"Before man was, war waited for him."
Cormac McCarthy.

World peace is one of those elusive aspirations, akin to finding the Holy Grail, Atlantis and El Dorado. It is something we wish for and ironically, die for. Since the dawn of time we have fought amongst each other. The reasons that man has fought and killed are legion. Land, pride, riches, cattle and perceived insults are but a few of the many things that have led humanity on a course of warfare throughout the ages. Has anything changed over the millennia? Very little, I would propose. Yet there may be hope for us in the future.

We are still the same creature as the hunter gatherer of the stone age. We still suffer the same emotions. The only thing that has changed is technology and our organizational skills. If the advances of mankind are examined, you will see that our ability to kill with greater ease has moved along at pace with our developments in agriculture, industry and social structure. Man has now created weapons that can destroy our world in one fell swoop. That is a very pessimistic thought. On the flip side we have developed a stronger sense that we belong to a world community due technical advances such as communication networks. It is up to us to harness the power that we now possess in our ability to talk to each other almost instantaneously. Problems and issues can now be resolved across different times zones which in earlier times would have taking weeks even months. That is the theory, the reality is different.

Wars since the dawn of the twentieth century have become more global and destructive. Is there anything since the end of that century that would lead us to believe that world peace is around the corner? Sadly, no. Today we have a global war on terror which is turning into a bigger danger to the world than the previous Cold War of the twentieth century. In the Sudan, the world is looking on as genocide is occurring. Across the continent in Africa, a number of conflicts are ongoing with little chance of an end in sight. South America, although peaceful to the casual eye, is riven with violence caused by social inequality and drug production. I tender up Columbia and the multiple gang related deaths in Brazil as examples of the violence in South America.

Religion and ideological beliefs, the cornerstones of many societies have caused numerous outbreaks of war. We need only look back as far as the 1940s to see the results of this. Fascism under the leadership of Adolf

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