Where Is War Making Taking Us?
By David
Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/content/where-war-making-taking-us
Remarks at the New Hampshire Peace Action 30th Anniversary Celebration in
Concord, NH, October 5, 2012.
First of all, congratulations on 30 years! Give yourselves some
applause.
I should tell you now that I don't trust anyone over 30, so your time is
running out quickly here.
Actually, when it comes to organizations and the principles they've been
founded on, I am more likely to trust organizations over 30. New Hampshire Peace
Action's website says that you envision a world committed to disarmament, peace,
and nonviolent conflict resolution. More organizations used to be founded on
that vision in the past, I think, than are today. The Center for American
Progress favors "national security" in its mission statement, and the Campaign
for America's Future wants to move "away from Middle East occupation" while
warning us about terrorism, and the only warfare mentioned in Moveon.org's
mission statement is that very worst and most intolerably evil form of warfare:
"partisan warfare." If the two political party's could only agree on such basics
as corporate trade agreements, drug policies, prison policies, basic budgetary
priorities, immunity for U.S. war criminals, the need to support for-profit
health insurance companies if it kills us, the appropriateness of denying basic
human needs while funding banks and bombs, and the president's prerogative to
select winners in a murder lottery from a list of nominees every Tuesday, what a
wonderful world it would be. Or is. Or something.
The typically greater wisdom of older groups (even when they contain
younger people) is indicative of certain negative trends, but there have been
positive trends as well, some of them as a direct result of the kind of work you
do.
During these past 30 years, we've seen dents put in the culture of racism,
sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. We've seen violence decline
around the world and in our own society, in our treatment of our personal
acquaintances, sexual partners, children, pets, and other animals. And we've
seen nonviolence really come into its own as a force for change. The same year
New Hampshire Peace Action began, an International Day of Peace was created.
We've seen the Cold War ended. We've seen the death penalty retreat abroad and
even in some U.S. states. We've reduced the number of nuclear weapons on earth.
We've seen most of the world ban chemical weapons and land mines. We've
prevented the launching or escalation of numerous wars desired by members of our
government, as well as slowly and not-always-completely bringing other wars to
an end.
It's important, in fact, to remember that when the war planners don't get
to have a war that they want, they don't hold an annual press conference to
announce that the peace movement has won again. And the peace movement doesn't
do so either. So for those of you who are a little bit success-dependent you
have to remember to hold a little celebration inside your head. We didn't go to
war with Iran or China or Russia this year. Say it to yourself. We didn't go to
war with Iran or China or Russia this year. At least not yet. And if you think
that has had nothing to do with the peace movement, you aren't paying attention
to the slips that people like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton make in
revealing, after the fact, the degree to which they've been moved by the peace
movement's pressure. There are powerful people in the U.S. government who want
more wars now. And almost all powerful people in Washington have learned the
highly refined skill of convincing protesters that protest has no influence.
It's the most ludicrous and dangerous lie they tell. Even Barack Obama would
quite easily be moved by public pressure for peace if it were ever applied to
him.
We've also seen occasional incidents of accountability imposed on war
makers, from the World Court's sanctioning of the United States for its war
crimes in Nicaragua, just two years into the life of New Hampshire Peace Action,
to Italy's upholding last month the convictions of 22 CIA agents and 1 U.S.
military official for kidnapping a man in Italy and shipping him off to be
tortured in Egypt, as well as numerous prosecutions of non-Western war makers.
And then there's the accountability of the polling place, even in our nearly
completely corrupted election system. The more war-hungry candidates were more
likely to be thrown out of office in Washington in 2006 and 2008. U.S. public
understanding has moved against war, and remarkably toward awareness of the lies
that support war. The lies that the Bush-Cheney gang told about Iraq were not
unusual as war lies go, except in one respect. Those men were incompetent liars,
just as they were incompetent at so much else. The lies were doomed to be
undeniably exposed as falsehoods very quickly, and so they were. The weapons
that they knew weren't there turned out not to be there. The result has been a
big boost for public resistance to similar lies about Iran, Libya, Syria,
Pakistan, Yemen, etc.
