Note:
Remarks
at Muslim
Community of the Quad Cities in
Bettendorf, Iowa, November 10, 2023
In
the popular Western imagination war resembles
a sport with what President Joe Biden calls
“teams” with differently colored uniforms on
an identifiable and uninhabited “battlefield”
where mostly soldiers die. That almost no war
has resembled this since World War One does
not stop the endless outcries, during each and
every war:
“This is not a war! It’s an
occupation!”
“This is no war! Stop calling
it a war! It’s a genocide!”
“This is not a war at all!
It’s an invasion!”
“The important thing is to
stop the media calling this ethnic cleansing
a so-called war!”
I’m
sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It doesn’t
matter which mass-murder spree you’re looking
at. It’s a war. It doesn’t resemble World War
I or the U.S. Civil War because war has not
resembled that sort of thing for over a
century. War happens in people’s cities and
villages. War kills mostly civilians. War is
genocide is war is massacre is war is ethnic
cleansing is war.
This
is true in Gaza but it’s also true in Ukraine
and Yemen and Sudan and Azerbaijan. The
well-known U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
were extremely one-sided slaughters of mostly
civilians and overwhelmingly of people living
in the so-called battlefields. You can declare
none of the wars to have been wars. But we
shouldn’t imagine that some other cleaner
version of war exists somewhere.
The
dishonest notions that war prevented, rather
than facilitated, genocide in World War II, or
that war should have prevented genocide in
Rwanda, where war helped create genocide and
then continued to do far worse in the Congo
following its moment of unacceptability in
Rwanda, or that war prevented genocide in
Libya where genocide had in fact not been
threatened, or that war is fundamentally
distinguishable from genocide — these false
beliefs are a major impediment to ending war.
There’s no better justification for war or
preparations for war than the pretense that
there can be something worse than war that war
can prevent.
With
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
committing war/genocide, people have been
sharing a
scandalous article from 2015 called
“Netanyahu: Hitler Didn’t Want to Exterminate
the Jews.” I’m afraid it may give people the
wrong idea. Netanyahu’s lie was that a Muslim
cleric from Palestine convinced Hitler to kill
Jews. But when Netanyahu said that Hitler
originally wanted to expel Jews, not murder
them, he was telling the indisputable truth.
The problem is that it wasn’t a Muslim cleric
who convinced Hitler otherwise. And it isn’t
any secret who it was. It was the world’s
governments. It’s incredible that this remains
unknown, as it similarly remains unknown that
World War II could easily have been avoided by
a wiser ending of World War I; or that Nazism
drew on U.S. inspiration for eugenics,
segregation, concentration camps, poison gas,
public relations, and one-armed salutes; or
that U.S. corporations armed Nazi Germany
through the war; or that the U.S. military
hired many top Nazis at the end of the war; or
that Japan tried to surrender prior to the
nuclear bombings; or that there was major
resistance to the war in the United States; or
that the Soviets did the vast bulk of
defeating the Germans — or that the U.S.
public at the time knew what the Soviets were
doing, which created a momentary break in two
centuries of hostility to Russia in U.S.
politics. But the fact is that the world
shamefully, and for openly bigoted reasons,
refused to take the Jews, the British blockade
prevented their evacuation, and appeals by
peace activists to the U.S. and British
governments to rescue the Jews were rejected
in favor of focusing entirely on the war.
The
weapons of war that the United States has
given to Israel in recent years are used for
genocide — and intended as such openly and
explicitly by some members of Congress. One
wants Gaza made into a parking lot, another
calls it a religious war. There’s no such
thing as a war weapon that’s not for genocide
or a genocide weapon that’s not for war. There
are attempts to ban particular war/genocide
weapons. But war proponents generally refuse
to ban them because they fit perfectly into
the thinking behind war, which is very much
the thinking behind genocide. There’s a
difference between thinking “I will kill lots
of people because their government is invading
my country” and thinking “I will kill lots of
people so that my government can invade their
country.” But almost nobody thinks that second
one. Almost everybody thinks their side is in
the right, some with a lot more reason than
others. And the notion of proper, justifiable
war leads to many bad places. It leads to the
U.S. government giving Israel simultaneously
both bombs to drop on people and trucks of
food for some small fraction of the people
being bombed. It leads to human rights groups
complaining that a family was not given a
proper warning, up to the acceptable
standards, moments before having a missile
sent into its living room. There should be no
proper standards for that. It leads to an
abused and harassed government in Gaza sending
rockets into Israeli homes, while knowing
perfectly well that the result would be the
mass murder of Gazans many times multiplied.
