David Swanson: "War is So 2014!"

I don't think people really know about the Taliban's several offers to turn bin Laden over. If that's correct, that's a rather big and glaring "oversight". Where's the press? Also, I don't think the average citizen knows that our involvement in Afghanistan has not wound down as advertised. How can we possibly keep up if the goalposts and even the names of military campaigns keep changing? Our ignorance is really dangerous.

Ignorance is the fuel for war like wood is the fuel for fire. Cut off the supply of ignorance and war ends. The Washington Post this past year asked US-Americans to find Ukraine on a map. A small fraction could do it, and those who placed Ukraine furthest from its actual location were the most likely to want the U.S. military to attack Ukraine. There was a correlation: the less one knew about WHERE Ukraine was the more one wanted it attacked -- and this after controlling for various other variables.

I'm reminded of a Canadian comedy called Talking to Americans that you can find on Youtube. The guy asks lots of Americans if the nation of " and he says a fictional name of a made-up nation " needs to be attacked. Yes, they tell him, solemnly, all the other options, sadly, regretfully have been exhausted. Now, of course, the comedian may have left lots of intelligent answers on the cutting room floor, but I doubt he had to work very hard to find the dumb ones -- I'd bet you any sum I could get them right now without leaving the coffee shop I'm in.

Nowhere outside the United States do people think of bombing as being anywhere on the list of options. In the United States, people think of it as the first and only option. Got a problem? Let's bomb it. But they are compelled to pretend that it is a last option, even when there's been literally nothing else attempted or even contemplated because a comedian just made up a nonexistent country to ask about. So nobody knows that Dubya told the President of Spain that Hussein was willing to leave Iraq if he could have $1 billion. Of COURSE (!!!) I'd rather have seen Hussein tried for his crimes, but I'd much rather have seen him leave with a billion dollars than have the war happen -- a war that has destroyed Iraq.

Iraq will never recover. The dead will not be resurrected. The wounded will not be healed. The reason that people pretend that war is the last resort is that nothing is worse than war. The reason it's always a pretense requiring falsehood and self-delusion is that other options always exist. So the habit of PRETENDING we need a war or that we need SOME of the wars is so ingrained that it comes to people automatically even in the most absurd situations. And consider which is more absurd: supporting the bombing of a fictional nation or supporting the bombing of Iraq and Syria on the opposite side of a war you were told had to be joined a year earlier, doing so despite the enemy's clearly stated desire that you do so to boost its recruitment, and doing so despite its constituting the reinitiating of the quintessential dumb war, the war everyone hates, the war whose echoes prevented the launching of missiles 12 months earlier.

When put that way, it's clear that we're caught in some sort of vicious cycle. The example of the fictitious country we're happy to bomb is terrifying, actually. What can we do to bring that cycle to an end?

I think we have to stop opposing each new war in isolation. Slavery wasn't ended (to the significant extent that plantation slavery was ended) by opposing one particular plantation. Peace groups have focused on the cost to the aggressor to such an extent that nobody knows that wars are mass-murder against weak countries that can barely fight back. The damage to U.S. troops is horrific, as is the financial waste. (In fact, the lives lost by not spending the funding on useful measures far outstrips the lives killed in wars.) But we won't get people to oppose mass murder until we start behaving as if they might be capable of it. That requires that we start telling them what these wars are: one-sided slaughters. We have to make a MORAL case against the greatest evil we've created -- with the possible exception of its partner in crime: environmental destruction.

To make a case for abolition, we have to satisfy people's logical arguments by explaining that war doesn't make us safe, doesn't make us rich, doesn't have any upside to be weighed against the destruction. And we have to satisfy people's illogical urges and unstated demands as well. People need love and community and participation in something larger than themselves, they need their fears addressed, they need their passions released, they need their models and heroes held up, they need the opportunity to be or to imagine being courageous, self-sacrificing, and comradely.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).