That list, by no means complete, indicates that the full picture of the
past 30 years is not all pleasant. The glass is certainly half empty as well as
half full. In fact, the glass is flowing over with blood, and too many are
eagerly drinking from it. We may be kinder to our dogs and horses, but our
fossil fuel consumption is killing off species faster than Mitt Romney changes
his opinions. Racism and religious bigotry are alive and well in U.S. foreign
policy, and consequently in domestic policies as well. We treat non-white,
non-Christian, non-NATO nations in a manner in which we would never want to be
treated ourselves. At a Republican presidential primary last year, Ron Paul
proposed applying the Golden Rule to U.S. foreign policy, and the crowd booed
him. In fairness, he proposed ending our wars, in the next breath, and they
cheered, just as they cheered in Tampa when Clint Eastwood proposed immediate
withdrawal from Afghanistan to an empty chair. What too many Americans,
including millions who've sworn their souls away to both big political parties,
want is not so much bloodshed as superiority, exceptionalism, and the ability to
keep anything unpleasant out of their heads. So, wars on others are either
genocidal or humanitarian, depending on how one prefers to imagine them, but as
long as not many Americans die, and as long as the deaths of others are not
pointed out or dwelled on or displayed visually, well, we do what must be done
as the one nation that must live up to the sacred indispensible responsibility
of using its brute force to . . . well, to do whatever it damn well
pleases.
The Cold War may have ended, but the U.S. government is hard on the trail
of possible enemies, building bases, and positioning missiles around all
possible borders of Iran, China, and Russia. The United States now dumps a
greater percentage of discretionary spending, and of global military spending
into its military, shortchanging everything else. And, while this is beginning
to fuel military spending elsewhere, the United States also accounts for over 85
percent of international weapons sales. We arm the dictatorships and so-called
democracies of the world. We go to war against our own weapons to protect those
we've sold weapons to from others we've sold weapons to. And our corporate media
almost universally discusses war preparations as a socialistic jobs program --
saved from the "Socialist" label purely by virtue of its ability to kill lots of
people. Humanitarian war justifications, purely hypocritical though they are for
those in power, indicate a certain progress as well as a tragic and embarrassing
weakness. Propagandists can't take us to war anymore without pretending it's
philanthropy -- or pretending it isn't war. The downside is that this works. At
least as long as the president is a Democrat, the peace movement collapses, and
millions of otherwise mentally healthy people decide that war is not such a bad
idea after all.
The awareness of war lies still has a long way to go, which is why I wrote
"War Is A Lie" as a manual to help everyone recognize them. We then also have
the problem of wars not based on lies but begun and carried out in secret. We
now have a secret agency, the CIA, conducting wars halfway around the world with
robotic planes. The United States has been at war throughout the history of New
Hampshire Peace Action, which was just a 19-year-old kid when the current war on
Afghanistan began. An eleven-year-old today, and effectively most teenagers
today, have learned a great deal since they were born, but they've had no chance
to learn to live in a world in which the United States was not at war in
Afghanistan. And, of course, among Afghans there is virtually no one alive with
any experience of peace. Permanent war is now considered the societal and legal
norm here, and it's becoming as hard for Americans to imagine their government
at peace abroad as it is for Afghans to imagine peace at home.
The Bush-Obama tag team has bestowed on all future presidents the ability
to openly spy on anyone without a warrant, imprison anyone without a trial,
torture anyone using Army Field Manual approved methods or indeed with any
methods at all, ship anyone abroad to be tortured, test drugs on prisoners in
foreign death camps, and assassinate anyone -- man, woman, child, American,
non-American -- as long as the killing is done abroad. And future presidents
will have the undisputed bipartisan-approved power to do these things in secret,
announcing bits and pieces of them, as they see fit, while punishing
whistleblowers to the full extent of … I can't say the law exactly … to the full
extent of a government without legal limits. This gloomy and socio-suicidal
future will be possible without any of that nasty partisan warfare at all.