It leads to Russia invading Ukraine, believing
that a proper legal defense against the
build-up of NATO, knowing full well that it
would thereby vastly empower NATO. It leads to
the U.S. blocking peace in Ukraine believing
that justice requires continuing to fight
against a Russian invasion, which is also not
bad for weapons sales or funeral parlors. It
leads to the U.S. attacking Afghanistan and
Iraq and Somalia and Pakistan and Syria, and
calling those wars defensive policing and a
means of upholding the rule of law through the
very worst violation of the law there is, the
killing of millions of people through wars
that cost enough money to have saved the lives
of tens of millions of people or transformed
the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Something
that helps make the most fantastic and
undocumented lies credible are differences and
prejudices, against others and in favor of
one’s own. Without religious bigotry, racism,
and patriotic jingoism, wars would be harder
to sell.
Many
of our best peace activists are motivated by
their religions, but religion has also long
been a justification for wars. The so-called
“ultimate sacrifice” in war may be intimately
connected with the practice of human sacrifice
as it existed before wars. The crusades and
colonial wars and many other wars have had
religious justifications.
Americans
fought religious wars for many generations
prior to the war for independence from
England. Captain John Underhill in 1637
described his own heroic war making against
the Pequot: “Captaine Mason entering into a
Wigwam, brought out a fire-brand, after hee
had wounded many in the house; then hee set
fire to the Westside…my selfe set fire on the
South end with a traine of Powder, the fires
of both meeting in the center of the Fort
blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the
space of halfe an houre; many couragious
fellowes were unwilling to come out, and
fought most desperately…so as they were
scorched and burnt…and so perished valiantly….
Many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women,
and children.”
This
Underhill explains as a holy war: “The Lord is
pleased to exercise his people with trouble
and afflictions, that hee might appeare to
them in mercy, and reveale more cleerely his
free grace unto their soules.”
Underhill
means his own soul, and the Lord’s people are
of course the white Christian folks. The
Native Americans may have been courageous and
valiant, but they were not recognized as
people in the full sense.
Two
and a half centuries later, many Americans had
developed a far more enlightened outlook, and
many had not. President William McKinley
viewed Filipinos as in need of military
occupation for their own good: “There was
nothing left for us to do but to take them
all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift
and civilize and Christianize them.” McKinley
was proposing to civilize a nation with a
university older than Harvard and to
Christianize a population that was largely
Roman Catholic.
Propaganda
posters in the United States during World War
I showed Jesus wearing khaki and sighting down
a gun barrel.
Karim
Karim, an associate professor at Carleton
University’s School of Journalism and
Communication, writes: “The historically
entrenched image of the ‘bad Muslim’ has been
quite useful to Western governments planning
to attack Muslim-majority lands. If public
opinion in their countries can be convinced
that Muslims are barbaric and violent, then
killing them and destroying their property
appears more acceptable.”
In
reality, of course, nobody’s religion
justifies making war on them, and U.S.
presidents no longer claim it does. But
Christian proselytization is found in the U.S.
military, and so is hatred of Muslims.
Soldiers have reported to the Military
Religious Freedom Foundation that when seeking
mental health counseling, they have been sent
to chaplains instead who have counseled them
to stay on the “battlefield” to “kill Muslims
for Christ.”
Religion
can be used to encourage the belief that what
you are doing is good even if it makes no
sense to you. A higher being understands it,
even if you don’t. Religion can offer life
after death and a belief that you are killing
and risking death for the highest possible
cause. But religion is not the only group
difference that can be used to promote wars.
