100
Years of Using War to Try to End All War
By
David Swanson
February 24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WBW"
- This April
4th will be 100 years since the U.S. Senate
voted to declare war on Germany and 50 since
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war
on Vietnam (49 since he was killed on that
speech’s first anniversary). Events are being
planned to help
us try to finally learn some lessons, to move
beyond, not just Vietnam, but war.
That
declaration of war on Germany was not for the
war that makes up the single most common theme
of U.S. entertainment and history. It was for
the war that came before that one. This was the
Great War, the war to end all wars, the war
without which the conditions for the next war
would not have existed.
As well
recounted in Michael Kazin’s War Against
War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918,
a major peace movement had the support of a
great deal of the United States. When the war
finally ended (after the U.S. had actually been
in it for about 5% the length of the war on
Afghanistan thus far) just about everybody
regretted it. The losses in life, limb, sanity,
property, civil liberties, democracy, and health
were incredible. Death, devastation, a flu
epidemic, prohibition, a permanent military and
the taxes to go with it, plus predictions of
World War II: these were the results, and a lot
of people remembered that they had been warned,
as well as that the ending of all war had been
promised.
The peace activists had warned the U.S.
government to stay out of the war (not out of
foreign relations, just out of mass-murdering
foreign relations). And they had been right. The
regret was intense and lasting. It lasted right
up until the worst result of World War I came
along in the form of World War II. At that
point, regret was replaced with forgetting.
World War I was erased from popular history, and
its
child on steroids
was celebrated rather than mourned, and has been
celebrated with growing reverence ever since.
The massive peace movement that
outlawed war in 1928,
had been widespread,
mainstream, and
aggressive before 1917 as well. Antiwar Congress
members had entered into the Congressional
Record a sample of the flood of letters and
petitions they had received urging that the U.S.
stay out of war. Peace groups had held marches
and rallies, sent delegations to Europe, met
with the president, and pushed to require a
popular vote before the launching of any war,
believing that the public would vote war down.
We’ll never know, because the vote was never
taken. Instead, the United States jumped into
the war, thereby preventing a negotiated
settlement and creating a total victory followed
by vicious punishment of the losing side — the
very fuel for Nazism, as well as for Italian
fascism, Japanese imperialism, and the
Sykes-Picot carving up of the Middle East so
beloved by that region’s residents to this day.
An
antiwar exhibit that toured the U.S. in 1916
included a life-sized model stegosaurus that
represented the fatal consequences of having
heavy armor but no brains. The idea of preparing
for war in order to achieve peace, which today
is simple commonsense, was widely found to be a
great source of humor, as Washington cynically
pursued “preparedness.” Morris Hillquit, an
eloquent socialist — something of a Bernie
Sanders without the 21st-century militarism —
asked why European nations, having fully armed
themselves to avoid war, hadn’t avoided it.
“Their antiwar insurance turned out to be a bad
case of over-insurance,” he said. You prepare
for war, and you get war — remarkably enough.
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Woodrow
Wilson won reelection on an antiwar platform,
and could not have won it otherwise. After he
opted for war, he was unable to raise an army to
fight his war without a draft. And he was unable
to sustain a draft without imprisoning people
who spoke against it. He saw to it that
conscientious objectors were brutally tortured
(or, as we would say today, interrogated). Yet
people refused, deserted, evaded, and violently
fought recruiters by the thousands. The wisdom
to reject war was not lacking. It just wasn’t
followed by those in power.
The
understanding that war should be ended, which
reached its peak perhaps in the 1920s and 1930s,
saw something of a comeback during what the
Vietnamese call the American War. Martin Luther
King did not propose a different war or a better
war, but leaving behind the entire war system.
That awareness has grown even as the Vietnam
Syndrome has faded and war been normalized. Now,
the U.S. popular mind is a mass of
contradictions.
In a
recent poll,
66% of people in the United States are worried
that the U.S. will become engaged in a major war
in the next four years. However, the U.S. is
engaged in a number of wars right now that must
seem pretty major to the people living through
them, wars that have created the greatest
refugee crisis so far on the planet and
threatened to break similar records for
starvation. In addition, 80% of the U.S. public
in the very same poll say they support NATO.
There’s a 50/50 split on whether to build yet
more nukes. A slim majority favors banning
refugees who are fleeing the wars. And over
three-quarters
of Democrats believe, for partisan rather than
empirical reasons, that Russia is unfriendly or
an enemy. Despite the warnings of the wise for
over a century, people are still imagining they
can use war preparations to avoid war.
One
thing that could help keep us out of more wars
is the Trump face now placed on the wars. People
who will hate Russia because they hate Trump may
at some point oppose Trump’s wars because they
hate Trump. And those getting active to support
refugees may also want to help end the crimes
that create the refugees.
Meanwhile, German tanks are again
rolling toward
the Russian border, and instead of soliciting
denunciations from groups like the Anne Frank
Center, as recently done to combat Donald
Trump’s anti-Semitism, U.S. liberals are
generally applauding or avoiding any awareness.
One thing is certain: we will not survive
another 100 years of this. Long before then, we
will have to try
something else.
We will have to move beyond war to nonviolent
conflict resolution, aid, diplomacy,
disarmament, cooperation, and the rule of law.
World Beyond War is planning
events everywhere,
including these:
Remembering Past Wars . . . and Preventing the
Next
April 3rd
at NYU, New York, NY. (details TBA)
Speakers: Joanne Sheehan, Glen Ford, Alice
Slater, Maria Santelli, David Swanson.
April 4,
6-8 p.m. Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Streets
NW, Washington, D.C.
Speakers: Michael Kazin, Eugene Puryear, Medea
Benjamin, David Swanson, Maria Santelli.
May 25,
6-8 p.m., Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Public
Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA.
Speakers: Jackie Cabasso, Daniel Ellsberg, David
Hartsough, Adam Hochschild.
