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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/26/11

When the World Outlawed War

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David Swanson
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Levinson's mission was to make war illegal.   And he came to believe that the effective outlawing of war would require outlawing all war, without distinction between aggressive and defensive war, and without distinction between aggressive war and war sanctioned by an international league as punishment for an aggressor nation.   Levinson wrote:

 

"Suppose this same distinction had been urged when the institution of dueling was outlawed. . . . Suppose it had then been urged that only 'aggressive dueling' should be outlawed and that 'defensive dueling' be left intact. . . .   Such a suggestion relative to dueling would have been silly, but the analogy is perfectly sound.   What we did was to outlaw the institution of dueling, a method theretofore recognized by law for the settlement of disputes of so-called honor."

 

Levinson wanted everyone to recognize war as an institution, as a tool that had been given acceptability and respectability as a means of settling disputes.   He wanted international disputes to be settled in a court of law, and the institution of war to be rejected just as slavery had been.

 

Levinson understood this as leaving in place the right to self-defense, but eliminating the need for the very concept of war.   National self-defense would be the equivalent of killing an assailant in personal self-defense.   Such personal self-defense, he noted, was no longer called "dueling."   But Levinson did not envision the killing of a war-making nation.   Rather he proposed five responses to the launching of an attack: good faith, public opinion, nonrecognition of gains, the use of force to punish individual warmakers, and the use of any means including force to halt the attack.  

 

Levinson would eventually urge the nations signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact (also known as the Pact of Paris) to incorporate the following into their criminal codes: "Any person, or persons, who shall advocate orally or in writing, or cause the publication of any printed matter which shall advocate the use of war between nations, in violation of the terms of the Pact of Paris, with the intent of causing war between or among nations , shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction thereof shall be imprisoned not less than ______ years."   This idea can be found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which states: "Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law."   It was an idea that also influenced the Nuremberg prosecutions.   It may be an idea worthy of revival and realization.

 

Levinson wrote on August 25, 1917: "War as an institution to 'settle disputes' and establish 'justice among nations' is the most barbarous and indefensible thing in civilization. . . . The real disease of the world is the legality and availability of war . . . .   [W]e should have, not as now, laws of war, but laws against war; there are no laws of murdering or of poisoning, but laws against them."

 

Many in the United States were averse to the sort of alliances created, for example, in 1925 in Locarno, Switzerland.   Under these aggreements, if Germany were to attack France, then England and Italy would have to attack Germany, whereas if France were to attack Germany, then England and Italy would have to attack France.   Aristide Briand made a name for himself as a peace negotiator in Locarno, but the Outlawrists' criticism of such arrangements as sheer madness looks wiser through the lens of later history.

 

Rather than alliances and unpredictable adjudications, the Outlawrists favored the rule of the written word.   The most popular criticism of Outlawry was that it intended to simply wish war away by banning it.   The most popular criticism of international alliances was that they would create wars to end wars.   While NATO and even the United Nations have indeed been used to launch wars (although the European Union has rendered wars within Western Europe unimaginable), the Kellogg Briand-Pact and the United Nations Charter have banned war, and wars have proceeded merrily on their way not noticing.   But all of this criticism is overly simplistic.   The United Nations is a corrupt approximation of an ideal never yet realized.   And Outlawry, despite passage of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, has never been fully tried.  

 

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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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