Any difference of culture or language will do,
and the power of racism to facilitate the
worst sorts of human behavior is well
established.
The
two world wars in Europe, while fought between
nations now typically thought of as “white,”
involved racism anyway — the content of race
is pretty arbitrary. The French newspaper La
Croix on August 15, 1914, celebrated “the
ancient élan of the Gauls, the Romans, and the
French resurging within us,” and declared that
“The Germans must be purged from the left bank
of the Rhine. These infamous hordes must be
thrust back within their own frontiers. The
Gauls of France and Belgium must repulse the
invader with a decisive blow, once and for
all. The race war appears.”
This
kind of thinking helps not only in easing the
war-funding check- books out of the pockets of
Congress members, but also in allowing the
young people they send to war to do the
killing. It is much easier for a soldier to
kill someone labeled subhuman.
Nationalism
is the most recent, powerful, and mysterious
source of mystical devotion aligned with war,
and the one that itself grew out of war
making. While knights of old would die for
their own glory, modern men and women will die
for a fluttering piece of colored cloth that
itself cares nothing for them. The day after
the United States declared war on Spain in
1898, the first state (New York) passed a law
requiring that school children salute the U.S.
flag. Others would follow. Nationalism was the
new religion.
When
the United States was lied more deeply into
the Vietnam War, all but two senators voted
for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. One of the
two, Wayne Morse (D-OR) told other senators
that he had been told by the Pentagon that the
alleged attack by the North Vietnamese had
been provoked. Any attack would have been
provoked, and the attack itself was fictional.
But Morse’s colleagues did not oppose him on
the grounds that he was mistaken. Instead, a
senator told him, “Hell, Wayne, you can’t get
into a fight with the president when all the
flags are waving.”
We
now have a form of proxy patriotism, with
people in the U.S. cheering for wars by waving
Ukrainian and Israeli flags. I expect to wake
up any day now and see the flag of Taiwan
flying up and down my street in Virginia, and
for that day to be one of the last on which
anyone wakes up anywhere.
But
flags are not the only thing that distant wars
bring to U.S. streets. Historian Kathleen
Belew has
documents showing
there
has always been a correlation in the United
States between the aftermath of war and the
rise of white supremacist violence. “If you
look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux
Klan membership, they align more consistently
with the return of veterans from combat and
the aftermath of war than they do with
anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship,
or any of the other factors that historians
have typically used to explain them,” she
says.
Following
a recent mass shooting in Maine, I read a news
report that claimed it was the first U.S. mass
shooting by a U.S. military veteran. In fact,
while only a
very small percentage of
men under 60 in the United States are military
veterans, at least 31% of male mass shooters
under 60 (which is almost all mass shooters)
are military veterans, and their mass
shootings kill more people than do the mass
shootings by non-veterans. Those mass shooters
who are not military veterans tend to dress
and speak as if they were, often claiming to
be at war against some hated group. Other
violent crimes are also committed against
groups demonized in recent war propaganda.
We’ve seen a great deal of anti-Muslim
violence in the United States during the
post-9-11 wars, and a recent upsurge in
anti-Asian violence as the U.S. government
demonizes China, as well as even anti-Jewish
violence by some who apparently see through
the pro-Israel propaganda yet fail to see
through the underlying propaganda supporting
violence and hatred. Who knows how many lives
have been spared by the fact that most people
in the U.S. do not think they can recognize
someone of Russian ancestry by sight, or by
the fact that so many racists in the United
States oppose fueling the Ukrainian military
for their own partisan or ideological reasons.
Needless
to say, statistically, virtually all veterans
are not mass shooters. But that can hardly be
the reason for not a single news article ever
mentioning that mass shooters are very
disproportionately veterans. After all,
statistically, virtually all males, mentally
ill people, domestic abusers,
Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and gun-purchasers
are also not mass-shooters. Yet articles on
those topics proliferate like NRA campaign
bribes following every mass shooting.
