By
David Swanson
Remarks at Veterans For Peace Convention, Asheville, NC, July 27, 2014.
I started seeing graphics pop up on social media sites this past week
that said about Gaza: “It’s not war. It’s murder.” So I started asking
people what exactly they think war is if it’s distinct from murder.
Well, war, some of them told me, takes place between armies. So I asked
for anyone to name a war during the past century (that is, after World
War I) where all or even most or even a majority of the dying was done
by members of armies. There may have been such a war. There are enough
scholars here today that somebody probably knows of one. But if so, it
isn’t the norm, and these people I was chatting with through social
media couldn’t think of any such war and yet insisted that that’s just
what war is. So, is war then over and nobody told us?
For whatever reasons, I then very soon began seeing a graphic sent
around that said about Gaza: “It’s not war. It’s genocide.” And the
typical explanation I got when I questioned this one was that the wagers
of war and the wagers of genocide have different attitudes. Are we
sure about that? I've spoken to advocates for recent U.S. wars who
wanted all or part of a population wiped out. Plenty of supporters of
the latest attacks on Gaza see them as counter-terrorism. In wars
between advanced militaries and poor peoples most of the death and
injury is on one side and most of it — by anyone’s definition —
civilian. This is as true in Afghanistan, where war rolls on largely
unchallenged, as in Gaza, about which we are newly outraged.
Well, what’s wrong with outrage? Who cares what people call it? Why
not criticize the war advocates rather than nitpicking the war
opponents’ choice of words? When people are outraged they will reach
for whatever word their culture tells them is most powerful, be it
murder or genocide or whatever. Why not encourage that and worry a
little more about the lunatics who are calling it
defense or
policing or
terrorist removal? (Eight-year-old terrorists!)
Yes, of course. I’ve been going after CNN news readers for claiming
Palestinians want to die and NBC for yanking its best reporter and ABC
for claiming scenes of destruction in Gaza that just don’t exist in
Israel are in fact in Israel — and the U.S. government for providing the
weapons and the criminal immunity. I’ve been promoting rallies and
events aimed at swaying public opinion against what Israel has been
doing, and against the sadistic bloodthirsty culture of those standing
on hills cheering for the death and destruction below, quite regardless
of what they call it. But, as you’re probably aware, only the very most
open-minded war advocates attend conventions of Veterans For Peace.
So, I’m speaking here backstage, as it were, at the peace movement.
Among those of us who want to stop the killing, are there better and
worse ways to talk about it? And is anything revealed by the ways in
which we tend to talk about it when we aren't hyper-focused on our
language?
I think so. I think it’s telling that the worst word anyone can
think of isn’t war. I think it’s even more telling that we condemn
things by contrasting them with war, framing war as relatively
acceptable. I think this fact ought to be unsettling because a very
good case can be made that war, in fact, is the worst thing we do, and
that the distinctions between war and such evils as murder or genocide
can require squinting very hard to discern.
We’ve all heard that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
There is a parallel belief that wars don’t kill people, people who
misuse wars, who fight bad wars, who fight wars improperly, kill
people. This is a big contrast with many other evil institutions. We
don’t oppose child abuse selectively, holding out the possibility of
just and good incidents of child abuse while opposing the bad or dumb or
non-strategic or excessive cases of child abuse. We don’t have Geneva
Conventions for proper conduct while abusing children. We don’t have
human rights groups writing reports on atrocities and possible law
violations committed in the course of abusing children. We don’t
distinguish UN-sanctioned child abuse. The same goes for numerous
behaviors generally understood as always evil: slavery or rape or blood
feuds or duelling or dog fighting or sexual harassment or bullying or
human experimentation or — I don’t know — producing piles of
I’m-Ready-for-Hillary posters. We don’t imagine there are good, just,
and defensible cases of such actions.
And this is the core problem: not support for bombing Gaza or
Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or anywhere else that actually gets
bombed, but support for an imaginary war in the near future between two
armies with different colored jerseys and sponsors, competing on an
isolated battlefield apart from any villages or towns, and suffering
bravely and heroically for their non-murderous non-genocidal cause while
complying with the whistles blown by the referees in the human rights
organizations whenever any of the proper killing drifts into lawless
imprisonment or torture or the use of improper weaponry. Support for
specific possible wars in the United States right now is generally under
10 percent. More people believe in ghosts, angels, and the integrity
of our electoral system than want a new U.S. war in Ukraine, Syria,
Iran, or Iraq. The
Washington Post found a little over 10
percent want a war in Ukraine but that the people who held that view
were the people who placed Ukraine on the world map the furthest from
its actual location, including people who placed it in the United
States. These are the idiots who favor specific wars. Even Congress,
speaking of idiots, on Friday told Obama no new war on Iraq.
