Getting to know war…

A friend of mine was an editor on a new book, essentially a memoir of a photographer’s experiences in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there. It’s a cross between a graphic novel and a photo journal.   This book comes highly recommended by the New York times; I think the best thing they said about it is this:

It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the com batants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. “The Photographer” is one.

This speaks to me of one of the sad truths of war that I have such trouble wrapping my mind around: how people can honestly sit back and say “sure, let’s just go kill some people” when confronted with a problem.   I hope this book succeeds in communicating the foolishness of such an attitude to some people who currently suffer from it.

 

Lashing out

Today Andrea and I went to have lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. There was a guy hanging out in front of the H&R block next door to the restaurant, sitting on a milk crate. There’s a tendency for there to be aggressive panhandlers there, and the only available parking spot was right in front of the guy. So when I got out of the car, I walked around the back of the car because I didn’t really feel like interacting with the guy.

Maybe this sounds pretty craven, I don’t know. The guy wouldn’t be there if he had a better place to be. I don’t know why he’s there. But obviously he needs help. And at the same time, I don’t feel like I can really help him. For example, he might be there to buy drugs (we witnessed a drug buy there a little later on). I don’t know. He might just be hungry, and want some food.

Avoiding him didn’t work. He came after me, and pretty forcefully demanded to know if I wanted my windows washed. I was feeling beset, and I responded with a pretty forceful “no” while hastening away from him. Not something I’m proud of, but there it is – it was my natural reaction in the moment. I didn’t want to connect with the guy. Yes, in principle I want to help him, but in practice I wanted him to leave me the hell alone.

So now I’ve been unkind to someone who’s so much worse off than me that it scarcely bears contemplation. Why? Because I felt put-upon. Not exactly threatened, but sort of threatened. My space invaded. Lies told to me (the guy didn’t have window-washing equipment that I noticed, although I wasn’t looking that closely).

Why do I mention this here? Well, obviously I don’t feel that my behavior was constructive or appropriate. But what does that have to do with war? This.

The United States is a rich country. We have powerful weapons. Not necessarily the right weapons, but powerful weapons nonetheless. If someone comes at us, we can answer them. The force behind our answer might not be appropriate, but we can definitely answer them. In fact, because we are so rich and powerful, the force behind our answer almost has to be disproportionate. Right now we’re in trouble off the coast of Somalia because we are using cannons to swat gnats.

We see this kind of response at every level of our society. I lash out inappropriately at the homeless guy. The police lash out inappropriately at petty criminals and legitimate protestors. Corporations lash out inappropriately at people who they feel are cutting into their bottom line. The People lash out, possibly inappropriately, at financial workers. And when three thousand of our countrymen and women were killed, we lashed out inappropriately in Afghanistan, first, and later Iraq.

Were we beset by foes? Sure. Did we have a right to respond? Maybe so. Was our response constructive? Not in the slightest.

I was trying to avoid being hassled. I was hassled anyway. I feel like a jerk for what I did. Not only did I not accomplish what I hoped to accomplish by avoiding that guy who was hassling me, I made things worse – I made him feel worse, and I made myself feel worse. Was it okay for him to hassle me? No. Did my response work? No.

I think the analogy holds all the way up the spectrum, from me, to the cops, to corporations with lawyers, to the people, to our military response to 9/11. There was a stimulus, and it triggered a response. The stimulus and the response were completely disproportionate. And the outcome was not in any way satisfactory or useful.

 

Human sacrifice

I think our culture is so steeped in the idea of war that we sometimes have trouble conceiving of it as anything other than a normal thing.

Yesterday, on the way home from the IETF conference, I ran into a soldier on BART who was on the way back to Iraq. It’s hard for me to fathom what that must be like – here he is, on a train, in a beautiful city, chatting with a couple of nice women (he didn’t have any time for me, and who can blame him) and in a few short hours he will be back in the war which, by the way, is still going on, in case anyone forgot.

