Americans are already too inclined to believe in their own righteousness. Global Research . They certainly don't need theologians telling them that their good intentions entitle them, over the inevitable objections of billions of their would-be subjects, to appoint themselves the world's benevolent despot. We’re up against apathy, which can benefit from the fantasy that all will magically work out, that the universe has a moral arc. In 1973-1974, Wittner visited GI coffee houses in Japan including in Yokusaka, where the Midway aircraft carrier was in port. But apparently not. Now our propaganda is working to restore war’s status as a sport, not against an honorable opponent but against an invisible one. But U.S. soldiers with whom Wittner and other activists had talked, brought them onto the ship and showed them the nukes. That action is focused on the criteria for determining when it's just to go to war in the first place (ius ad bellum). We’re up against ignorance, including willful ignorance. Free Books! The U.S.'s default setting is to careen toward conflict, but Biggar believes it's necessary to step harder on the gas because he fears that a "presumption against war" has taken hold in the Western world. I recently read some memoirs by a peace activist from this part of the country named Lawrence Wittner. Stop arming these dictatorships for years and then turning against them. “For decades I looked back on this venture as a trifle ridiculous,” Wittner wrote. Why should we believe such a pretense? We chant “No justice, no peace,” threatening to disturb the peace if we don’t get our justice. You can’t build a just nation with bombs. We don’t mean the abolition of war and the elimination of standing armies. Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the day's breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons. If that sounds selfish, that's because it is. I was an activist before I knew we were destroying the atmosphere, before I knew of the level of death and trauma caused by our bombs and our billionaires, before we’d legalized baseless imprisonment, before we’d tossed out the Fourth Amendment, before we’d given presidents full war powers and personal lists of so-called nominees to be murdered. The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. Imagine what all those college-educated people could imagine that other 90% could do. But a lot of what I do is write, and I enjoy writing. I enjoy the process of writing. Now how do we make that a national priority? Our government's highest duty is to us. George W. Bush’s memoirs recall top Republicans in 2006 secretly demanding withdrawal from Iraq under public and electoral pressure. Undoing the policies of death would be priority number 1. The 95% of victims in our one-sided slaughters are rarely mentioned in U.S. news coverage, and on this new war-o-tainment show the heroic warriors attack empty fields, blow up guard towers with no guards, kick in doors of uninhabited houses, and spend so much time talking about how “real” it all is that none of them seem to notice that there are no enemies or victims to be found. We have more strength in numbers and in solidarity. I'm going to go out on a limb here and simply declare that any moral calculus that gives such a result is effectively worthless. GlobalResearch Center for Research on Globalization. I have a theory that we talk about peace and justice because we don’t want to talk about peace. As Saddam Hussein's actions during the 1991 Gulf War made clear, he was deterrable. So, objecting to stupidity is almost certainly part of my motivation. I submit that the answer is an unequivocal no. We also talk a lot about peace without meaning it. When someone tells you to stop imagining that you’re having an impact, ask them to please redirect their energy into getting 10 friends to join you in doing what needs to be done. So, what drives me is not fundamentally recognition, but I do think it’s worthwhile for those of us who are always speaking on panels to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are always in the audience. One would think that at this late date it would be unnecessary to list the reasons why. A final consideration. This is an attempt to strip war of morality. This is certainly what Biggar, a professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church, Oxford, cares about. They would empower the U.S. (along with the U.K. and any other nation willing to pitch in — remember the "coalition of the willing"?) We need to bring the stories of others here. . A U.S. military sniper bragged on the debut episode this week of NBC’s war reality show “Stars Earn Stripes” that he had “160 kills.” Not that he killed 160 people. They wish they could have the world’s oil and gas and labor without killing anybody, but the next best thing is to not pay attention to the killing or the system of injustice it maintains. Human beings still suffer mental breakdowns from engaging in it, including engaging in it from a drone pilot’s desk. We’ve advanced to the point of actively working to disempower each other. And that can lead to massive blunders, as we saw very vividly in the arguments leading up to the start of the Iraq War in 2003 — arguments that Biggar exhaustively reconstructs in an unfortunate 69-page chapter that ends with him pronouncing that, all things considered, the war was morally justified. It certainly isn’t hope that we’re about to succeed. Not to generate propaganda for war but to generate pressure for peace. If you work for an online activist group you discover that people will take 10 minutes to write you letters explaining why taking 10 seconds to email their lousy bum of a Congress member would be a waste of time. Then the threat of bombs has to stop. The following are some of the initial responses I had prepared beforehand. And I’m all for peace in our personal lives. