Peace on Earth

While most humans probably agree that peace on Earth would be a nice thing to have, we seem to have quite diverse visions about how this peace would actually look like and how to get there. This document tries to formulate a simple recipe.

Recipe

(1) Create the Board for Territorial Affairs (BTA), an international group of experts who develops, publishes and maintains a database that assigns every square meter of our planet to a national government.

(2) The BTA is the ultimate authority who judges about changes in this database. A major part of their work is to run scientific research in diverse fields (historic, ethnic, sociological, geographical) and to publish studies about their work.

(3) Implement a database of Registry of Sins Against Humanity (RSAH) where “sins against humanity” are registered and stored as financial debts. This includes creation of a virtual international currency.

(4) The RSAH will register all material and human damage caused by armed forces during an incident, and all costs caused by the incident will be billed as de debt to the accounts of the concerned nations according to their degree of guiltiness. The invaded nation will receive a credit to their account, as a refund for every day of occupation of their territory.

(5) National governments who decided to join this system, implement a new kind of tax, technically similar to the value-added tax, whose tax rate is based on the RSAH.

(6) The national governments collect this tax and then forward it to the BTA who decides what to to with the money.

(7) National armies reorient their activities from using mass weapons towards non-violent resistance (NVR).

Expected outcome

(1) Trying to settle territorial conflicts using armed force will simply become financially unbearable. Invading a territory will simply no longer be interesting because the conquered areas are unusable and represent a considerable cost of ownership.

(2) The UN won’t even need to “ban” usage of weapons because nobody will buy them any more.

(3) The NATO will start selling their weapons or convert them into NVR material. NVR will become a new market.

(4) The big national governments with imperial tendencies will, after a period of temptation to invade even more territories, quickly embrace the new rules of the game and become successful exporters of NVR technology.

Non-violent resistance

Non-violent resistance (NVR) means to use modern and traditional technology to develop security infrastructure. NVR has the following main priorities:

  • (8) Protect the population of threatened territories. This includes evacuating important people and temporarily grant their safe stay in exile. It also includes entering into occupation mode.

  • (9) Make infrastructure in occupied areas unusable for the invader and easy to restore when the conflict has found a resolution.

  • (10) Record what happens on the territory and collect data to be used as evidence for court decisions.

The NATO website says that “NATO’s essential and enduring purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security of all its members by political and military means.” Who says that “military means” requires usage of weapons? Merrian-Webster explains “military” as being related to “armed forces”, and “armed” indeed can mean “furnished with weapons”, but it can also mean “furnished with something that provides security, strength, or efficacy”. I think that a professional, systematic and efficient form of NVR can be considered “military means”. The Treaty itself says that they assist each other “as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” It says “including”, not “only” or “mainly”. I cannot find anything in the Treaty that says that the NATO must use weapons.

Comments

(11) How to make sure that the BTA is independent and neutral? Ideas: (a) The members of this group would renounce from private property and hence have no heirs, and they would receive an unconditional basic income until the end of their lives. (b) No need to make this sure because every nation decides whether to trust the BTA or not, which leads to an automatic indicator.

Concepts

BTA

Board for Territorial Affairs.

Maybe the International Court of Justice can assume this responsibility.

RSAH

Registry of Sins Against Humanity

NVR

See Non-violent resistance.