Obama has not yet killed anything like the number of people Bush killed.
But Obama has claimed and fixed in place for the future more abusive powers with
more reach than anyone in the history of the earth. This was predictable and
predicted. When we tried to get Bush and Cheney impeached we were told that we
were vengeful and hateful and prejudiced and partisan. My response was that I
carried no ill will toward Bush or Cheney. I simply wanted to deter the next
president, who would be even worse if Bush wasn't held accountable. Take just
the example of trial-free imprisonment to see how this has worked. Bush began
locking people up in secret foreign locations. Some of those secrets were
gradually leaked. Debates raged in Congress. Supreme Court decisions pushed back
against this new power. Democrats campaigned against it, but did nothing against
it. Obama moved into the White House with a plan to move Guantanamo to Illinois,
but didn't try very hard to enact it. He closed some secret sites but not
others. He enlarged his lawless prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. He stood in front
of the Constitution and the Magna Carta in the National Archives and declared
that he had the power to imprison people forever without a trial. He gave
himself that power in an executive order. And then he wanted it in a piece of
Congressional legislation as well.
What would Democrats in Congress say? They worked for him. He held many
carrots and sticks and dollars with which to manipulate their votes.
What would Republicans say? If they didn't legalize Bush's crimes, what
would become of Bush? And shouldn't future Republican presidents have the powers
of gods?
So last year's National Defense Authorization Act included the presidential
power to imprison anyone, including U.S. citizens, forever and ever, with no
trial. This was at the insistence of President Obama, according the public
testimony of Senator Carl Levin, as well as according to a careful study of what
was proposed, what was vetoed, and what was signed. Then journalist Chris Hedges
and others sued and won an injunction in federal court, but the U.S. Justice
Department that does Obama's bidding put up a furious appeal and is working hard
to keep the power to imprison Americans without trial in place for all future
presidents. That Dick Cheney still thinks George W. Bush was a better president
than Obama simply shows how disloyal Cheney is to his own principles. But he's
got nothing on loyal liberals. I read an article a couple of weeks ago that went
to great length to demonstrate that Obama had appointed the judge that
overturned his law, because he secretly wanted it overturned, and he was
struggling in court to keep it in place merely as an elaborate pretense that
would intentionally fail in the end.
Oh, and he messed up the debate this week because of a bad format, bad
camera angles, and bad coaches. Never mind that four years ago he could talk
about closing Gitmo, ending the very mindset that gets us into wars, providing
universal healthcare, restoring the rule of law, reforming NAFTA, creating the
right to organize in the workplace, ending the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. Now,
you can blame his failure to actually attempt any of those things on the
Republicans or Rahm Emanuel or his dog Bo, but all the post-debate analysis
ignores the real way in which Obama must now debate with one hand tied behind
his back. If there were debate insurance, neither candidate could by it given
their pre-existing positions.
OK, so I just meant to say congratulations on 30 years and ended up on a
five-page-long tangent. Now what I really wanted to do was to go back further
than 30 years.
One place to look for the origins of war, as well as religion and many
other things, including goose bumps and the little muscles that make hair stand
up on the back of your neck if you have any hair on the back of your neck, is in
early foreign relations -- that is, relations between tribes of humans and the
ferocious wild beasts that liked to eat them. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out
so well in her book "Blood Rites," early humans were not so much hunters as
hunted. The supposed weapons marks on early human bones turn out to be teeth
marks. We were what's for dinner. We lived in fear, and we still do. Fear still
makes us do things that made sense then and no longer make any sense at all.
We're easily moved by dangers that resemble those our ancestors faced, and
largely indifferent to greater dangers that kill more of us but don't resemble
predatory attacks. More of us die from unsafe workplaces, lack of healthcare,
cigarettes, automobiles, too much McDonald's, etc., than from terrorism. But
which one scares us?
