PEACE '' WARS '' PEELS : PRECIS

THE BENGALI man of letters Rabindranath Tagore - a poet, a playwright and the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature - saw this clearly more than a century ago.

Tagore viewed World War 1 not as a sudden convulsion but rather as a slow culmination. The mechanized slaughter of the war, Tagore felt, showed that an imperial world built upon the domination of nature, and on the domination of Asians and Africans, was now collapsing on itself :

'' Suddenly all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the Furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into the dust.''

SURVIVORS of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks, who formed the group Nihon Hidankyo in 1956 to advocate a world free of nuclear weapons, were finally recognized with the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

Their brave voices need to be amplified as nuclear conflict looks more likely than it has in generations.

We should heed their deep wisdom warning that life on Earth depends on peace.  

The World Students Society thanks Sunil S. Amrith, a history professor at Yale and the author, most recently of '' The Burning Earth.''