This fellow is 39 years old. He had no sense of balance—he fell down twice getting off the train. He was not drunk —I didn’t smell any alcohol at all, and I would have. So he’s got some head injury. And he was showing the women he was chatting with the exit wound from some bullet that had hit him. And he’s going back to that. He didn’t look thrilled, and he didn’t look upset—he just looked like that was his life, and he didn’t expect anything else.

Being a science fiction reader, I’ve encountered the Aztecs a few times in science fiction novels, and this has led me to do a little research about what they were like in real life. The Aztec culture was a culture that engaged in human sacrifice. They would rip peoples’ hearts out and offer them to the sun god. Our written records of the day to day life of Aztec culture are not very complete, but we do have written records, and we have some idea of what life was like in those times, in that place. How does a culture tolerate human sacrifice?

The answer, as best I can glean, and I do not claim to be an expert, is not that they were simply barbarians who were too stupid to know any better. They tolerated it for a number of reasons. First, they had reason to believe that they would not be the ones sacrificed – sacrifices usually weren’t taken out of the general populace, but rather from military captives. Second, they were told that it was necessary – that their future depended on it. That the sun would not rise if it was not done. Third, most of them didn’t have much choice about it.

I think the parallels between the Aztec tradition of human sacrifice and the modern tradition of war are strong enough to be taken seriously. The Aztec culture was dominant in its part of the world, in its time. It was prosperous, up to a point. And it was fragile, in that the conditions supporting it could not be counted on to persist, and in that there were severe injustices being done in the name of stability. And it fell, and the human sacrifices stopped. And, fortunately, the sun kept rising.

So when we are talking about war, trying to figure out how to explain just how barbaric it is, the history of the Aztecs might be worth visiting. They were not so different from the culture in the United States. They had sacrificial victims. We have soldiers—our own, and the enemy. They had a civilian population trapped between the fear of the apocalypse and the comfort of business as usual. We have a civilian population that is still afraid of terrorist attack, and still wants the comfort of a normalcy that is still present in some places, but fast fading in many.

They believed in magic; when we go to war, so do we. You probably have some inkling that the belief in war as a cause for peace is magical thinking, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I think this is a point that might be convincing for some people who still accept the idea of war as a cause for peace. So I mention this here because it might be something to bring out when you are trying to get someone to doubt their faith in war. We are more like the Aztecs than I we imagine. We need to learn to believe that when we stop using war to get what we want, the sun will continue to rise.

 

Three Acts of Peace…

I didn’t really have time to do a blog this week. I had to travel to work on something I think is really important for peace—keeping the Internet alive and working as we outgrow the original design. So instead, I wanted to call your attention to something really cool a friend of mine is doing—she has a web site called One Thousand Acts of Peace.

If you want to know what it means to live a life dedicated to peace, I think this is one example of what it might look like.

Another friend of mine who is a school teacher has been working on training children to integrate actively peaceful behavior into their lives. There’s a shorter version of the video as well.

We don’t see stories like this on the news, but they are happening all around us.

 

Estelle Seguin on “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier”

Jeff mentioned a song in the comments here a few days ago, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”, by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi. Coincidentally, my friend Estelle Seguin ran into the same song because it was a number one hit the year before her grandmother was born, at a time when America was debating the need to prepare for war. You can find the audio on iTunes or at History Matters.

Here’s what Estelle has to say about it.

—Ted

“I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier”

by Estelle Seguin

As a mother, I have first hand experience with the way frustrations can boil over, whether it is me with my kids or sibling rivalry. It’s not that huge a leap to imagine entire nations getting carried away with hate and misunderstanding. Luckily, my Buddhist training sometimes actually comes back to me during such moments. Sometimes.

The idea of extinguishing a precious human life I carried in my body, nursed and educated just for some extended real life chess game is beyond rational thought. I don’t even think I know of a proper word to use when pondering the notion. Preposterous? Outrageous? Perhaps, if you go to the root of the words and forget how they’re misused nowadays to describe trivial matters.