The problem is the people, ranging across the population from morons
right up to geniuses, who favor imaginary wars. Millions of people will
tell you we need to be prepared for more wars in case there’s another
Adolf Hitler, failing to understand that the wars and militarism and
weapons sales and weapons gifts — the whole U.S. role as the arsenal of
democracies and dictatorships alike — increase rather than decrease
dangers, that other wealthy countries spend less than 10 percent what
the U.S. does on their militaries, and that 10 percent of what the U.S.
spends on its military could end global starvation, provide the globe
with clean water, and fund sustainable energy and agriculture programs
that would go further toward preventing mass violence than any
stockpiles of weaponry. Millions will tell you that the world needs a
global policeman, even though polls of the world find the widespread
belief that the United States is currently the greatest threat to peace
on earth. In fact if you start asking people who have opposed every war
in our lifetimes or in the past decade to work on opposing the entire
institution of war, you’ll be surprised by many of the people who say
no.
I’m a big fan of a book called
Addicted to War. I think it
will probably be a powerful tool for war abolition right up until war is
abolished. But its author told me this week that he can’t work to
oppose all wars because he favors some of them. Specifically, he said,
he doesn’t want to ask Palestinians to not defend themselves. Now,
there’s a really vicious cycle. If we can’t shut down the institution
of war because Palestinians need to use it, then it’s harder to go after
U.S. military spending, which is of course what funds much of the
weaponry being used against Palestinians. I think we should get a
little clarity about what a war abolition movement does and does not
do. It does not tell people what they must do when attacked. It is not
focused on advising, much less instructing, the victims of war, but on
preventing their victimization. It does not advise the individual
victim of a mugging to turn the other cheek. But it also does not
accept the disproven notion that violence is a defensive strategy for a
population. Nonviolence has proven far more effective and its victories
longer lasting. If people in Gaza have done anything at all to assist
in their own destruction, it is not the supposed offenses of staying in
their homes or visiting hospitals or playing on beaches; it is the
ridiculously counterproductive firing of rockets that only encourages
and provides political cover for war/ genocide/ mass murder.
I’m a huge fan of Chris Hedges and find him one of the most useful
and inspiring writers we have. But he thought attacking Libya was a
good idea up until it quite predictably and obviously turned out not to
be. He still thinks Bosnia was a just war. I could go on through
dozens of names of people who contribute mightily to an anti-war
movement who oppose abolishing war. The point is not that anyone who
believes in 1 good war out of 100 is to blame for the trillion dollar
U.S. military budget and all the destruction it brings. The point is
that they are wrong about that 1 war out of 100, and that even if they
were right, the side-effects of maintaining a culture accepting of war
preparations would outweigh the benefits of getting 1 war right. The
lives lost by not spending $1 trillion a year in the U.S. and another $1
trillion in the rest of the world on useful projects like environmental
protection, sustainable agriculture, medicine and hygiene absolutely
dwarf the number of lives that would be saved by halting our routine
level of war making.
If you talk about abolishing war entirely, as many of us have begun focusing on through a new project called
World Beyond War,
you’ll also find people who want to abolish war but believe it’s
impossible. War is natural, they say, inevitable, in our genes, decreed
by our economy, the unavoidable result of racism or consumerism or
capitalism or exceptionalism or carnivorism or nationalism. And of
course many cultural patterns interact with and facilitate war, but the
idea that it’s in our genes is absurd, given how many cultures in our
species have done and do without it. I don’t know what — if anything —
people usually mean when they call something “natural” but presumably
it’s not the provocation of suicide, which is such a common result of
participating in war, while the first case of PTSD due to war
deprivation has yet to be discovered. Most of our species’ existence,
as hunter-gatherers, did not know war, and only the last century — a
split-second in evolutionary terms — has known war that at all resembles
war today. War didn’t used to kill like this. Soldiers weren’t
conditioned to kill. Most guns picked up at Gettysburg had been loaded
more than once. The big killers were diseases, even in the U.S. Civil
War, the war that the U.S. media calls the most deadly because Filipinos
and Koreans and Vietnamese and Iraqis don’t count. Now the big killer
is a disease in our thinking, a combination of what Dr. King called
self-guided missiles and misguided men.
Another hurdle for abolishing war is that the idea rose to popularity
in the West in the 1920s and 1930s and then sank into a category of
thought that is vaguely treasonous. War abolition was tried and failed,
the thinking goes, like communism or labor unions and now we know
better. While abolishing war is popular in much of the world, that fact
is easily ignored by the 1% who misrepresent the 10% or 15% who live in
the places that constitute the so-called International Community.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come or weaker than
an idea whose time has come and gone. Or so we think. But the
Renaissance was, as its name suggests, an idea whose time came again,
new and improved and victorious. The 1920s and 1930s are a resource for
us. We have stockpiles of wisdom to draw upon. We have example of
where things were headed and how they went of track.
