works for young and older people alike. Because in this age of information all of human history is at our fingertips. Because we can. Because we owe it to ourselves and the world around us to “be the change we want to see in the world” (with thanks to Ghandi for the sentiment, if not the direct quote).

While I’ll attempt to keep the themes and topics in this blog as universal and accessible as possible, at its heart it’s also my journey, my adventure, and the various routes I go down will inevitably reflect at times my own personal interests and upbringing. Will it have a British or Western bias? Probably. Will there be some eventual blog topics, for example Scotland or space travel, that will interest and excite me more than most readers? Inevitably. But it’s my blog and I’m going to write about what captivates me.

Enough preamble, let’s get started. What does World Peace actually mean and why does it still seem such a distant concept? The very first ‘adventure’ post in the blog will start with that very subject, take things from there and eventually loop back, but, for starters, I’d say any consideration of the ‘World Peace’ subject has to be equally about both individuals and about society. We should remind ourselves right here at the start that large-scale societies (states, if you will) are a very, very recent development in the human experience. For the vast majority of human pre-history, large societies simply did not exist. The earliest known city-states, found in ancient Mesopotamia, were established less than 6,000 years ago. A quote from the anthropologist Robert L. Carneiro puts that starkly into context:

“For 99.8 percent of human history, people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages. At the beginning of the Palaeolithic (i.e. the Stone Age), the number of these autonomous political units must have been small, but by 1000BC, it had increased to some 600,000. Then supra-village aggregation began in earnest, and in barely three millennia the autonomous political units of the world dropped from 600,000 to 157. In the light of this trend, the continued decrease from 157 to 1 seems not only inescapable but close at hand.”

Long story short: the global village is here and it got here fast. It’s no wonder we’re still squabbling with each other and trying to find our feet.

To begin the journey, go to Adventure 1: World Peace