Like just about every mother in the world, a good part of my time is spent mediating. I cannot count the times I’ve said “well, who will be the first smart enough to stop”, “just because he hit you doesn’t mean you have to hit him back”, et cetera… You get the idea.

Now imagine the questions that must come up in these young minds when all they hear on the news are words like retaliation, defense systems, blah blah blah. People in fancy suits and cars negating absolutely everything I’ve tried to teach them about conflict.

I have enough to worry about: am I feeding them well enough, loving them enough, protecting them yet giving them enough independence, encouraging them. The list goes on. And then some person can decide to put them in front of a bunch of guns just to put a different coloured flag on a piece of land? I don’t think so.

Am I being selfish? Perhaps. Is it selfishness when my heart wants to rip in two when I see a mother on TV wailing in front of her son’s dead body? Maybe it is, maybe I only get it now because I’ve given birth.

I can’t even imagine sitting at a desk, ordering the mobilization of thousands of troops. Maybe we should change the language around war, make it harder to execute. Instead of troops, let’s use the words sons and daughters. Instead of front, let’s use the word target. Reporters will have to dirty up the language they’ve worked so hard to sanitize.

I would never wish it on a reporter or politician but it’s quite obvious they don’t feel the ache a mother feels when her child has died, just one of many lives destroyed forever.

I struggle to understand mothers of fallen soldiers who still support the war they lost their son to. It would be so easy for me to condemn them, get angry at them, want to shake some sense into them, but then I wouldn’t be setting a very good example for my kids. Maybe, when you think about it, they’re the ones teaching me.

There’s a brief article about the song on the History Matters site:

Roosevelt’s retort to the popularity of the antiwar song was that it should be accompanied by the tune “I Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.” He suggested that the place for women who opposed war was “in China—or by preference in a harem—and not in the United States.”

I have two boys, currently 6 and 12. If my kids ever faced the choice of going to war, I’d cut off their pinkies and make the choice for them.

 

If we are in a downward spiral, what can we do?

A friend of mine whose father survived the Nazis has been observing some trends recently that he finds deeply disturbing.   We are in a world economic downturn that is reminding people of the Great Depression; one of the results of the Great Depression was the rise of a bunch of different kinds of scary regimes – for example, the Nazis and the Fascists.   This led to war in Europe.   There were similar groups in the U.S., although they never gained the kind of foothold here that they did in Europe.   My command of Depression history is probably better than average, but some of this stuff is controversial, so I’m not asking you to accept my view of how it was; simply pointing out that quite a few governments spun out of control during that period, and that this was probably related to the hard times brought on by the Depression.

My response to my friend was basically something along the lines of “chill, dude.”   But suppose he’s right.   Suppose we are in a downward spiral.   Is my friend’s answer—getting ready to run for high ground—really our only, or at least our best, option? That is, are we helpless?   Or can we do something to slow, stop, or deflect the downward spiral?   If this downturn could lead to war, can we do something about it?

I’ve been pushing this notion that peace is something that happens by consensus.   We avoid war because we don’t want war.   We avoid living in repressive regimes because, en masse, we reject them.   So what can we do to avoid a consensus that leads us to war and totalitarianism and repression?

I hate to be pollyannaish, but I think there is something we can do.   I would say there are a number of things we should try to do:

• Don’t feed the angst and paranoia.   If people are panicking around you, don’t join in. Have a little faith.   I don’t care in what—God, human goodness, your own personal strength of character, whatever.
• Be a rock.   Try to inspire the people around you who are feeling uncertain or panicky to have a little faith too. If you don’t feel any inspiration, go looking for some.
• Look for positive aspects to the current crisis.   Ways that things can improve as a result of the destruction that is going on around us.
• Offer people your smile.
• Thank people when they do things for you, even if you paid them to do those things.   Try to reach down deep and find some genuine gratitude—don’t just do it by rote.
• Leave good tips, if you can afford to.
• Be brave, and offer people help when they need it.   You can’t bail them out – don’t put that on yourself.   Offer them the kind of help you do have to offer instead.
• Pay close attention to proposed laws that restrict freedom of speech, and oppose them.   The easiest way for totalitarianism, oppression and war to fester is by suppressing communication—by preventing people from seeing clearly what is going on, and getting them to panic because they lack the knowledge that would let them find a sane way forward.

