Remarks at Conference of GAMIP (Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures for Peace)
I'm sorry I've been too busy to have slides here, and am lucky just to have words. I'm also sorry there are so many Davids, King David being a horrible figure to name us all after, but David Adams and many other Davids are redeeming the name, I think.
Here we are in a moment when the world's most self-righteous, self-appointed overseers of an international order are openly and proudly committing genocide, after having spent decades trumpeting their rejection of genocide and even using genocide as the primary justification for wars, as if most wars were not genocides and every genocide not a war. It seems an odd moment in which to talk about infrastructure for peace and especially about what works, what succeeds.
But if anything fails, if anything conspicuously does not work, it is war. Working for peace does not always bring peace, but waging war for peace never brings peace, never creates the borders or governments stated as the goals. The leading warmakers never win on their own terms or any terms. They fail over and over again, on their own terms and ours. In Ukraine, both sides finally admit failure and yet don't know what to do about it. In Israel and Palestine, anyone who doesn't think war brings more war is choosing not to think. War supporters should not talk to peace supporters about success unless they're ready to admit that weapons profits and sadistic cruelty are the objectives of war.
There is no question that institutions created for peace or under the pretense of being for peace can be abused, that laws can be ignored, that laws and institutions can even become literally incomprehensible to a society so far gone for war that peace makes no sense to it. There is no question that ultimately what works is first and foremost an engaged society that educates and activates for peace, and that what is illegal is not what's banned on a piece of paper unless that piece of paper leads to action.
But a society needs infrastructure, needs institutions, needs laws, as part of the culture of peace and as mechanisms for making peace. When wars are prevented or ended, when bases are closed, when weapons are dismantled, when nations denounce wars or propose peace negotiations, or try foreign warmakers in absentia, all of that too is done through institutions and infrastructure. And it's important to recognize that the self-proclaimed crusaders for a so-called Rules Based Order are in reality the rogue outliers refusing to support what exists in the way of an actual order based on rules.
The United States is the leading holdout on basic human rights treaties and disarmament treaties, the leading violator of treaties on war and weapons dealing, leading opponent and saboteur of international courts. Israel is close behind. Calling an apartheid state openly created for one religious or ethnic group a democracy doesn't make it one, and doesn't diminish the need for actually fair and representative institutions. It also shouldn't take away from the fact that most of the world's governments are not at war and have not been so for decades or centuries.
The United Nations yesterday looked like it worked pretty darn well, like it gave voice to its governmental members, like some of those governments, maybe even a majority of them, spoke for their people, and like an institution supposedly created to rid the world of the scourge of war would take the obvious step that ought to go without saying of advocating for and beginning to work for the end of a particular war. And then came the U.S. veto, surprising absolutely nobody, every single observer having known from the start that the whole thing was a charade, the United States having effectively blocked this particular measure for months, and having vetoed the very idea of peace in Palestine or the application of the rule of law to Israel on dozens of previous occasions.
The most comical thing ever done by Volodymyr Zelensky was not the television sitcom in which he played the part of an actually good president. It was not his tour of the marble palaces of the NATO Empire dressed in battle gear to rub glorious blood and smoke onto the sleeves of airconditioned armchair warriors. It was his proposing, not too many weeks ago, to eliminate the veto at the UN Security Council. He was so far gone into believing U.S. propaganda that he thought a rules-based order in which the Russian government could not veto the will of the world's governments would be acceptable to the world's leading vetoer in Washington. This is comical because it's not just hypocrisy, not just the dishonesty of the U.S. Secretary of State this week opposing ethnic cleansing if it's in Sudan, or the U.S. so-called Institute of Peace having on its website today opposition to genocide if it was done by ISIS 10 years ago in Iraq. Zelensky may be a champion of hypocrisy, but he misunderstood his role so drastically that he blurted out what we actually need and apparently had no idea his weapons dealer in Washington would object.
We desperately need to reform or replace the United Nations with at the very least a body in which each national government is equal, and with a body that replaces armed peacekeeping with unarmed peacekeeping. The latter has been used so successfully in Bougainville, while armed peacekeeping has failed to make or keep the peace in dozens of locations around the globe, often making matters worse, while costing a fortune and reinforcing war mentalities and warmaking infrastructure. We have national governments that justify their militaries to their impoverished publics largely on the grounds that those militaries do UN peacekeeping and completely regardless of whether it works.
And as David Adams has explained, the reform or replacement needs to extend to UNESCO.
We need national governments to give people what they actually want. Instead of agencies of aggression mislabeled ministries of defense and departments of defense, we need agencies of actual defense, also known as peace. And we need not insist that they be mislabeled or disguised as departments of mass-murder. We can be satisfied with simply calling them what the are, departments of peace. But calling something that will not, by itself, make it that. As David Adams has recounted, the U.S. government answered a public demand by creating what it calls a U.S. Institute of Peace. That institute does some good things where those things don't interfere with U.S. empire, but it has yet to oppose a single U.S. war anywhere ever. We need not only branches of governments pretending to favor peace, but actually working for peace and empowered to shape what those governments do. In nations with cultures and governments with low-levels of corruption able to work for peace, a Department of Peace working with a focus on peace is even better than a department of state or foreign affairs doing the same thing, which ought to be its job. There is more to peacemaking than just diplomacy, and much more than the sort of diplomacy done by wealthy bribe payers working at the direction of militaries and weapons-funded think tanks.
By the way, today's New York Times praises France for carefully avoiding any diplomacy with Russia when some WWI Russian casualties were found and buried in France. Diplomacy is treated like a disease pandemic.
At ldbeyondwar.org/constitutions is a collection of treaties, constitutions, and laws against war. I think it's worth looking at them, both to understand how useless paper alone is, and to understand which pieces of paper we might choose to make better use of. Laws that ban all war are literally incomprehensible to people who imagine there is no defense against war but war. You can see this in certain nations' constitutions that both ban all war and lay out the powers of various officials in waging war. How is that possible? Well, because war (when it is banned) is understood as bad war or aggressive war, and war (when it is managed and planned for) is understood as good war and defensive war. This isn't even put into words, so there is no need to explain or define it. Thus we go on with wars, as every side of every war believes itself to be the good and defensive side, while if our great great grandparents had banned only bad and aggressive dueling, leaving good and defensive duelling in place, there would be legal and honorable assassinations at every meeting of the UN Security Council.
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