Bears and lions couldn't be reasoned with, and so, preemptive war carried a
certain logic that it lacks in intrahuman relations today. But when the wild
beasts had been largely eliminated, war took on its true purpose, the purpose it
has fulfilled right up through those taxes you earned yesterday to pay for
nuclear submarines or that groping I got at the airport this morning. The
purpose of war became the propagation of war itself.
Which came first, the wars or the weapons? The answer is the weapons. They
came for defense from animals. But when the animals had been killed off, the
warrior class that didn't feed itself or arm itself but lived as parasitically
as Mitt's vision of 47% of us, didn't want to just give up the warrior status
any more than a president would. A ready substitute for tigers and leopards was
found in the warriors of other human tribes. By fighting each other, warriors
could continue their accustomed lifestyle. Which is not to say that they sat
down and planned it that way together, any more than Americans sat down and
planned to waste 40% of their food each year. Small conflicts between tribes
were no doubt more easily escalated without a common four-footed enemy to fight
off. The substitution happened. The animals became gods. Animal killings of
humans became intentional human sacrifices. And other humans took the place of
the animal enemies.
These many years later, labor unions (with a few wonderful exceptions like
the Chicago teachers) go on pointless one-day strikes as a vestigial reenactment
of strikes that once halted production. And fathers give their daughters away to
grooms who carry them over the threshold, even though daughters aren't owned and
brides aren't kidnapped anymore. Similarly, we continue to glorify war, to speak
of the war dead as making the ultimate sacrifice, to imagine that war is a means
of keeping us safe, and to suppose that by funding war profiteers we hold off
the menace of foreigners, who are still depicted as wild animals in editorial
cartoons. We sanctify the troops even as the warrior class has been shifted from
the wealthy to the poor and is in many ways treated as that would lead one to
expect. Our homeless shelters are full of discarded warriors, revealing clearly
which group is master and which servant. War as it was is no more. But old ways
can hang on tenaciously.
The history of war is of a behavior that has been spotty and sporadic. War
has only been around for a small fraction of human existence. And as long as
it's been around, it's been a part of some cultures but not others. Nations have
limited and eliminated war. China and Japan have had periods of peace. One in
Japan lasted from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as culture
flourished until the United States came knocking. Costa Rica has thrown away its
military -- put it in a museum in fact. Numerous nations never go to war, or
participate after a campaign of bribes and threats. Coalitions of the willing
are not coalitions of the eager. Some tribes in pre-Columbian America,
Australia, and elsewhere did not know war. During a lengthy cold war, two
nations chose to avoid actual war. Western Europe has chosen not to go to war
with itself for 65 years. Some cultures are so far removed from war that their
people cannot even understand it. A Batek man in Malaysia was asked why his
ancestors did not use their poison darts (which they had for hunting animals) to
shoot slave-raiders. His shocked reply was "Because it would kill them!"
Now there's opposition to the motto of "Live Free or Die" if I've ever
heard it. These people's motto must be "Be enslaved rather than kill." Of
course, both of those attitudes are easily conceived of in too-simplistic a
manner, by neglected the power of nonviolent action to resist tyranny without
killing -- and often without prematurely dying either.
The idea that war is in our genes is an incoherent proposition because so
many people have lived and do live without war. Taking part in it traumatizes
us, whereas avoidance of war -- war deprivation -- has never given anyone post
traumatic stress disorder. But war in the genes is an incoherent concept for
another reason as well. Namely, humans are free, no matter how they behave or
what they put on their license plates, they are free. We can choose not to eat
or drink or have sex or even breathe. There is nothing we are compelled to do.
The idea that we could be internally compelled to join together to construct
such an elaborate activity as war is absurd. Many have inclinations that lead
them willingly toward war when it's offered in the absence of anything better,
but that is a very different thing from having no choice in the matter.