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. And if most of us do little to nothing, what does that oblige those of us who are aware to do? It certainly isn’t the expectation of riches and fame and glory, which are all far more easily obtained elsewhere. But it’s in a different country far away. And it's a development to which we owe a debt of gratitude to those who have worked to revive just war thinking, adapting its premodern moral calculus for the age of total war. New outrages are added to old, but they weren’t required to get most of us active in the first place, and we won’t go silent if they’re undone. Over the past few decades, many authors have written articles and books attempting to construct an apparatus for judging the morality of war. I do peace activism out of habit and paid employment. It must be declared and waged by a competent governing authority. I’m tempted to say I’m motivated by the severity of the crisis, the likelihood that we have very little time left to avert environmental and/or nuclear catastrophe. That’s the second priority. We always have a moral rationale for undertaking military action. Why should we care if it’s a pretense or not? The top priority of civil libertarians, of opponents of poverty, of advocates for education, or environmentalists, and of everyone working for a better world ought to be the dismantlement of the military industrial complex, and if we merged these movements we could do it. If we can’t close the School of the Americas, but we can help convince South American nations to stop sending students, let’s start there. We lock up football stars who hurt dogs, but not Americans who torture and kill human beings in time of war — and war is without limit in time or space. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: [email protected]. Then it became the occupation of people’s homes and the slaughter of those people. But when a government kills another nation’s people, that’s not always viewed as a moral problem. copyright owner. www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Even if we side with the lower estimates and assume roughly 100,000 civilian deaths, there is no plausible scenario in which anywhere close to that number of people would have been killed if we had left Saddam Hussein in power. But what advocates of just war reasoning have in mind is far more sweeping. What I mean by peace is first and foremost and almost entirely the absence of war. But why shouldn’t it have grown exactly the same in the face of the pretence that we were having no impact? Estimates of violent deaths in Iraq as a direct or indirect result of the invasion and occupation of the country range from just over 100,000 to more than 1 million. We ought to be able and willing to love, in a similar but not identical manner, everyone else as well. Second, to insist that policymakers base the decision about whether to go to war on the supposition that a failure to act will result in worse moral atrocities than if they do act is to place a black box of uncertainty at the core of deliberation. Comment on Global Research Articles on our Facebook page, Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). We always consider our actions defensive (even if the aggression hasn't happened yet) and aimed at protecting the innocent. I want to achieve peace through putting an end to warfare. That’s dishonesty — a quality far worse than stupidity. Everyone in some sense must be our loved one. First the bombs have to stop. I suspect the answer is the same for all of us. (Read Biggar on how war can and should have a "punitive" dimension.). We want to reduce suffering and increase happiness. And that strikes me as either incredibly stupid or incredibly greedy. But this isn’t true. A sheepish grin now spread across this former government official’s face, and I knew that I had caught him.”. Less than 10 percent of what it swallows each year could make state college free. 4. I’m all for peace in our hearts. If Americans were the rapacious marauders Noam Chomsky claims we are — if, for example, we were contemplating an invasion of Canada to annex the tar sands oil fields for our own use — then ad bellum criteria might be a useful means of rendering judgment of our actions, reining them in, and directing them toward more moral ends. But most of all we’re up against disempowerment and the ridiculous but nearly universal belief that we can’t change things. Killing is a long-standing taboo. I enjoy reading. We always consider ourselves to be a competent authority. War engages me because of its unique relationship to morality. Do we need radical love? War used to get a moral pass as a sporting contest between two armies on a distant battlefield. I think maybe we need to make it a human priority. Send aid. And it is what makes just war thinking so very appealing to foreign policy hawks of various stripes — neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, and realists who define American national interests very broadly. Then in the mid-1990s, while doing research at the Kennedy Library on the history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, I stumbled onto an oral history interview with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. One of our top priorities in the United States must be education, about the rest of the world, and about alternatives to war thinking. We could have better lives without our empire, but most people don’t believe that. And that offends me. Even a little injustice is enough. Should we not give each other recognition and praise and respect regardless of whether our