It sort of feels like I’m giving opposing advice, because I’m saying on the one hand not to panic, and on the other to be watchful of government.   But that’s precisely what we need to do.   This is not a struggle between good and evil—it’s a struggle for balance. Our part in that balance is to let our elected representatives know that we are paying attention, and that we are thinking critically, and that we care more about content than appearance. This is the only thing that can ever give them the courage to resist unjust laws that sound good on paper, because they know that in the absence of an informed electorate (that’s us!), they will be judged on the basis of what the justification for the law is, not on the basis of what the law would actually do.

Oh, I guess there’s one more bullet point:

• Be a citizen, not a consumer.

What I mean here is that we hardly ever hear the word “citizen” anymore – when people talk about us on the news, they call us “consumers.”   This is a deep bit of psychological misdirection.   If we are consumers, then we are the customers of the government.   If we are citizens, our role is to operate the government.   This second role is the only one that can prevent the downward spiral my friend is worried about—we have to take responsibility, and not leave it up to someone else.

 

Why are people such jerks, and how can we get them to stop?

Whoever we are, there are people around us who are behaving badly.   Treating each other unfairly, defending positions that are indefensible.   People of bad character, who, even if they are on the right side of some issue, just have the wrong attitude, and consequently tend to screw things up.   You know the type.   There are probably dozens of them in your life.   There certainly are in mine.   And the world really can’t be a better place until they stop.   So we have to get them to stop, or else things can’t possibly get better.

So how can we make people stop doing bad things?   There are a lot of ways.   One of my favorite is arguing.    When I explain my position carefully, they can’t help but get it.   Because my logic is unassailable, and their own positions are weak, with only the feeblest of justifications.   It works every time.

Threats work pretty well too.   They’re especially effective with politicians – if enough people tell them that they are being idiots, they change their minds and start doing the right thing.   This is why, for instance, the Republicans are starting to change their tune recently – why you hear about their efforts to form a bipartisan team and try to do the right thing for the country in our time of need.

Another really effective way of getting people to stop being wrong is to chastise them.   Just the other day I got some email from a friend of mine asking for help with something I didn’t agree with, and so I gave her a piece of my mind – I really let her have it.   Problem solved – her organization is back on the straight and narrow, doing what I thought they should be doing all along.

As if.

It’s a bit frustrating to post here because I feel like a lot of the time I’m just asserting things.   And that’s really what I’m arguing against here.   You can’t convert people by asserting things.   I can’t either.   So I guess I’m speaking to the people who are reading this and who already agree that the problem I’m talking about is a real problem, and that solving it will make a difference.

There will always be people we can’t convince.  They aren’t necessarily bad people.   They just see things differently enough that we can’t figure out how to communicate with them.   We have to live with them anyway.   We can’t make them stop.   If making the world a better place requires us to make them stop, or convince them to stop, we are out of luck.   I guess that’s another assertion.   But if you think it’s not true, how are you going to make them stop?   Is making them stop even consistent with peace?   And if you aren’t going to force them, how are they going to stop?   Are you really going to convince them?   Has it ever worked before?   Are your arguments so much better than those others have tried in the past?

This is why I have such trouble with the idea of peace being something imposed, something that comes from stopping other people from doing things we think are bad.   I think if peace comes from that, there is no hope, because the very act of stopping them is not a peaceful act.  And am I really so all-knowing that every wrong thing ever done is obvious to me, and every opportunity to do right unmistakeable?   And yet I think peace is possible.