Wars used to profit the victors with territory, slaves, and treasures. Now
wars only profit specific war profiteers, not their whole nation. Wars and war
preparation drain away the resources of a nation, and because one of those
resources traded away for war is education, we aren't able to recognize what is
happening. We see people with jobs at BAE or in the military and we imagine that
without war spending they'd have no jobs. In fact, military spending produces
fewer jobs than most ways our government could spend that money, and even than
tax cuts for working people. The choice is not war jobs or nothing. The choice
is war jobs or peace jobs and more of them. In fact the choice is peace jobs and
more of them or war jobs and economic collapse … and war. Beyond that, in fact,
the choice is jobs in a massive emergency campaign to save our natural
environment or war jobs and economic collapse and environmental collapse and
civic and cultural collapse and war. This is not a difficult choice. The Senator
Ayotte, McCain, Graham road show is right to finally say we need government
spending, but is pushing the only kind that doesn't help.
The vast majority of Americans want the war on Afghanistan ended, and this
Sunday it will enter its 12th year. Some may be convinced that the 12th year is
really going to be the charm. But President Obama wants to continue this war for
over two more years beyond that, and then at a smaller scale for 10 years beyond
that. Two years is longer than entire wars used to take, but Obama calls this
the "winding down" process.
Of course the so-called surge ended, or so we were recently told. But let's
remember what happened to troop levels in Afghanistan. Obama promised to
escalate them if elected, and we elected him. So, early in 2009, selecting this
as the promise he would keep, Obama sent 21,000 so-called combat troops and
13,000 support troops and at least 5,000 mercenaries, plus other contractors.
There was no major media debate or Congressional debate. And the fact that this
had happened was erased from all memory. Obama had sent the first 17,000 prior
to holding his first meeting to try to develop any plan or purpose for them to
serve. Sending the troops was an end in itself. It was war for war's sake. Not
only did it go unquestioned, but it no longer exists in recent U.S. history.
It's gone, vanished from all reporting.
Then, in the fall of 2009, there was a big media debate over whether Obama
should escalate the war, as if he hadn't already done so. It was largely a
public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who should
probably have been dismissed for insubordination, as we are supposed to have
civilian control over the military), but members of Congress popped up in cameo
roles. In fact, it began to look like a Congressional vote on funding a
so-called surge might not be easily passed. So, what happened?
Congress passed a standard massive military bill and put off the surge
funding vote until 2010, while Obama went ahead with the surge unfunded, sending
another 30,000 troops plus support troops plus mercenaries and contractors. Once
Obama had more-or-less agreed with his generals, the media reporting and polling
ended. The story was complete, the debate over.
The surge funding was relabeled war funding, and Congress -- now with the
choice to fund or not fund something that had already happened -- passed it
easily. Obama then continued to send more troops with less fanfare, raising
troop levels from about 34,000 when he took over from Bush to about 100,000 plus
an even larger number of contractors, etc. The so-called "surge" troops were the
only ones that counted in the corporate media because they had been a news
story.
So a week and a half ago, the media told us that the surge was finally
over. There were then 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, or twice as many as
when Obama had taken office, and somewhere around 100,000 contractors, who are
rarely mentioned and about a quarter of whom are from the United States, plus of
course that new favorite form of Washington warrior: drones. Drones fit nicely
into a policy of never talking to people. Bush not only bothered to lie to
Congress before his wars, but he negotiated an end to one of them. Iraq is still
a disaster. Afghanistan is worse and could remain worse following the departure
of the last U.S. helicopter from the roof. But it would look weak for our
government to talk to Afghans or Iranians . . . or to Osama bin Laden in a court
of law.
Yet they may have to talk to Afghans, and they may have to leave faster
than planned, and there are events everywhere this weekend to demand it --
including in Boston.
Drones are taking war into new nations where we had no war before, killing
large numbers of civilians, building hostility, creating chaos, and predictably
enough resulting in ground troops being sent in as well. Did you know that
drones have their own caucus in the U.S. Congress? Homeless people don't have a
caucus, poor people, old people. No caucus. Why do Congress members gather
together to discuss the needs of their robotic killer airplane constituents, and
not the needs of the rest of us?