War
propaganda both requires blind support for
militaries and dehumanizes groups. Just look
at how a war is reported in the corporate
media: One side of a war kills through
barbaric savagery, while the other only
regretfully wages a noble war that involves
collateral damage. One side mysteriously dies
after living blank lives with no stories or
quirks or loved ones or suffering, while the
other side is brutally killed cutting short
lives rich in intimate detail. One side is
made up of fighters or civilians, while the
other consists of men and women and children
and grandparents and somebody’s dear Aunt
Kathy who was the sweetest woman on Earth. One
side commits acts of terrorism, while the
other applies pressure through surgical
strikes.
It
is of course the greatest of absurdities to
not simply recognize every single human as
human. If people have to be “humanized” by
relating details about their lives, what in
the world are we to suppose they were before
they got humanized? Often the answer, I’m
afraid, is demonic monsters. So this absurd
humanization is clearly needed, and
desperately so, to transform people in the
popular imagination from monsters or blank
pages into characters with names and faces,
children and uncles, meals and pets and
laughter and arguments and struggles and
triumphs . . . and then vicious murder. We
have to overcome the prejudice that one side
of a war is acceptable killing. And we have to
overcome the prejudice that various types of
people are not humanized humans.
We
know that corporate media outlets are capable
of telling the stories of war victims, because
they do it for Ukrainians and Israelis and
U.S. troops. But how do you get them to do it,
in more than small exceptions, for all types
of war victims?
We
know that people are capable of ignoring the
corporate media and getting their information
elsewhere, because young people do it. If you
look at opinion polls in the U.S. by age
group, the younger people are the wiser they
are, and generally the less corporate media
they have consumed. So it really is true that
the more television news you watch, the dumber
you become. But there are plenty of other news
sources that are just as bad or worse, and no
news at all is not the answer. So, how do we
make sure that people are becoming well
informed, and that people understand how to
consume media and sort out the reliable
information from the undesirable attitudes?
We
know that amateur videos and photographs can
change the conversation, at least in
combination with activism and influence of
various sorts, because Black Lives Matter
happened — and goes on happening. So, how do
we take all the tragic videos and photos from
somewhere like Gaza that we see if we inhabit
the right online bubble and make sure everyone
else sees them too?
I
think this question of communications and
prejudice is far from the only way to work for
peace. But I think it is an important one. One
aspect of it is working the corporate media.
People who want peace should be as dedicated
as those who want war to making the best use
of letters to the editor, phone calls to radio
shows, press advisories, press releases,
colorful events, and nonviolent interruptions
in front of cameras. Once you get on U.S.
television and oppose war once, you won’t be
seen again, but you can train many others to
get on in your stead.
Another
aspect of it is producing the best social
media, the best videos and graphics, the best
independent media outlets, websites, webinars,
books, banners, signs, etc. We need to be
doing a lot more training and spending a lot
more money.
Another
aspect of it is media literacy. I recently
tried to explain how and why I read the New
York Times. I read it looking for two things:
the insinuations and the independent evidence.
By insinuations, I mean the bulk of it, the
stuff that’s put in there to communicate
without any straightforward assertion of
verifiable facts. One article had the
headline:
“A Former French President
Gives a Voice to Obstinate Russian
Sympathies: Remarks by Nicolas Sarkozy have
raised fears that Europe’s pro-Putin chorus
may grow louder as Ukraine’s plodding
counteroffensive puts pressure on Western
resolve.”
I
explained at some length why the factual
content of that headline could also be found
in this one:
“Corrupt Warmonger Worthy of
Our Attention Joins Significant Number of
People in Disagreeing with the New York
Times About Russia: Times Owners,
Advertisers, and Sources Fear We Won’t Be
Able to Go on Claiming Imminent Victory Much
Longer, Request Public’s Help in Painting
Naysayers as Loyal to the Enemy”
I
explained why most of the article didn’t
report any information, but that it did
accurately quote an interview given by Sarkozy
and did tell us what the New
York Times was
worried about. I think we have to learn to
read more and less credible sources and to
know what topics various sources are more
credible about, but primarily to distinguish
between independent evidence and insinuation.
I also wrote a book called War
Is A Lie to
help in spotting war lies.
