Nobody is apologizing to Barbara Lee for ostracizing her when she alone of all members of Congress voted against the war on Afghanistan. Ten years ago voting for an aggressive and doomed to be disastrous war was the right thing to do. Never mind that the Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over to a third country to be tried. Never mind that any pretense to the contrary could no more justify a war than Italy would now be justified in bombing Washington for not extraditing the CIA convicts. There was evil in the world, and only violence could get us drunk enough to believe we'd had nothing to do with it.
Now, 10 years later, ending a war because of its illegality is not an issue at all, except for quaint radicals. And ending it because the American people want it ended is just inappropriate. In wartime, leaders should not be swayed by public opinion when they are busy bombing a new democracy into place. Ending the war because it costs money or fuels terrorism or damages the earth or kills human beings doesn't make any sense. If it did, David Koch would be phoning in about it.
The disturbing side to Gates' desire to avoid future wars like these is that he and many in Washington think we should pursue a different kind of war: small wars, secret wars, assassinations, death squads, and unmanned drone attacks. This agenda, when combined with the ever expanding secrecy of our government, and when combined with Americans' relative lack of concern for the deaths of non-Americans spells trouble for advocates of peace. What if we were to finally catch on to the tricks of the second oldest profession on earth, the war propagandist, just in time for wars to proceed in the shadows without marketing campaigns, public debates, or even the pretense of authorization by a legislature?
The answer to this, I think, is two-fold. We must work with whistleblowers and publishers, such as wikileaks, to find out what our government is doing. And we must organize and train and engage in relentless nonviolent activism to radically and quaintly change what it is doing.
We may be past the point of spiritual death as a nation, yet somehow we're still kicking. And we're not just kicking our neighbors who have unions or health coverage, as we've been instructed. We're pushing back against the plutocratic plunderers of our children's future. Some of us whom the government taxes for working will be paying a visit to Bank of America this evening, which the government pays to rip us off. Nicole Sandler, our nation's best radio host, is here to lead that action.
There is a moment of activism in the world right now that should not be allowed to slip through our fingers. We have an absolute duty to fend off the twin dangers of collapse into apathy or degeneration into violence. Did you know that Egyptians studied the Montgomery Bus Boycott and learned from American scholars of nonviolent action? We are part of an ongoing exchange of ideas and inspiration. And while our government may not save a trillion dollars a year by hiring Egyptian activists to spread democracy instead of the Pentagon, we can take inspiration from what is happening across the Middle East and the Middle West and find our calling in the eternal nonviolent struggle for a better world.
There is no quick fix to the mess we're in. For godsake, peace is quaint and radical. You don't dig out of that hole in a matter of days. And this is good, not bad, news for you and me. Drug abuse, I guarantee you, has plummeted in Madison, Wisconsin. Nobody's skydiving. Nobody's reading their horoscopes or trying on new religions. Nobody engaged in the peace and justice movement has to look for meaning in life. Nonviolent action is what makes life worthwhile.
And we Americans can do it as well as anybody else and have done it before. Libyans are laying down their lives against brutal violence, and they are advancing the cause of peace and justice whether they win this year or decades down the road. They have no parties, no unions, no civil society, they're divided by region and tribe, and yet they are taking action and so can we.
Most human societies have not known war and many have known it and dropped it. The current issue of Yes magazine has an article about a group of baboons that engaged in constant violence for years and then developed a culture of peace. Now I'm not claiming we're all geniuses, but if baboons can do it we might want to try. War is not in our genes. It's not necessitated by the small-scale violence that responds to it. It's not needed to defend anything. It is worse than anything it can be used to remedy. And if the young people in this room live to be as old as the elderly in this room it will be because the thought of war as an acceptable human behavior has been made both radical and quaint.
David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" http://warisalie.org
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