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People and Peace Over Plutocracy

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The School of the Americas Watch has not shut down the school, but has persuaded various nations to stop sending students to be trained in torture and murder at Fort Benning, Georgia.  Sometimes our best allies are abroad.  Powerful movements against U.S. military bases in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Italy, and elsewhere need our help, as we need theirs.

The torture techniques used by our death squads and proxies abroad are also developed in U.S. prisons.  We lead the world in weapons sales, war spending, and incarceration.  And these are connected.  Taking on the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex together is the most likely way for us to take on militarism, racism, and extreme materialism without dividing our strength.

Gun control should be holistic and international.  While the NRA and the White House debate local gun restrictions, they join hands to oppose international ones.  But selling weapons to the world, against some of which U.S. soldiers will certainly later fight, spreads the idea of righteous violence.  Peace activists should work for gun control at home, but should take the opportunity to make people more aware of U.S. weapons sales abroad, and the kinds of governments those weapons are sold to. 

Fox News' Sean Hannity says it's OK for basketball coaches to hit players because, "My father hit me with a belt and I turned out OK."  I suppose we can each judge for ourselves how he turned out.  Violence in any aspect of our lives can help to legitimate it in others.  Hannity has not distinguished himself as an opponent of wars.

Environmental groups have largely, but not entirely, shied away from opposing our greatest consumer of oil, a machine that fights wars for oil and uses the oil to fight wars, poisoning our nation and others with chemicals and radiation to an extent that would rank such abuses above 9/11 or Pearl Harbor if foreigners were responsible.  The anti-bases movement is slowly making connections, as in Jeju Island, South Korea, between environmental activism and peace activism.  Such alliances can only make us stronger.

Immigrants rights can sometimes be thought of as "refugee rights."  Little produces immigration the way wars do.  And denying rights to people whose country your own military has ravaged is beyond the rudeness of most people, once made aware of it.  Immigrants rights and peace are causes that must unite.

Education and housing and green energy infrastructure advocates, advocates for all good programs, have two possible sources of funding.  We can tax the plutocrats.  Or we can scale back a war machine currently as large as the rest of the world's combined.  Practically speaking, we'll have to do both.  The war machine generates plutocrats, and vice versa.  About half of our tax dollars on Monday will go to war funding.  There are funds that you can put that money into instead, an approach that some of you might want to investigate.

The Pentagon just announced that it went $10 billion over budget on killing children in Afghanistan.  Oops.  Meanwhile, Congress has manufactured the pretense that the U.S. Postal Service is billions of dollars in the hole.  We are a nation that can afford services we don't dare imagine, and our government still hopes to privatize the post office.  Instead of having no mail on Saturdays, I, for one, would prefer to wars on Saturdays.

The Military Industrial Complex is everything Eisenhower feared, and then some.  But if every interest group and individual for whom it is a major stumbling block were to unite against it, and in favor of conversion to a peace economy, the Pentagon's walls would come crumbling down.  Opposing militarism is not a separate little campaign, but ought to be part of a comprehensive plan for justice.  Instead of shouting "Jobs Not Cuts," we should be demanding cuts to the military and to highways and to banks and to corporate welfare, and expanded investment in all the things we want and the things we don't dare dream of but can easily afford. 

By direct democracy, Americans would reduce military spending right now.  No persuasion is needed.  But a movement of dedicated activists intent on enacting a major conversion program will require stronger and deeper public opinion than now exists. 

We're up against belief in the possibility of a good war, and myths about past wars being good and just.  We have to correct those myths and point out the altered state of the world that makes them unhelpful anyway.  Weaponry, communications, and understanding of the tools of nonviolence have changed.  War is no longer useful, even if you imagine it ever was.  What we need is a movement for the abolition of war, and one place to look for inspiration might be to the original abolitionists, to Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano, and those who launched a movement that built pressure to end the British slave trade and slavery -- a movement that gained, of course, from rebellions by those enslaved in Jamaica and what we now call Haiti.

If you're like me, there are some things you would like to abolish.  My list includes weapons, fossil fuel use, plutocracy, corporate personhood, corporate nationhood, health insurance corporations, poverty wages, poverty, homelessness, factory farming, prisons, the drug war, the death penalty, nuclear energy, the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandering, electronic voting machines, murder, rape, child abuse, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.  I could go on.  I bet you can think of at least one institution you believe we'd be better off without.  I put war around the top of the list.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England, activists invented committees with chapters and newsletters, posters, speaking tours, book tours, petitioning, boycotts, theatrical props, and investigative journalism.  Most people couldn't vote, and voting had nothing to do with it.  Slavery was the norm across the world, and activists faced defeat after defeat for many years.  They didn't quit.  They demanded rights -- and not for themselves, but for others unlike them and for the most part unseen by them.  Britons were familiar with having their sons kidnapped and enslaved by the British navy, but they applied that understanding to others in other circumstances.  We can do the same.  We see disasters in New Orleans or New York.  We can begin to see them in Baghdad and Kabul.

Frederick Douglass went to England to meet with Clarkson.  Douglass worked for the abolition of slavery here, but later remarked, "When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act."  Perhaps we too can act on behalf of others.  Perhaps we can expand concern for U.S. citizens killed by drones to human beings killed by drones.

Douglass also said this: "War is among the greatest calamities incident to the lives of nations.  They arrest the progress of civilization, corrupt the sources of morality, destroy all proper sense of the sacredness of human life, perpetuate the national hate, and weigh down the necks of after coming generations with the burdens of debt." 

When Britain and France went to war, the anti-slavery movement stalled.  When the global war on the globe started, progressive movements in the United States stalled.  The idea that North Korea will kill us all aids the idea that we should cut Social Security and get started on killing ourselves.  Permanent war means a permanent impediment to progress.  We have the power to abolish war and to put a trillion dollars a year to better use.

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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