Thirty-two U.S. peace activists are in Pakistan right now meeting with
elected officials, tribal leaders, and the family members of drone victims. Code
Pink organized the trip. At a meeting with the U.S. ambassador, Veterans For
Peace president Leah Bolger got him to promise not to attack their planned
march, and then asked if spreading Americans across the region could get him to
promise no attacks on Pakistanis at all. However there is not concern that the
Taliban will attack the march. Bolger told me that there was no question the
march would go ahead nonetheless.
Meanwhile the U.S. government claims there are no civilian victims, and
does so without officially acknowledging that our drone wars exist at all. One
reason is that it's really hard to explain how they're legal. This past May the
Congressional Research Service wrote a 23 page paper in which they tried to
guess at ways in which the White House might try to argue that killing people
all over the world with drones could be considered legal, were the White House
to bother. Think about that. The legislative branch of our government, the
people created by the first and longest article of our Constitution, the men and
women given most of the power in that Constitution, including exclusive power to
make laws, have now been reduced to trying to concoct twisted convoluted
explanations of how, as Richard Nixon might have put it, whatever a president
does must be legal.
What our friends are doing in Pakistan right now, building friendship and
understanding is immensely important. A number of us are hoping to travel to
Iran soon to do the same. Finding ways in which Americans can come to know
Iranians, and Russians, and Chinese as friends is one of the most valuable
things we can do right now. Amy Goodman spoke in my town, Charlottesville, Va.,
last week and reminded us that Secretary of War Henry Stimson took Kyoto off the
list of targets for nuclear bombs because he and his wife had been there. If
only they had also visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Stimson was the same guy who four years earlier had met with President
Roosevelt and top officials in the Oval Office, where Roosevelt predicted the
Japanese attack might come on December 1st -- off by six days. "The question,"
Stimson wrote in his diary, "was how we should maneuver them into the position
of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a
difficult proposition."
I'd say it was more difficult for the sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor
than it was for Stimson. Which brings us to the question of how things are
looking for the people of Iran. A lobbyist in D.C. who favors war on Iran
blurted out a whole string of open secrets recently, and did so on video, which
is always helpful.
We know that in the past so-called "defensive" wars have been intentionally
launched by fraud or provocation. We know that many in our government want a war
with Iran. We know that several years ago then-Vice President Dick Cheney
proposed disguising U.S. ships as Iranian and attacking other U.S. ships with
them. We know that then-President George W. Bush proposed disguising a plane as
belonging to the United Nations, flying it low, and trying to get Iraq to shoot
at it. We know that there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, no evidence that Spain
attacked the Maine, no doubt that the weapons and troops on board the Lusitania
were public knowledge, no question that FDR worked hard to provoke an attack by
Japan, no question that the U.S. invaded Mexico and not the reverse, and so on.
And we know that Iran has not attacked another nation in centuries. So, it
almost goes without saying that Washington warmongers are contemplating ways to
get Iran to make the so-called "first move."
Assassinating scientists hasn't worked, blowing up buildings doesn't seem
to do it, cyber-war isn't blossoming into real war, sanctions are not
sanctioning armed resistance, and dubious accusations of Iranian terrorism
aren't sticking. Exactly what do we have to do to get ourselves innocently
attacked by the forces of evil?
The Israel Lobby to the rescue! Patrick Clawson, Director of Research at
the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy, a group founded by AIPAC, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee said this:
"Crisis initiation is really tough. And it's very hard for me to see how
the United States president can get us to war with Iran. . . . The traditional
way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests. Some people
might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War II . . . . You
may recall, we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson
wanted to get us into World War I. You may recall that he had to wait for the
Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to send
troops to Vietnam. You may recall he had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode.
We didn't go to war with Spain until the Maine exploded. And Mr. Lincoln did not
feel he could call out the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is
why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the
South Carolinians had said would cause an attack. So, if in fact the Iranians
aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war. .
. . I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I
mean, look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Someday one of them
might not come up. Who would know why? [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] . . . . We are
in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get
nastier."
This is serious advocacy for manufacturing a "defensive" and "humanitarian"
war. This is not a war critic or a Yes Men prankster. The position of most
elected officials in Washington, including the President, fits well with this.