roles are those of spokespeople. Those deaths continue, by the way, right down to the present. David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. This means that war was not undertaken as a last resort. There was no atrocity underway in Iraq during the spring of 2003, and so there were no innocents to protect from unjust aggression. The people are erased in his language. It must be aimed at protecting the innocent against unjust aggression. The war must be undertaken with the intention of establishing a just peace. “I have 160 kills.” And the show itself is a dramatization of U.S. news coverage of U.S. wars, in which the only participants are Americans. That’s why we do what we have to do. And it must be undertaken as a last resort. So take a moment right now to shake the hand of someone near you and thank them for what they do. Yes, not only of enemies, but of invisible nonentities, those distant in space and those distant in time. Imagine how the peace movement would have grown if such responses to it had been public. We need to put pressure on foreign governments that still respond to it. It’s demilitarization. Given this fact, ad bellum considerations primarily provide an additional moral and theological imprimatur for actions we would be inclined to do anyway. Let's leave aside the question of whether such a judgment should be considered Christian. We should be the U.S. arm of a global movement, with the establishment of representative government in our own country as one of our distant dreams, to be advanced perhaps by work at the state and local levels where we still have a chance. Support nonviolent uprisings like that in Bahrain rather than assisting in the brutal crackdown. In fact a government killing its own people is often used as a justification for another nation to come in and kill more of the first nation’s people. Their tendency toward what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the perpetual utterance of self-applause" often leads them to make foolish mistakes. But the primary and overriding duty of a government is to uphold the nation's common good and defend its citizens against external harm or attack. There are equally important and more important jobs in a movement. A protest at the White House urged President Kennedy not to follow suit. What motivates you? Without peace not much else matters. Shouldn’t we push ahead as our morality requires regardless? Real war is still hell. But I’m miserable when I’m not doing it, so there must be something motivating me. Let’s not wait to catch them. Imagine what the other 90% could do. Anyone who cares about questions of war and peace — and who wishes to think deeply about how to assess those questions morally — should buy and promptly read Nigel Biggar's In Defense of War. Send in nonviolent forces. Things may work out or we may all die horribly. “I have 160 kills.” Woody Allen said “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. We must love the foreigners we are killing and the great grandchildren we are depriving of a livable environment. . While there may be global trends against war, our nation has empowered presidents to make wars, guaranteeing that they will, and built up a military industrial complex that generates wars at will. That's one reason why Biggar's book deserves a wide and responsive readership. Making war on non-white people draws unquestioning support of both the genocidal and the humanitarian variety. This is also what makes just war thinking a scam. Think about a small child witnessing the death by missile of his parents and crying over their bodies in hopelessness and terror. In response, I recounted what McFarlane had revealed. To see why, consider the six criteria just war theorists, including Biggar, use to determine when a war is morally justified. I’m not sure we do. That we don’t achieve this or even strive for it is an embarrassment to be outgrown. Watch for the video, because a terrific discussion took place around a series of questions posed by the event organizers. Play for free online or without download on mobile! If it has no impact, you’ll have gone down trying. Among ourselves we’ve become less violent — still outrageously violent, but less so — and less racist, and less sexist, and less bigoted all around. I think most people go out of their way not to acknowledge what is happening because they feel ashamed and powerless and comfortable and greedy. 1. So much for evils of omission. to serve as nothing less than the world's moral judge, jury, and executioner, meting out punishment for transgressions of justice. If we can’t shut down our oil companies, but the people of Iraq can block their oil law, let’s help. Here I'm mainly interested in a narrower issue: Is there any realistic scenario in which, judged by these criteria, the 21st-century United States would start and wage a war that it didn't consider just? 2. When a government kills its own people, that’s generally considered an outrage. What is the alternative to murder? This means that the war was not defensive. (The fact that after the 2003 invasion he was found to possess no weapons of mass destruction provides further, retrospective justification of this view.) The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. I enjoy the praise and recognition that comes from writing and giving speeches. In Call of War you have the choice between 34 different units (we counted Nuclear Energy as a unit) from 5 different branches: Infantry, Armor, Air, Naval and Secret. “After all, we and other small bands of protesters couldn’t have had any impact on U.S. policy, could we? I just can’t do it. By war thinking I mean the sort of thinking that is currently asking “How can we oppose war in Syria without