Unless and Until

Today Paris is again the centre of attention as it welcomes, for the first time, representatives of every country on earth to the latest climate conference organised by the United Nations. It is a hopeful sign that most of these countries have already submitted plans to cut emissions in order to start to combat climate change. Mankind as a whole is hoping that an agreement will be reached which will make a real difference. If nothing happens, we are likely to find that wars and upheavals will be caused by the fact that people are desperate to escape floods, drought, water and food shortages caused by the changes to the climate. This, on top of the wars we already have.

Many years before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stayed in Paris (see previous blog), His Father, Bahá’u’lláh, wrote from exile in Turkey to the kings and rulers of the time, urging them to convene a peace conference. At this conference, permanent boundaries would be fixed, lower levels of armaments would be agreed, and all the rulers would agree to support one another against any aggression. He wrote: “Should any king take up arms against another, all should unitedly arise and prevent him.” Only one ruler, Queen Victoria, responded (politely) to Bahá’u’lláh’s letter. If they had all listened to His proposals, the two World Wars would never have happened, not to mention dozens of other wars from that time to the present day.

The world now finds itself fighting a new kind of war, in which one side in the conflict does not follow the “rules” of war. Ignoring all the conventions and agreements which humanity has come to, there are different groups now which act with complete barbarism. Wholesale slaughter of anyone outside their own group, the forcible abduction of women as sex slaves and the deliberate destruction of mankind’s religious and cultural heritage are all committed openly and triumphantly as if to advertise their total rejection of all the accepted norms of human behaviour. More and more people now understand that unless and until these groups are stopped, no-one else is safe.

Governments have come to realise that they must put aside political differences and work together to eliminate this particular threat to the peace and stability of the world. The ultimate goal of world peace is impossible unless the governments and peoples of the world “unitedly arise and prevent” the wanton massacres perpetrated by these groups. There are early signs that countries are now doing this. In West Africa, there are five armies now working together to combat the threat from one such terrorist group; in East Africa, the African Union has been using troops from six countries to push back another such group; and now, in the Middle East, over twenty countries are increasingly working together to overcome the most infamous group of all. Maybe we haven’t got the world peace conference yet which Bahá’u’lláh called for, but there has been significant advance in that the United Nations Security Council has now given its unanimous assent to action against the most powerful terrorist entity. Previously the United Nations was not able to act, due to the lack of unity among the political leaders. Perhaps we are taking a small step towards what Bahá’u’lláh envisaged.

Meanwhile, we still have the threat of climate change to deal with. The common element in the problems of war and climate change is the need for unity – that all human beings should be aware of their oneness, coming as they do from one species, and inter-related as we all are. Through the fires of suffering, through the threat of climate catastrophe, through the experience of united action, the different races and religions must see one another as one and the same. As Bahá’u’lláh put it:

"The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established."

Let us hope that recent and current events in Paris will move us nearer to this goal.