That position includes the ultimatum that Iran must cease doing what U.S.
National Intelligence Estimates say it is not doing, namely building nuclear
weapons. The goal at the bottom of all of this is war. The purpose of the war is
not related to any of the excuses for it. The purpose is profit, control,
domination, image, machismo, and the irrationality that continues to allow war
to control people rather than the other way around.
Most war planners are not longing for a new long-term occupation with lots
of deaths among that 5 percent of humanity they know they have to pretend to
care about. But war is still in charge, not its planners. When you launch
small-scale wars, they don't always stay that way. Even when you fund proxy wars
or impose sanctions as collective punishment or engage in major naval exercises
off the coast of a nation you're threatening, the result can be war beyond all
control, even if not fully intended. Current U.S. backing of terrorists in Syria
is certain to have blowback if it doesn't quickly develop into wider war.
As long as we keep war as an acceptable tool, and as long as we keep
nuclear weapons and power plants, our future is likely fairly short. Survival
requires not proper civilized war that complies with Geneva Conventions and
serves humanitarian goals. Survival requires the elimination of war. If the
danger is not immediate enough to make anti-war work as thrilling as war to
young adventurers, well then try nonviolent activism. Madison - Tahrir Square -
Madrid - Occupy: that's the moral superior to war, outdoing William James'
search for a moral equivalent. My book "When the World Outlawed War" looks at
the movement to abolish war that existed in this country in the 1920s and the
huge steps forward that it made, some of which we take for granted. One lesson
from the 1920s is that they did not tie peace to a political party, but made it
such a powerful movement that all four, yes four, political parties came running
to them.
This is what we need to do, even when there's an election soon. Vote for a
good candidate or vote for your lesser evil choice. But before and after
election day, work for peace and justice, educate, organize, mobilize, resist,
change our entire culture, rather than making yourselves cheerleaders and
apologists for one war-making party over another. Too many are not just
apologists, but selective collectors of information. Some friends and I recently
handed out information on Obama's kill list outside an Obama event. The kill
list had been a big New York Times story and would have been the source of much
outrage were Obama a Republican. His supporters did not defend it. They did not
know about it. They are pouring their energies into cheering for a man who has
claimed the power to murder anyone, and they've avoided knowing about it. I
posted online an offer to help the Obama campaign find more voters if Obama
supporters would join me in protesting wars this weekend. You join me in
protesting these wars, and I'll canvas for your guy. That was my offer. That's
how little I think it matters who I vote for and how much I think it matters
whether we are building a movement around policy changes rather than personality
changes. I got no takers.
I have two other books here today. One is actually the first test copy of a
children's book I'll be publishing this month. I'll sign it for whoever gives
New Hampshire Peace Action the most money for it. The other is a collection from
many great writers called "The Military Industrial Complex at 50" and this is
where I think we should focus, because I think Eisenhower was right. If civil
liberties groups would turn against the military funding that produces the
abuses, if environmental groups would turn against our top polluter, if groups
favoring education and healthcare and housing would turn against the black hole
that we're dumping all the money into, we could turn this thing around.
I actually like the motto "Live free or die," when spoken by those
committed to nonviolence. Of course, you know it was plagiarized from a
Virginian warmonger named Patrick Henry, but his words can also be put to better
use. He said: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the
price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course
others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
I think however that both of those statements have been improved upon by
the reggae singer/musician Jimmy Cliff, who said of those abusing this earth and
its people, and this is for Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Ali
Abdullah Saleh of Yemen:
"I'd rather be a free man in my grave.
"Than
living as a puppet or a slave.
"The harder they come, the harder they'll fall
one and all."
"And these words shall then become," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"Like
Oppression's thundered doom
"Ringing through each heart and brain,
"Heard
again - again - again -
"Rise like Lions after slumber
"In unvanquishable
number -
"Shake your chains to earth like dew
"Which in sleep had fallen
on you -
"Ye are many - they are few."
