What Nicholas Kristof Gets Wrong About Rape in Africa

Nicholas Kristof's column in today's New York Times speaks of the heartbreaking situation that men returning from war--notably in Africa but also around the world--attack, rape, and murder women and girls, sometimes even babies only a few months old.

Kristof argues that bringing these men to justice will help reduce sexual violence against women and surely it will. And thus Congress ought to maintain current programs that discourage such violence, study their effectiveness, and work to provide ever better remedies.

But I think that Kristof gets it wrong. He blames the problem of the rape of girls as primarily one of poor law enforcement. I believe, rather, that it's the result of elevated testosterone in men who return from war filled with rage and energy and, yes, elevated hormones. It's a very primitive response. But that's what war does. We have to find a way to end it.

I recently proposed here a radical solution to end all war among nations--by leving an unbearable "peace tax" and then returning that money to nations and corporations at the end of every year that they did not participate in a war. Motivating that essay was the heartbreak of parents and girlfriends (and now boyfriens) at the devastating loss of a young person fighting in a war that inevitably serves the needs of wealthier people who avoid the front lines.

But Kristof's column emphasizes yet another reason to transcend this terrible human heritage of organized violence--the primitive response it evokes in those who go to war and those who return from war. We would not be able to kill others in war if we thought of them as fellow human beings with whom we disagree.

Soldiers can kill because they are made to see the enemy as less-than-human or as so fundamentally evil that they do not deserve to live. Think about the dehumanizing effect this has on the soldier whose world view is so transformed by this view of others.

Elevated rates of unemployment, violence, depression, and suicide among soldiers AFTER military deployment testify to the reality that everyone loses when nations go to war. Everyone, that is, except the corporations that Dwight Eisenhower called the Military-Indusdtrial Complex. And he was certainly in a position to know. That "complex" has grown to unimaginable proportions today and it has gone global. A smart and unified effort, however, can transform this bloodlust.

presented a view that only when the messiah comes will war end. I am not willing to wait that long nor to concede the impossibility of peace. It may be human nature to go to war.

But it is our religious nature to transcend human nature. Just as we reject social darwinism and heal the sick and help the needy--regardless of the effect on our human gene pool, so we can reject violent solutions to human economic and ideological rivalries. We are smart enough to figure out how to do this.