War and violence leave no room for hope and one will never heave a sigh of relief with the current crises. The tragic stories making the headlines in national and international media fill one with disgust. Streams of blood gush from the wounds caused by suicide bombings or terrorist attacks, one’s honor and reputation are tarnished in the blink of an eye and people’s pains and sufferings never come to an end. The catastrophe about human rights, around the globe, continues unabated.
The utopian world, where mankind could exercise their rights and liberty, was drawn by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) did not come true. “Freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”. On the contrary, “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts”.
The utopia remains no more than an imaginary world. Inhumanity, cruelty and violence prevail in our world and life has turned into hell.
Democratic discourse is yet to come to fruition and the global threat, terrorist networks, is a flagrant slap in the face of democracy. In other words, democracy encounters great barriers and terrorist acts, which stem from radical ideology, are believed to be the strongest menace to it. Freedom fighters are repressed by the militants and radical ideologues. The warring factions spew out fear and hatred and play a highly destructive role in modern world. They seek to impose their ideology on individuals with the barrel of gun. Lack of tolerance and men’s thirst for power are the main reasons behind the deadly wars.
Moreover, ethnocentrism is the second reason behind war and violence. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one’s ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one’s own. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs and religion. These ethnic distinctions and sub-divisions serve to define each ethnicity’s unique cultural identity. In our country, warring factions, mainly the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), largely exercise ethnocentric acts and have stoked sectarian violence recently through killing ethnic minority groups on the basis of their race and ethnicity.
For instance, the day to day reports in national media is about gunmen shot dead five female airport workers and their driver in southern Afghanistan, suicide bombings left casualties behind, women underwent domestic violence, neighbor’s girl was raped and attorney general’s office recorded more than 3,700 cases of violence against women in the current year, the graph of corruption remains high, bribery is paid excessively, insurgency has been intensified, political wrestling goes on, the gap between state and nation widens, etc.
We harm one another, perpetrate honor-killing acts, blacken our neighbors’ reputation and shed our brethrens’ blood with no iota of mercy. We succumb to the worldly temptations, yield to carnal desires and satiate our voracious appetite for not only pecuniary issues but for hurting our fellows without feeling a sense of guilt.
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
In the state of nature, man is man’s wolf and there is war of all against all. Since men are naturally wicked, their wickedness will increase in social life. Hence, they step in civil state and submit all their rights to a person or a group of people so as to gain peace and security, this is called “social contract”. It is made to reduce the pains and sufferings of mankind and to live in the utopia.
In modern world, it is commonly accepted that everyone is equal in the eye of law and no one, including the head of state, is beyond law. Since we live in civil state, we are supposed to respect people’s civil rights. Moreover, it is widely agreed that human beings are born with a set of natural, inherent and inalienable rights awarded to them either by the Creator, reason, nature or state – there exist different theories – just for being human regardless of their race, sex, color, creed, etc, the same rights are stated in the international instruments especially in the UDHR. Therefore, we have to respect each one’s rights and dignities and the violators are to be punished according to the law of state.