Andrew Carnegie took war profits and set up an endowment with the
mandate to eliminate war and then to hold a board meeting, determine the
second worst thing in the world, and begin eliminating that. This
sounds unique or eccentric, but is I believe a basic understanding of
ethics that ought to be understood and acted upon by all of us. When
someone asks me why I’m a peace activist I ask them why in the hell
anyone isn’t. So, reminding the Carnegie Endowment for Peace what it’s
legally obligated to do, and dozens of other organizations along with
it, may be part of the process of drawing inspiration from the past.
And of course insisting that the Nobel Committee not bestow another
peace prize on a war-thirsty presidential candidate or any other
advocate of war is part of that.
The case against war that is laid out at
WorldBeyondWar.org includes these topics:
War is immoral.
War endangers us.
War threatens our environment.
War erodes our liberties.
War impoverishes us.
We need $2 trillion/year for other things.
I find the case to be overwhelming and suspect many of you would
agree. In fact Veterans For Peace and numerous chapters and members of
Veterans For Peace have been among the first to sign on and
participate. And we’ve begun finding that thousands of people and
organizations from around the world agree as people and groups from 68
countries and rising have added their names on the website in support of
ending all war. And many of these people and organizations are not
peace groups. These are environmental and civic groups of all sorts and
people never involved in a peace movement before. Our hope is of
course to greatly enlarge the peace movement by making war abolition as
mainstream as cancer abolition. But we think enlargement is not the
only alteration that could benefit the peace movement. We think a focus
on each antiwar project as part of a broader campaign to end the whole
institution of war will significantly change how specific wars and
weapons and tactics are opposed.
How many of you have heard appeals to oppose Pentagon waste? I’m in
favor of Pentagon waste and opposed to Pentagon efficiency. How can we
not be, when what the Pentagon does is evil? How many of you have heard
of opposition to unnecessary wars that leave the military
ill-prepared? I’m in favor of leaving the military ill-prepared, but
not of distinguishing unnecessary from supposedly necessary wars. Which
are the necessary ones? When sending missiles into Syria is stopped, in
large part by public pressure, war as last resort is replaced by all
sorts of other options that were always available. That would be the
case anytime any war is stopped. War is never a last resort any more
than rape or child abuse is a last resort. How many of you have seen
opposition to U.S. wars that focuses almost exclusively on the financial
cost and the suffering endured by Americans? Did you know polls find
Americans believing that Iraq benefited and the United States suffered
from the war that destroyed Iraq? What if the financial costs and the
costs to the aggressor nation were in addition to moral objections to
mass-slaughter rather than instead of? How many of you have seen
antiwar organizations trumpet their love for troops and veterans and war
holidays, or groups like the AARP that advocate for benefits for the
elderly by focusing on elderly veterans, as though veterans are the most
deserving? Is that good activism?
I want to celebrate those who resist and oppose war, not those who
engage in it. I love Veterans For Peace because it’s for peace. It’s
for peace in a certain powerful way, but it’s the being for peace that I
value. And being for peace in the straightforward meaning of being
against war. Most organizations are afraid of being for peace; it
always has to be peace and justice or peace and something else. Or it’s
peace in our hearts and peace in our homes and the world will take care
of itself. Well, as Veterans For Peace know, the world doesn’t take
care of itself. The world is driving itself off a cliff. As Woody
Allen said, I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen, I
want to live on in my apartment. Well, I don’t want to find peace in my
heart or my garden, I want to find peace in the elimination of war. At
WorldBeyondWar.org is a list of projects we think may help advance
that, including, among others:
- Creating an easily recognizable and joinable mainstream international movement to end all war.
- Education about war, peace, and nonviolent action — including all that is to be gained by ending war.
- Improving access to accurate information about wars. Exposing falsehoods.
- Improving access to information about successful steps away from war in other parts of the world.
- Increased understanding of partial steps as movement in the direction of eliminating, not reforming, war.
- Partial and full disarmament.
- Conversion or transition to peaceful industries.
- Closing, converting or donating foreign military bases.
- Democratizing militaries while they exist and making them truly volunteer.
- Banning foreign weapons sales and gifts.
- Outlawing profiteering from war.
- Banning the use of mercenaries and private contractors.
- Abolishing the CIA and other secret agencies.
- Promoting diplomacy and international law, and consistent enforcement of laws against war, including prosecution of violators.
- Reforming or replacing the U.N. and the ICC.
- Expansion of peace teams and human shields.
- Promotion of nonmilitary foreign aid and crisis prevention.
- Placing restrictions on military recruitment and providing potential soldiers with alternatives.
- Thanking resisters for their service.
- Encouraging cultural exchange.
- Discouraging racism and nationalism.
- Developing less destructive and exploitative lifestyles.
- Expanding the use of public demonstrations and nonviolent civil resistance to enact all of these changes.
I would add learning from and working with organizations that have
been, like Veterans For Peace, working toward war abolition for years
now and inspiring others to do the same. And I would invite you all to
work with
WorldBeyondWartoward our common goal.
David Swanson is Director of World Beyond War, host of Talk Nation Radio, author of books including
War No More: The Case for Abolition, War Is A Lie, and When the World Outlawed War.
