The Worst Kind of Criminal

There is a certain class of criminals we hate above all others, a certain kind of deviant that we, as society, have always united to destroy.

It isn’t enough to decry them in public or mock them in private. It isn’t enough to imprison. It isn’t enough to torture or even kill them. They must be stamped out, eliminated, lest their ideas fester and spread.

No other group, not drug traffickers, sweat shop owners or even war criminals have been so consistently and tenaciously persecuted.

And yet no matter how many of them we threaten or imprison, no matter how many of their lives we destroy, no matter how many of them we kill, whether by assassin’s bullet or state sponsored execution, their ideas, like some malicious form of cancer, keep coming back to haunt us.

Who are these villains that seem to frighten us so much?

They are the lovers of peace, tolerance, forgiveness and compassion. They are the heroes of our highest ideals and they are the ones we, as a society, have united, over and over again, to destroy.

You don’t believe me? Compare the death of Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King to those of Stalin, Mau or even Hitler.

Read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trial and see how carefully the charge of “War Criminal” is prosecuted and how relatively merciful the sentences. Then compare those trials and sentences to those of Nelson Mandela, Steven Biko, Lech Walesa or thousands of other peacemakers throughout history.

You might say that miscarriages of justice like that only occur under evil regimes like Soviet Dominated Poland or South Africa under apartheid but, to do so you would have to ignore HUAC under McCarthy, Nixon’s “enemies list”, the treatment of civil rights activists in the South and literally dozens of other miscarriages of American justice.

Most people when asked about things like peace, compassion, freedom and justice would say that they are for them. Just as most people decry war, poverty, and injustice on principle.

However, in reality, it often works out to be just the opposite.

It is those who march for peace who must face the fire-hoses. It is those who refuse, on principal, to kill that are labeled traitors and imprisoned. While those who fight for the poor are called communists or worse, “Community organizer”.

What does it say about a nation when rallies are held to save the taxes of a billionaire while millions fall below the poverty line?

What does it say about a nation that defends their right to wage pre-emptive war, while ignoring the battle scarred veterans who fought that war?

What does it say about a planet where men of peace like Martin Luther King, Jesus, and Gandhi and hundreds of other peace makers die violently or in prison, while dictators like the Shah of Iran, Fernando Marcos and Pol Pot die of natural causes?

How is it possible that a church, founded on the life of a peaceful man who was tortured to death could, in turn, torture non-believers and go to war in his name?

How is it possible for Gandhi to unite a nation through non-violence then watch that same nation fall apart in racial slaughter before being assassinated himself?

What does it say when the values that most of the world’s population hold dear, compassion, peace and forgiveness are constantly under siege while greed, aggression and vengeance are defended as if they were virtues?

It says that there is a great chasm in the human heart between what we claim to believe and the real motivations which drive us.

We might decry aggression, violence and revenge but we are still inexplicably drawn to them.

Turn on the TV, watch a movie or play a video game and the odds are you will see some form of violence. We romanticize violent struggle over just about everything else and our great heroes whether real or fictional are often people of violence.

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan.

There is no question that these were great men. Great in the sense that they literally changed the face of history.

But they were also conquerors, killers, men who repeatedly chose war over peace.

They were great, but that did not make them good.

The good people, the ones who stood up against the conquerors, the ones who fought for peace were probably called traitors and their names have been lost in the mists of history while the characters of those who conquered have been whitewashed by time and elevated to the status of heroes.

Like millions of others, I have spent much of my life fascinated by the martial arts and there are tens of thousands of martial arts schools around the world to teach me martial ways.

Where are the schools for the peaceful arts?

Most of us understand that a world in which all the resources are controlled by a tiny minority, while the vast majority descends further and further into poverty is not only an unjust world but an unstable one and yet that is the world that we live in.

To make matters worse, those champions of greed are canonized in our libraries and magazines. We admire their private jets and opulent mansions. Where are the stories about those who work hard and live simply? If we idolized frugality and charity instead of extravagance and selfishness, our world would be a much better place.

Most of us believe that racism, and intolerance are wrong but we cannot help dividing ourselves into groups, teams, nations and religions and for some reason, all of us feel that the team we are on is the “good guys”.

If our world is to survive, all of this must change. We have become far too powerful to endure much longer the discrepancy between what we claim to believe and how we actually live our lives.

It is, in fact, time to side with the great criminals of history, with Gandhi, and Jesus and Martin Luther King.

It is time to put down the sword and become a criminal, a deviant...

A peacemaker.