And so I think that peace comes from two things.   It comes from stopping myself from doing things that aren’t consistent with peace, and it comes from acts of creation that build a peaceful world.   It comes from those people I was trying to make stop come into that peaceful world of their own accord, because they choose to, because it is a better world than the one they are creating with their control and their hatred and their anger and their violence.

And this is why practices like the one Andrea described on Friday are so important.   Because I am really more like the people whose actions I wish would stop than I am different from them.   And those differences are in my mind.   So if I really want to change the world, I need to change my mind.

 

What would peace look like?

I asked this question in a comment the other day, and didn’t get any clear answer, probably because it’s a difficult question. Naturally I have my own ideas, which I will share here, but I’m not claiming I’m right – just throwing out ideas.

First of all, I’d like to point out that one kind of “peace” that we’ve seen in the past is the total extermination of one side of the conflict. There is historical evidence of quite a few aboriginal cultures in Europe that have perished this way. Many Native American tribes were wiped out in this way. It’s what made Stalin and Pol Pot famous.

I mention extermination because I think that many of the wars that we see nowadays are silently predicated on the idea of total extermination of the enemy. I don’t mean that this is a deliberate goal – I just mean that these wars don’t make sense when viewed any other way.

What I mean is that there is no exit strategy for the conflict – no set of end conditions that would mean that it was time to stop fighting – other than that everyone is dead. I’m aware of at least one conflict that looks this way to me that’s going on right now, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t more. Interestingly, it needn’t be the case that both sides be fighting on this basis – it’s only necessary for one side to have no exit strategy, and I think you have an extermination-oriented conflict.

So suppose that such a conflict comes to a conclusion. Do we now have peace? History would suggest otherwise. What actually happens is that you wind up with an empire, and then that empire eventually crashes. And then you have conflict again.

So what about getting rid of the people who are in control, who are instigating the conflict? Does that work? I ask this question because I think this is the model most people who want peace actually believe in. Get rid of the aggressors, and the conflict will stop.

Let’s consider two examples – mid-seventies Iran, and the U.S. this year, 2009. Iran is a questionable example because they were not really at war in a technical sense, but I think only in a technical sense. Really, Iran was an occupied country. The leaders of the occupation were Iranian, but they were in power because of an occupation begun by the British, and continued by the Americans.

When Iran’s occupation ended, intellectuals in Iran who supported its end were hopeful. They wanted to build a new government that was just and peaceful. This was not an unreasonable hope – nowadays we tend to think of the Middle East as a place where everyone wants war, but this isn’t really true now, and in fact historically the Middle East has been a cradle of civilization.

Unfortunately, Iran was not ripe for a peaceful government when the old government fell. Consequently, what rose up in its place was something even worse. No longer occupied by a foreign power, Iran fell into chaos and repression. War with Iraq killed more Iranians than the Shah ever did.

In the U.S., in 2009, we are tired of war. I think the old government here fell because of this. Lucky us. Unfortunately, although I think we are ripe for improvement, we are not yet ripe for peace. We want an end to the war in Iraq, but not today. So the war is currently projected to continue until 2011, and the war in Afghanistan is ramping up.

There’s an argument, and I think a legitimate one, to be made for staying in Iraq. We allowed the war to start there, and if we just leave, the chaos that follows will be our chaos. But nevertheless, if we were ready for peace, I have trouble believing that the word would be that we would stay until 2011.

So this leads to what I think peace is. I think peace is what happens when most people not only are not interested in war, but are actively interested in peace. I say most because there will always be sociopaths, and there will always be people who feel unfairly done-by, and there will always be criminals. But for peace to exist, it must be the case that those people are not in control, and that their bad behavior is completely and successfully moderated by the intentions and actions of the people who do actively want peace.

I think that people who want peace sometimes imagine that in the absence of aggression, peace would happen naturally, and would remain indefinitely. I think this is unrealistic. We don’t expect the leaves in our roof gutters to clean themselves out. We don’t expect that, once painted, our houses will remain just as bright, forever. Why would we expect peace to emerge on its own out of the ashes of oppression?

