IV. The fourth big area where I think Peace Studies can help end war is through the advancement of Peace History, Peace Journalism, and Peace Training in Resistance to Propaganda. I realize that we face hurdles here other than lack of accurate and well-conceived information. I remember when believers in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were shown evidence to the contrary and consequently believed in the weapons all the more strongly. And, by the way, you generally do not, of course, have to persuade people who believe their televisions that their facts are wrong. You can choose to start a very different conversation, such as asking whether all nations that possess weapons of mass destruction should be utterly destroyed, or asking whether the CIA was all wrong when it suggested that the best way to get Iraq to use its weapons would be to attack Iraq. I also remember when the U.S. public powerfully opposed attacking Syria in 2013 only to completely lose its mind the next year when it saw or heard about horribly frightening ISIS videos. Fear is not always conquerable by means of facts or context -- such as the fact that toddlers with guns are a bigger danger in the United States than ISIS is. But, among many other things, facts do matter, useful analysis does matter, and changing the conversation to one not framed by sound bytes on subservient corporate advertising-based media matters.
I'm not sure that, in general, even without an unfair draft, one's level of formal education makes one more likely to oppose militarism. But it does seem to be the case that in general the more one knows about a country, a situation, and the range of options the more one favors peace. Various studies have found people's ability to accurately locate a country on a globe to be inversely proportional to their desire to see the U.S. government bomb that country. Ordinary folks and even members of Congress have, when prompted, expressed their belief in the need to bomb various countries with funny names that do not actually exist. Without a doubt people would not hold those relatively harmless beliefs if they knew the names of the world's nations. I'd also be willing to bet, although I have no evidence for it, that an American's willingness to declare the United States the "greatest nation on earth" is inversely proportional to the amount of time he or she has spent outside of the United States or its military bases. And then there's a study I read about in Peace Science Digest that found that people are much more willing to oppose a war if told there are alternatives, but that if neither told that there are nor that there are not alternatives then they are just as supportive of a war as if they had been told there are no alternatives. The researchers concluded that, contrary to logic and past experience, many people simply assume that the U.S. government has already exhausted all alternatives before launching any war. This, it seems to me, can be countered in three ways. First, by creating the understanding that there are ALWAYS alternatives. Second, by pointing out specific current alternatives. And third, by reviewing a little peace history -- taking peace history to include antiwar history.
I don't think most text books in U.S. schools point out the following pattern:
- Spain wanted the matter of the Maine to go to international arbitration, but the U.S. preferred war.
- Mexico was willing to negotiate the sale of its northern half without war.
- Peace activists urged the British and Americans to negotiate to transport the Jews out of Germany, but Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden replied that it would be too much bother when they needed to focus on the war.
- The Soviet Union proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War.
- The United States rejected peace proposals for Vietnam from the Vietnamese, the Soviets, and the French, including through Richard Nixon secretly sabotaging a peace agreement prior to his first election.
- Prior to the First Gulf War, the Iraqi government was willing to negotiate withdrawal from Kuwait, as the King of Jordan, the Pope, the President of France, the President of the Soviet Union, and many others urged a peaceful settlement.
- Prior to Shock and Awe, the U.S. president had been concocting cockamamie schemes to get a war started; the Iraqi government had approached the CIA's Vincent Cannistrato to offer to let U.S. troops search the entire country; the Iraqi government had offered to hold internationally monitored elections within two years; the Iraqi government had offered Bush official Richard Perle to open the whole country to inspections, to turn over a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to help fight terrorism, and to favor U.S. oil companies; and the Iraqi president had offered, in the account that the president of Spain was given by the U.S. president, to simply leave Iraq if he could keep $1 billion.
- In March 2011 the African Union had a plan for peace in Libya but was prevented by NATO, through the creation of a "no fly zone" and the initiation of bombing, to travel to Libya to discuss it. In April, the African Union was able to discuss its plan with Ghadafi, and he expressed his agreement. The U.S. preferred war.
- The U.S. government has spent years sabotaging UN attempts at peace in Syria, and dismissed out of hand a Russian peace proposal for Syria in 2012.
The point of this handful of examples, which could be multiplied, is that, just as racism has to be carefully taught, war has to be carefully created and peace carefully avoided at all costs. War doesn't just occur naturally of its own volition, even though threats and buildups and faulty nukes and radar systems can risk making it more likely. Most people don't engage in war without intense conditioning, and most people suffer intensely from having done so. This point is strengthened greatly by the work of Douglas Fry and others who document the common existence of humans through history and prehistory without war. Believe it or not, despite our great admiration for innovation, many people simply refuse to be part of anything (even living without war) unless it has been done before. So, informing people that it has been done before performs a great service.
Peace Studies needs to include lessons in lie detection, in recognition of common propaganda techniques, and in smart reading of news.
Raise your hand: who can tell me the most successful step yet taken to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program?
The U.S.-Iran nuclear deal? No. The correct answer is the 2005 decree against nuclear weapons by Iran's religious leader, or in other words the fact that Iran did not in 2015 have any nuclear weapons program, nor did it in 2007 according to the U.S. "National Intelligence Estimate." Nor did it ever, according to the reporting of Gareth Porter and others. Of course a deal is better than a war, but believing all the rhetoric of the deal's supporters can be counterproductive, and assuming that one corrupt political party must be 100% right if the other corrupt political party is wrong guarantees disaster.
