HAROLD BRODKEY
595
stice, a true lessening of the evil that violence is, it can be arranged
only if the government of Ethiopia is altered, a socialist or Marxist
government.
And we have South Africa and Chile and San Salvador. The
latter two are not at the moment expansionist and represent a dif–
ferent problem, actually.
Still ,
world peace,
the phrase, the reality it refers to, suggests a
world of states organized internally along similar lines so that we can
assume that the current Cold War, God help us, is a step toward
what is meant by
world peace.
Do history and conscience permit us any kind of distanced view
of these matters for long? It seems not. But if we do not take some sort
of distance, the control of opinion that springs up in the immediacy of
conscience and consoling one's conscience, "the hysteric gratification"
as Roland Barthes calls it, of closed discourse, the ways it confers
status and even omniscience on statements, will perhaps lead us into
actions worthless for purposes of individual and international peace .
It seems clear now that modern war and revolution, whether in
Ethiopia and Somalia and Chad and Cambodia, Iran and Iraq, Af–
ghanistan , Russia earlier, or Poland now, and in Israel and in South
Africa cannot stop short of attempted genocide . The weight of doc–
trine and the pressure of the human thing work toward a peaceful
solution, a peaceful organization, which means a complete organiza–
tion. And that now orders the events of carnage so that they move
toward dangerous solutions to which we must not become inured and
for which, except for specialists in guilt and reorganization of the
world, we are in every detail unprepared. Simply and clearly , the
modern world is evil.
History tells us that carnage will proceed along the lines of abil–
ity . Historically, very few states, and those only for a short time,
have practiced any disciplined limitation of their abilities to destroy
and rule .
We have in the West the historical examples of the
Pax Romana
and the
Pax Britannica
to represent limited carnage.
The
Pax Romana
generally avoided genocide but was culturally
and ecologically meddlesome . The peace it brought was limited in–
ternally by the power of its armies and that power's careless exercise
of further power and by the corruption that followed on the unmiti–
gated primacy of the emperor's will when once he gained control of
the armies if he could .