Peace, when it comes, will be the result of a very careful and deliberate effort to create the habits that perpetuate peace. We have never seen what this looks like. Perhaps it’s naive to think it’s even possible.

The reason I think it is possible is because this is actually how societies work. Societies have police forces, but it is not the police force that keeps the peace. The police force is just there for the people who can’t restrain themselves. The reason the peace is kept is that the overwhelming majority wants it kept.

And so I think it is possible for there to be peace on earth. But it will not happen because we get rid of someone, or stop someone, or something like that. It will be because we figure out what our world culture needs to be in order for peace to be possible, and because we work, over probably a very long time, to foster the birth of that culture, and to nurture it once it’s been born.

 

So what can we actually do?

Suppose we want peace. Real peace. We believe that peace is possible in theory, although we haven’t lived a day of our lives in a world at peace. What do we do?

Here are some options:

• We can get upset
• We can protest
• We can vote
• We can boycott
• We can resist more actively
• We can think

If it sounds like I’m leading you to a conclusion, please don’t think that.   I’m just trying to be complete.   I think all of these options are things worth discussing.

Let’s take getting upset.   This is a good one, because it’s so easy.   All we need do is read the news.   There is a war going on somewhere.   An atrocity was committed somewhere, today.   A child died in a hospital, in the arms of her sobbing mother, because of some tragic act of horror that was done yesterday, or last week.   I don’t mean to make light of this.   We need to stay in touch with why we want peace.   If we cannot put ourselves in the place of that sobbing mother, we cannot have compassion for her, and if we cannot have compassion for her, how serious can we claim to be?

At the same time, though, getting upset is time consuming.   I can waste an entire day getting upset about war, researching its causes, trying to figure out who’s right, who’s wrong, what was done badly here, how much guilt I share in the horror I have just vicariously witnessed.   So personally, I try to be careful about this.   I think moderation is important here.

We can protest.   I think protest is necessary.   At the same time, we have to be realistic.   For example, when Bush was in office, no amount of public protest that was realistically possible was going to sway him from the course he’d determined to follow.   I’m not saying that no amount of protest could have swayed him – just that the will for the amount of protest that could have swayed him wasn’t present.   As witness the fact that the protests that happened did not sway him.

So I think protest is a worthwhile avenue for communicating our intentions to those in power, and it’s important for us to affirm those intentions, and not just sit back and accept passively the evil that will be done in our names.   But this kind of protest, by like-minded individuals who already believe in peace, isn’t going to be enough.   

For my part, I protest by writing letters more than by appearing in public.   I think the last actual peace rally I attended was the one in New York in 1982, unless you count Critical Mass, which was motivated by a desire to end wars over oil, and which I used to ride in when I could when I was living in San Francisco.  Although reading about those protests when I went to find links describing them got me all teary-eyed – maybe I should go to some more.

We can vote.   This is a hard thing to contemplate.   I have never had the opportunity to vote for a president who was unreservedly pro-peace.   The last one who spoke seriously about creating peace was Jimmy Carter, and he was run out of town on a rail eight days after my sixteenth birthday.   But I voted enthusiastically for Barack Obama, despite his pro-war stance.   Why?   Because I’d rather have a president who’s a diplomat willing to go to war than a president who is not a diplomat, and willing to go to war.

Obviously we will never end war simply by choosing presidents on this basis, but as a practical matter, actions which are less likely to lead to war are worthwhile.   People often brag about refusing to vote on principle, because the choice is between two evils.   But if you ask someone who lives in a U.S.-dominated country like the Philippines how life changed for them when Bush was elected, they’re quite unequivocal about it (I know because I have asked).   When you choose, on principle, not to vote for someone who’s less likely to go to war, I believe that you are choosing to risk war on principle.   I don’t think that’s actually a principled choice.

We can boycott.    The thing about boycotts is that they are essentially tactical.   It’s not that boycotting people is the right thing to do.   In all likelihood, the people who will actually suffer the most from the boycott are not the ones you want to injure.   And there it is – in a boycott, you are essentially seeking to injure someone in a small way in order to prevent a larger injury.