We need to be trained in resisting demonization of groups of people and identification of groups of people with single demonized individuals. We need practice at distinguishing people from warmongering officials, abroad and at home. We need to resist identifying ourselves with a military. Even a peace activist who has protested a war and gone to jail to try to stop it will blurt out "We just dropped bombs." No, we didn't. The U.S. military did. Of course non-tax-resisters will immediately proclaim their responsibility to talk about the Pentagon in the first person because they pay taxes or simply because they live in the United States. But they pay local taxes and refer to their local government as their local government, not as "we." They pay state taxes and refer to their state government as the government of their state. And when the federal government bails out a bank or eliminates an estate tax or denies people health care it's rarely in the first person. Nobody says "We just eliminated my health coverage." The first person is used for what a government does to other people. The first person accompanies the military and the flag that must be worshiped, which is not a local, state, or earth flag, or a flag of peace.
Studies find that many people in the United States value U.S. lives far more highly than they value the other 96% of humanity. We need to learn to resist the immorality of that, to do what is called humanizing to most of humanity, and to learn who it is that suffers in what we call wars but could as accurately call one-sided slaughters. Ralph Peters wrote in the New York Post that it is worth killing a million North Koreans to save 1,000 U.S. lives.
We have to learn to be wise judges of claims that wars can be humanitarian, beneficial, philanthropic. There has yet to be a humanitarian war that benefitted humanity. Claims that opportunities for such successes have been missed or are still ahead of us should be treated with the skepticism they deserve.
We have to learn to counter the propaganda of troopism and the silly but dangerous notion that opposing a war is the equivalent of supporting the other side of a war. I want to read here a few paragraphs from my book War Is A Lie:
"The chairman of the house appropriations committee from 2007 through 2010 was David Obey (D-WI). When the mother of a soldier being sent to Iraq for the third time and being denied needed medical care asked him to stop funding the war in 2007 with a 'supplemental' spending bill, Congressman Obey screamed at her (and a Youtube video of him screaming made the news for 15 minutes), saying among other things: 'We're trying to use the supplemental to end the war, but you can't end the war by going against the supplemental. It's time these idiot liberals understand that. There's a big difference between funding the troops and ending the war. I'm not gonna deny body armor. I'm not gonna deny funding for veterans' hospitals, defense hospitals, so you can help people with medical problems, that's what you're gonna do if you're going against the bill.' Congress had funded the war on Iraq for years without providing troops with adequate body armor. But funding for body armor was now in a bill to prolong the war. And funding for veterans' care, which could have been provided in a separate bill, was packaged into this one. Why? Precisely so that people like Obey could more easily claim that the war funding was for the benefit of the troops. Of course it's still a transparent reversal of the facts to say that you can't end the war by ceasing to fund it. And if the troops came home, they wouldn't need body armor, [at least outside of Las Vegas and Orlando and wherever's next]. But Obey had completely internalized the crazy propaganda of war promotion. He seemed to actually believe that the only way to end a war was to pass a bill to fund it but to include in the bill some minor and rhetorical antiwar gestures. On July 27, 2010, having failed for another three-and-a-half years to end the wars by funding them, Obey brought to the House floor a bill to fund an escalation of the war on Afghanistan, specifically to send 30,000 more troops plus corresponding contractors into that hell. Obey announced that his conscience was telling him to vote no on the bill because it was a bill that would just help recruit people who want to attack Americans. On the other hand, Obey said, it was his duty as committee chair (apparently a higher duty than the one to his conscience) to bring the bill to the floor. Even though it would encourage attacks on Americans? Isn't that treason? Obey proceeded to speak against the bill he was bringing to the floor. Knowing it would safely pass, he voted against it. One could imagine, with a few more years of awakening, David Obey reaching the point of actually trying to stop funding a war he 'opposes,' except that Obey had already announced his plan to retire at the end of 2010. He ended his career in Congress on that high note of hypocrisy because war propaganda, most of it about troops, has persuaded legislators that they can be 'critics' and 'opponents' of a war while funding it."
Something else Peace Studies can help us with is figuring out the actual motivations for wars that are hiding behind all the false ones. I've never found a war with only one motivation, but some motivations are quite common. Pleasing what we euphemistically call election campaign donors is one, pleasing the media another, pleasing certain voters yet another, and pleasing the irrational urges of warmakers one of the biggest of all. The Pentagon Papers famously revealed that the Pentagon thought 70% of the reason to keep killing people in Vietnam was to save face. Often the reasons for wars that kill millions closely resemble the reasons for bullying in a school hallway that frightens one child (which may be why it makes sense for anti-bullying clubs to call themselves peace clubs, though I wish they'd oppose wars). But other, more solid (or sometimes liquid) reasons for wars exist. Again I quote from Peace Science Digest: "Oil importing countries are 100 times more likely to intervene in civil wars of oil exporting countries. The more oil produced or owned by a country, the higher the likelihood of third-party interventions. Oil is a motivating factor for military interventions in civil wars."
But how do we find honest and accurate accounts of motivations or of anything else? With the internet telling us everything and its opposite, how do we find the right news? My top 10 tips are:
- Read more books than articles.
- Avoid allowing Facebook or Google to decide what's news for you.
- Diversify your sources of news, and read news about your country that comes from outside your country.
- Consider what smart people you trust believe.
- Read websites that collect articles on topics that interest you.
- Don't read about a video, watch the video; and don't read about a statement or report or tweet, read the statement or report or tweet.
- Read only what you believe are important topics, whether or not they are the big and popular topics.
- Question everything, especially what is assumed without being asserted.
- Believe what is best documented, not what is most in the middle of a range of claims.
- Be willing to remain in doubt, and willing to believe horrible things when proven.
V. The fifth and final area where I think Peace Studies can help end wars is in correcting a blind spot in parts of academia by pointing out that, while many countries make weapons and wars, the world's leading warmaker and weapons dealer is the United States government.
There is a reason that most countries polled in December 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world, and why Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. But it is a reason that eludes that strain of U.S. academia that first defines war as something that nations and groups other than the United States do, and then concludes that war has nearly vanished from the earth.
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