Can there be an end to war?
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 1998
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is British military historian and journalist John Keegan.
In his fifth and final Reith lecture, recorded at the Broadcasting House, London, John Keegan considers the future of war. He argues that it will not be law that will keep the world's peace. Rather it will be because the United Nations retains the will to confront unlawful force with lawful force together with the capacity to resolve the conflicts in which wars originate. He believes that we must not shrink from seeing the causes of war addressed, but equally we must not shrink from seeing violence used when the threat of violence has failed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.4 | This lecture in the series War in Our World, given by John Keegan, was originally broadcast in 1998. |
| 0:12.3 | Welcome from the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London for the last of this year's 50th anniversary series of Reith Lect lectures, War and Our World, given by the |
| 0:22.7 | distinguished military historian John Keegan. You join an invited audience which includes politicians, |
| 0:28.7 | defence specialists, writers and academics, and a number of them will be raising questions |
| 0:33.2 | immediately after the lecture. In his previous lectures, John Keegan traced the likely origins of war |
| 0:39.0 | and how the development of mass conflict has shaped the 20th century. |
| 0:43.6 | He also explored the evolution of the nation-state and the changing nature of sovereignty. |
| 0:48.6 | And last week, he considered the impact of battle on those who have to fight |
| 0:52.3 | and how it has altered the nature of war. |
| 0:55.0 | Now tonight, for his final lecture, he looks through the future to ask, can there be an end to war? |
| 1:01.1 | Would you please then give a very warm welcome to the 1998 Wreath Lecturer, John Keegan? We must know, wrote Heraclitus of Ephesus in the 5th century BC, that war is common to all, and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife. |
| 1:33.7 | His was a deeply classical view, formed by the relentless conflicts of the Greek world, both between Greek and Greek and against the power of the Persian Empire. |
| 1:46.6 | It was a view held by most free Greeks of his time, men who thought of themselves as warriors |
| 1:53.7 | quite as much as they did as farmers, philosophers or historians, and who took it for granted |
| 2:00.7 | that they would, during the course of their lives, |
| 2:04.2 | fight as spearmen in the phalanx or as sailors at sea. |
| 2:11.1 | Is this true today? |
| 2:14.1 | Having considered in previous lectures the origins of war and the changing role of individuals and states, |
| 2:22.9 | in this final lecture, I must address the outlook for the future. |
| 2:28.4 | Can there ever be an end to war? |
| 2:34.5 | The classical idea of conflict as central to human life |
... |
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