I do not mean to imply that boycotts are never the right thing to do, but I think that a boycott should stand the test of practicality.   If the boycott has some hope of actually accomplishing the change that’s intended, then perhaps it’s worth doing.   But to engage in a boycott as a matter of principle, when it will not actually change anything, to me seems immoral, because now you are attempting to injure someone, and you can’t even point to any good that will come of it.

So personally I tend to shy away from boycotts unless it’s pretty clear-cut.   I was pretty enthusiastic about the INFACT boycott many years ago, and I still think that, for example, boycotting chocolate that’s produced using slaves is a very good thing, but a lot of times when I’m personally called on by a friend to participate in a boycott, it just doesn’t feel like the right thing to me.

We can resist more actively.   I guess this would range anywhere from lying down in front of a train carrying munitions to Weather Underground and SDS territory.   I think engaging in a protest where you might be grievously injured is on the one hand a very powerful statement, and on the other hand, like a boycott, a very questionable tactic.   In effect, you are trading one moment of terrible risk for all the good you might do in the rest of your life if you survive.

I think Brian Willson’s story is worth examining.   I find what he says in his extensive writings on peace both inspiring and discouraging.   He’s an amazing person, but his principled act of self-sacrifice back in 1987 barely left a ripple on the national consciousness.   Whether we agree with his choice of tactic or not, I think his story should be required reading for anybody who’s serious about peace.

As for the Weather Underground and SDS, I think history shows a pretty clear conclusion.   WU and SDS made things a lot worse.   Because of their actions in the sixties, Barack Obama came under scrutiny, merely for an incidental association with Bill Ayers.   Furthermore, any good those involved do now is forever tainted by their actions as misguided youths in the 1960s.   Their actions are used as justification for police brutality against protestors, up to and including killing in self-defense.   Violence begets violence, whether it is in the service of peace or war, or any other cause.

We can think.   We can be slaves to our drives, or we can think our way out of them.   When we engage in war, we are enslaved by our drives.   We are not moral actors – we are dumb animals reacting to our environment.   Thinking is actually the most important thing we can do to promote peace.   Our drives are never permanently conquered.   We do not, one day, decide that we will never get angry again, and then thereafter our will is perfectly imposed on our drives.   Quite the contrary.

Even our thinking about war is muddled by our drives.   The more you read about human drives, the more clear this is.   People can be manipulated, en masse.   We are manipulated by our emotions even as individuals.   Look at the standard action movie setup: some bad guy commits an atrocity against the hero’s loved one.   Any subsequent action on the part of the hero, no matter how depraved, is justified by this initial act.   It works in real life too.

The only tool we have with which to fight this is our intellect.

It’s key to bear in mind that it is not only those who promote war who manipulate us.   It is also those who promote peace.   I don’t mean that peace activists are bad people.   What I mean is that we need to use our intellect to examine all arguments offered to us, not just those with which we disagree.   A peace activist friend who urges us to do something extreme, or even just something ineffective, in the service of peace is just as wrong as the war hawk who urges us to go to war.   Right now I think the peace activist who has a serious, intellectually rigorous answer for why peace is better than war as a tool for achieving any end at all is a very rare bird.   Are you such a rare bird?

So I don’t mean to discount all the other things we can do to achieve peace, because they are also important.   But we need more of those rare birds.   We should all be able to sit down with Bill O’Reilly and not be stumped by a single thing he throws at us.   We should be able to describe and justify our own agenda clearly, and we should be able to respond to cross-examination on any point.

It is in service of this crucial need that I debate with people about war and peace.   It’s why I agreed to write about peace here on this blog.   And it’s why I blew my targeted word count by about 700 words.   So if you got to this point in the article, that’s a very hopeful thing.