offering an alternative?” Now most people would oppose an individual murder even if they couldn’t offer an alternative. We always think we have a reasonable chance of success. Become Member of In Biggar's view, this presumption focuses too single-mindedly on the "terrible evils" wrought by war while downplaying the fact that not going to war permits evils of its own. So people accept it. If we have a moral obligation to do something, we have the same moral obligation not to waste time fretting over whether we’re about to succeed. Readers who absorb and apply Biggar's criteria for assessing wars will have a clear and cogent way of judging whether past or future wars deserve to be considered just or unjust — by which Biggar means morally justified or unjustified. (Reading his book, you'd think that the foreign policy establishments of the U.S. and U.K. were dominated by pacifists.) It ought to be part of every child’s education. This website uses cookies in order to improve your browsing experience. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” Well I don’t want to achieve peace in my heart or in my little corner of a dying world. We fund it with our tax dollars. (I will examine that in a subsequent column.) The people are erased in his language. And yet there’s no sum of money or volume of praise that can motivate me to write or speak a view I oppose or even to address a topic that I find unimportant. Justice, including the redistribution of the military’s trillion dollars a year, including the liberation of nations living under our threat, including the preservation of a natural world ravaged by war making and war preparation can follow. We can all love our loved ones. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. First and foremost it is not murdering. If our names and our resources are being used to murder, to maim, to terrorize, and to destroy the homes of people in huge numbers, what does that oblige us to do? We haven’t created this kind of moral exemption for anything other than war, not for rape or slavery or child abuse or cruelty to animals. Killing in war, and lesser crimes in war, are given a moral pass or even praised. I have a hard time not myself offending people by mocking their cherished beliefs when I find them stupid. Kennedy personally wanted to resume such tests, Fisher recalled, ‘but he also recognized that there were a lot of people that were going to be deeply offended by the United States resuming atmospheric testing. What motivates the people you just shook hands with? The following summer, when Wittner read in a newspaper that, “a substantial number of American GIs had refused to board the Midway for a mission to South Korea, then swept by popular protest against the U.S.-backed dictatorship, it occurred to me,” writes Wittner, “that I might have played some small role in inspiring their mutiny.”, In the late 1990s, Wittner interviewed Robert “Bud” McFarlane, President Ronald Reagan’s former national security advisor: “Other administration officials had claimed that they had barely noticed the nuclear freeze movement. Let’s know they’re lying. But when I asked McFarlane about it, he lit up and began outlining a massive administration campaign to counter and discredit the freeze — one that he had directed. And we always claim to have waited as long as possible to act. The Pentagon now works very hard to ensure that, in any given mission, our military uses no more force than is necessary to vindicate the cause and that it refrains from intentionally killing civilians. When I asked him about the administration’s response to the freeze campaign, he followed the usual line by saying that there was little official notice taken of it. We're inclined to start or join wars (lots and lots of them) for the loftiest of reasons. First, as I've argued before, states have different moral obligations than individuals. If it has an impact, nobody will tell you for many years. '” If the picketers in 1961 had had the slightest notion that Kennedy was being influenced by them, their numbers would have multiplied 10-fold. We talk about peace in our hearts and in our personal lives. What is the alternative to supporting fanatical terrorists in Syria? The Centre of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post Global Research articles on community internet sites as long the source and copyright are acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original Global Research article. We need all the people we can get. Okay, it's not completely fraudulent. Reject violent uprisings like the one our nation has helped produce in Syria. In a future column, I will examine the religious sources of just war thinking and ask whether it deserves to be considered Christian at all. Members of our government talk about funding killing as a jobs program, but we’re not to see them as sociopaths. Send in independent media. I’m not suggesting we worship honesty and intelligence for their own sake, but that we apply them to the basic morality of which we are all capable at close range. That we now expect our armed forces to abide by these rules of war — and judge other states severely when their soldiers fail to do the same — is unquestioningly a good thing. By continuing to use this site you agree to the use of cookies. The fact that he was deterrable and possessed no weapons of mass destruction means that he posed no significant threat to us or our allies. Thank them in fact for their service, because unlike soldiers they are providing a service. Why do you think they’re spying on us? It must have a reasonable chance of success. Each of these units offers a set of unique features with regard to speed on different territories and strengths or weaknesses in combat with other units (or terrain). Relevant to our fight against war and truth in media is this article first crossposted on GR in August 2012. It can have no duty to the citizens of another nation. But it’s somewhere else. