Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton speaks during a rally in New York, April 18, 2016. Corporate media have drawn very little attention to US wars and military intervention abroad during the 2016 presidential primary campaign. (Photo: Sam Hodgson / The New York Times)
In this interview, David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, counters the theory that war is an inevitable part of human nature, says the antiwar movement is larger than the dominant media suggest and shares the view that wars are fought primarily for money and markets.
Mark Karlin: How do you respond to people who say that war is due to human hard-wiring that goes back to battling clans of cave people over territory and resources?
David Swanson: Thanks for the terrific questions. At least 90 percent of humanity is represented by governments that wage war much less than the US government. Over 99 percent of people in the United States are not in the military. There is not a single case of PTSD from war deprivation. The largest cause of death in members of the US military is suicide. So you can try to claim that hunter-gatherers waged wars despite the lack of evidence, or that chimpanzees wage wars despite the lack of either evidence or relevance. But the very claim that humans all wage war is ridiculous on its face. The notion that it comes naturally to them is a horrible joke, given the damage it inflicts even on drastically better-armed aggressors who kill even from the safety of a drone base thousands of miles from their victims. If someone thinks war comes naturally, I would suggest, respectfully, that they should try sexual abstinence, starvation or eating feces.
"No candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending on militarism is too much, too little or just right."
There have been human cultures like the current United States in which people have been taught to accept war as inevitable. There have been many others that have not known war at all and have considered killing utterly unacceptable -- meaning they would in fact never ever do it, not meaning they would kill anyone who threatened to kill someone. Eliminating war does not involve eliminating anger or conflict; it involves disassembling a complex industrial institution that goes to great lengths to create wars and far greater lengths to arm others so that when they become involved in conflicts much more damage is done. The majority of the weapons in the Middle East are made in and shipped from the United States. Taking away those weapons would not require discovering the mysterious seat of "human nature" in West Asian brains and operating on it. It would just require a popular movement that saw profiting from death as shameful and put an end to it, as a congressional committeeproposed 80 years ago and the pope suggested to applause from a joint session just recently.
As a follow-up, your book incorporates the principle that reason can overcome the emotional factors -- even if based on lies as you frequently detail in your book -- that perpetuate war. Yet, your epilogue provides a glimpse into the ongoing conflicts of the last five years and provides little hope that reason is making any progress in prevailing against the forces that lead to war (with the exception of the agreement with Iran). You conclude that "belief in the inevitability of war can end." How so, given its grim endurance?
I'm not in the business of giving hope or despair. I don't feel either one or see the relevance of trying to feel either one. We have moral obligations to try to improve things, so we must do our best -- and the fact that such work is enjoyable and fulfilling is a bonus. But to do our best we have to understand, as well as we can, what has been working. In that epilogue I focused first and primarily on the 2013 public resistance that stopped a massive bombing campaign of Syria by the United States (without stopping the arming of proxies, investing seriously in aid etc.). And after touching also on the upholding of the Iran agreement, I noted that Syria should be our model, because we took on the leadership of both big political parties in Washington, DC, not just one of them.
"The lies that launch wars are usually so weak that they require urgency."
President Obama admitted in a recent article based on a series of interviews that public pressure had been key in his reversing a decision he had formally committed to. That included public pressure through Congress and through Parliament in the UK. This was an admission, not an excuse. The very last thing our politicians ever want to reveal is that the public influenced them. They avoid it so skillfully that the public has internalized the process, so that when it appears to have an impact it reminds itself that such a thing can't possibly be true. This of course reduces activism dramatically.
I'm not sure success will come through a cold reasoning process divorced from emotions, if such a thing exists. I think love for those targeted is critical, combined with courage to resist those targeting them. But a bit of humility is needed. People in the United States who believe war is inevitable should ask some people outside the United States who believe in greater numbers that war is perfectly capable of being abolished. If they can believe it, humans can believe it. And if we can recognize them as humans, two things follow: They might be correct, and we damn well ought to stop killing them.