 

Confession

This morning I was reading the news, and I came to an article about Iran. It turns out that although Iran has not been working very hard on developing a nuclear bomb, they have been working on a delivery system, and on enrichment. Consequently, they are considered to be not all that far from actually having a nuclear weapon. They say their enrichment work is for peaceful purposes.

So what pops into my mind as I’m reading this, you might ask? Well, this is the confession. What popped into my mind was my recollection of Israel bombing a nuclear plant in Iraq many years ago, and how something similar might be done in Iran. Attacking, deposing the government there. Getting the current Ayatollah out of power. This is what my mind is like. Who am I to ever counsel anyone else that they ought to seek peace, if this is what my mind is like?

Here is the truth, as I see it. If we were to attack Iran in this way, it would make things worse. It feels like it would make things better. It feels like we could stop this madness by attacking. But I don’t think we can. Even though my natural first thought is to attack, I do not think that following my natural first thought is the right thing to do.

I don’t even know why Iran is pursuing nuclear enrichment. Maybe they really are going to build nuclear power plants, and generate power that way. I’m not a big fan of nuclear power, but would it be worth going to war with Iran if that were the reason they were enriching their uranium? I don’t think it would.

Iran has been through a terrible war in recent memory. The revolution there just turned 30. They are not stupid. I suspect they have planned for the possibility of air strikes. So going to war with them would probably be harder than going to war with Iraq. And going to war with Iraq is bankrupting us. Furthermore, going to war with Iraq has destroyed our credibility, so if we wanted to attack Iran as well, I don’t think we would find a ready source of allies.

If all that weren’t bad enough, it’s our attempts to control the middle east in the past that have led us to where we are today. The revolution thirty years ago in Iran was a revolution against a government that we installed. A government that had so harmed its people that when they revolted, they had no normalcy to fall back on, and they fell back on religious extremism instead. We really have nobody but ourselves to blame for our current relationship with Iran, and more to the point, the blame falls on us because of our warlike actions in the past, not because of any failure to prosecute a war.

This is the situation in Iraq as well – a despot we installed went crazy, and we wound up deciding to overthrow him.

So we really don’t have to think very hard to see that our warlike actions in the past have not served us well. And yet it’s been taboo in the U.S. to even talk about this, to even acknowledge that the problems in the middle east might be to some degree problems that we created. And it is only this shyness for confession, for taking responsibility for our actions, that allows us even for a moment to consider yet another act of war to try to make things better.

The world is in a dangerous situation right now. We have been mining aquifers to support our agriculture, and many of the aquifers we have been mining are nearly or completely empty. Grain production is sharply down, and we have been burning through our reserves. Food security is a dream for a lot of the world right now, and if things continue the way they are going, it will get worse.

And my reaction to this, I have to admit, is first to be concerned for all the bad things that could happen, and second to think, “well, I live in the United States, things probably won’t get that bad here.” And then finally I recall that the way this sort of thing typically corrects itself is by mass die-offs. People starve to death in the millions, and the problem corrects itself. Am I okay with that? I’m ashamed to say that it’s easy to comfort myself with the hope that things won’t get that bad here.

What is the point of all this soul-baring? It’s that we need to stop screwing around. We have to wake up and start changing the world. The Age of Aquarius has come and gone, and we have very little to show for it. The world will not improve itself. But improvement starts here, in my heart. If I can’t improve my heart, how can I demand of anybody else that they improve theirs? How can I demand that they be the one to start, while I sit back and criticize?

If it’s true that there are evil people in the world who are content to cause wars, to allow famines, even to profit from these evils, then I can always say “well, I’m better than they are, so until they improve, I don’t have to.” But if you think about it, this is completely backwards. Whatever the reason for their evil is, they are steeped in it. Turning around, for them, is going to be harder than it is for me. I at least recognize the problem. I at least can conceive of taking personal responsibility for it.

So if we are in that place, where we are not perfect, but we can allow ourselves to see our own flaws, and to confess them, we have a duty, I think. If the buck doesn’t stop here, I don’t know where it possibly can.