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. The Japanese were protesting the ship’s carrying of nuclear weapons, which was illegal in Japan, and which the U.S. military, of course, lied about. Here is another: Precisely by doing his job so thoroughly and elegantly, Biggar inadvertently demonstrates more fully than any previous author that just war thinking, even at its very best, is an intellectual, moral, and theological fraud. He participated in his first political demonstration in 1961. It’s popular to say “Peace must be more than just the absence of war,” was if the mere absence of war is talk to be reserved for the speeches of beauty queens. But neither have I ever spent a moment worrying that we won’t. Were it here in this town, people would not stand for it. And what really motivates me? If the war meets these six criteria, it can be considered morally justified. Loving those we don’t know can in fact be easier than loving some of the people we do know. He was explaining why Kennedy delayed resuming atmospheric nuclear tests until April 1962. The idea of making war on white people has been taboo for 65 years. Members of our government talk about wanting to make the Iranian people suffer with sanctions, but we’re not to picture the Iranian people. Notre site en Français: mondialisation.ca. I want to nonviolently afflict the comfortable to comfort the afflicted but I think we need to reverse the chant. The No. I know of none that approaches Biggar's book in lucidity and thoroughness. But it’s not clear to me that most people really are that stupid. A U.S. military sniper bragged on the debut episode this week of NBC’s war reality show “Stars Earn Stripes” that he had “160 kills.” Not that he killed 160 people. That’s the very first priority. (Unless, of course, we expand the term "atrocity" to include the injustices endured by everyone living under a tyrant, in which case the list of just wars would be very long indeed.). Americans sometimes worry about the risks and costs involved in the United States acting as the world's policeman. Killing is often if not always the worst thing that can be done to someone. We’re up against partisanship and the widespread poisonous idea that rather than demanding representation from our government we should be cheering for one political party within our government and forgiving all its sins. When an individual refuses to come to the aid of a victim of injustice, we rightly judge him harshly for failing to fulfill his moral duty. It must be defensive. But of course the United States doesn't behave that way. Killing in war, and lesser crimes in war, are given a moral pass or even praised. I say “No peace, no justice.” You cannot begin to make justice in the middle of killing and dying. The USSR was withdrawing from a moratorium on nuclear testing. True enough: evil arises from both acts of commission and acts of omission. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the But militarism is racism’s partner. (Maybe Biggar's publisher should send a gratis copy of his book to Vladimir Putin.) Trump's final fight is with democracy itself, Trump's motorcade greeted by jeering Biden supporters near White House as he returns from playing golf, The day the world stopped paying attention to Donald Trump, Americans tend to think all their wars are just. 1 real time WW2 strategy game to be played in multiplayer. The attempt to establish criteria for judging conduct within a war that's already been declared (ius in bello) has had a morally salutary influence on how the U.S. military, for example, conducts itself in battle. If we can’t free Bradley Manning, but we can encourage Ecuador to protect Julian Assange, we should. But killing on a larger scale, organizing numerous people to kill numerous other people is often treated very differently. I want to disturb the war. My answer is anything that looks most likely to succeed, an answer that results in nonviolent actions and a lot more of them. Muhammed Ali wouldn’t kill Vietnamese, but his daughter on the so-called reality show will blow the heads off paper targets that represent non-American humanity. We had people picketing the White House, and there was a lot of excitement about it. War is becoming a sport to be approved of regardless of who dies, and with a blank spot for the piece of knowledge that tells us the leading cause of death for U.S. troops is suicide, and the second leading cause being shot by Afghan troops you are supposedly training. (Warrick Page/Getty Images). But drones are part of an attempt to avoid danger for the five percent of humanity that appears in our news-o-tainment. Stupidity offends me deeply. Not weapons that are called aid. It’s not the same sort of love, but it has to be a kind of love if we are to find it in ourselves to take appropriate actions on their behalf and in partnership with them on behalf of us all. This is not an uncommon scene. But I wouldn’t kick out of the peace movement people who are unpleasant and acrimonious. 3. A month later, I interviewed Edwin Meese, a top White House staffer and U.S. attorney general during the Reagan administration. I enjoy the stimulation I get from other minds through books and through discussions like this one. Then justice and democracy can begin. This is an extremely bad idea. I spoke this past weekend at the Kateri Peace Conference in upstate New York ( http://kateripeaceconference.org ) along with Kathy Kelly, John Horgan, Ellen Grady, James Ricks, Matt Southworth, Walt Chura, and many others.