I
also think there are good reasons to believe
that culture matters, that it makes a
difference what statues we put up and tear
down, that it matters what music and food and
art we ban and avoid because of the latest war
fever. Equating a culture with an enemy means
equating an entire population with an enemy
government. There’s no excuse for thinking of
governments as enemies, but there’s also no
excuse for acting as if Russian music is evil
or eating something called Freedom Fries or
agreeing with a school board member who
proposes to ban Arabic numerals.
If
it happens on a significant scale, then
personal contact matters as well. Cultural
exchanges, student exchanges, zoom calls, and
every other means of interaction should always
prioritize those places one’s own government
is targeting. People in the United States
should be engaging in every possible activity,
online and by mail, and by travel when
possible and useful, with people in demonized
and sanctioned nations.
Identifying
with all of humanity and the population of the
globe matters too. We at World BEYOND War
organize online events and courses that result
in people from all over the world getting to
know each other as mutual supporters of peace
and justice. It changes how we talk and think.
People from the United States stop calling
their country “America” when people from the
rest of America are in the room. People from
the United States stop saying “We just shipped
more artillery shells,” to mean “The U.S.
government just shipped more artillery
shells,” when there are representatives from
the other 96% of humanity in the room and they
keep expressing confusion over this use of the
word “We.”
It’s
also important to remind each other
of
the vast majority of behaviors by the
vast
majority of humans that do not
involve
bigotry or hatred or violence and
never
have.
This
is needed to counter a somewhat
silly
yet popular belief that various
negative
behaviors are somehow
inevitable.
For any given war, one can
examine
the months or years or decades
during
which one or both
sides worked diligently
to
make
it happen, and both sides
conspicuously
failed to develop peaceful
alternatives.
Even
in the moment of greatest violence,
one
can consider the unarmed-
resistance alternatives that
are carefully
kept
out of consideration.
But
even if you can explain away all justification for
every side of every particular war, there
remains the false claim that war is somehow
simply part of “humanity.” If ants were to
stop waging wars, nobody would bat an eye, but
such a feat is deemed simply beyond the
intelligence of homo sapiens.
There
is a problem for this belief, namely the
problem of peaceful human societies. We know
that many, if not most, hunter-gatherer groups
of humans engaged for the vast bulk of human
existence in nothing resembling low-tech war
and that various nations have gone centuries
without war. A professor at the University of
North Carolina has a website documenting
numerous indigenous peaceful societies still
in existence. We know from anthropologists of
societies that find it hard to even comprehend
the idea of murder, and of people who have
been traumatized by their first introduction
to the violence of Hollywood movies. Children
who grow up in societies without violence do
not have it to imitate. Children who grow up
in societies that condemn anger learn not to
be angry. These facts are as endlessly proven
as the reappearance of the sun each day, just
as is the effectiveness of nonviolent action,
even against coups, occupations, invasions,
and apartheid.
If
we’re going to tell each other that we are
enlightened and face up to scientific facts,
here are some of them:
Humans
are biologically one species, not a bunch of
races.
Humans
do not become less intelligent or creative or
valuable because they are in an ethnic group
or a religion or a nation.
Humans
almost always do whatever they can to avoid
war, most participants in war suffer terribly,
and there’s never been one case of trauma from
war deprivation.
Human
societies often do without war altogether.
Humans
can choose our own future, whether its one
we’ve seen before or something new and
different.
There
is nothing inevitable, necessary, beneficial,
or justifiable about war.
War
is immoral, endangers us, erodes our
liberties, promotes bigotry, drains resources,
destroys the environment, and impoverishes us.
War
itself is a problem, and believing the problem
is a wartime enemy adds to the real problem.
Governments
and oligarchs do not train people in unarmed
resistance to other nations, because they do
not want such trained resistance within their
own nation.
Governments
and oligarchs are not as bothered as they
should be when people divide themselves
through foolish hatreds and prejudices, which
allow people to forget where some major
injustices actually begin.
Another
world is entirely possible
And,
every important change has been
widely
considered impossible right up
until
it happened.
