War on war

I've lived through the War on Poverty (poverty won), the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese kicked us out of their country), the War on Drugs (drugs prevailed), the Gulf War (Iraqis will eventually get us all out of their country), the War on Terror (up for grabs but the first side to choose nonviolence will win and right now it looks good for the Arab street as they figure out how to outfox all sides in this inane war). While my father's generation virtually worshiped war as the way to manage all conflict, it has been decidedly unimpressive to my generation. Perhaps there are legions of glorious victors of the Great War to Liberate Grenada drinking together across the land, but I haven't heard reports. So I hesitate to call for a declaration of war, but I am just an old fogy who can't help but want to defeat my enemy. We need a War on War.

War already declared that it targets everything we love. War targets our children and our ability to make a living. War targets our families and our very homes. War targets nature and nature will strike back with a fury that will turn humankind into collateral damage. The question is not whether this war should be declared, but whether we should notice that war is waging it and that we are losing.

Listening to the most liberal of national news sources, National Public Radio, is like listening to reports from the campaigns. The European Union, for all its glitches and personality disorders (France on the couch, Italy in the bordello, Greece in anger management therapy), is edging ahead of war in this battle. Africa is gaining. The Arab countries have found a path to defeat the worst of war as they learn to separate the armed forces from the dictators and join them with the people. The US lags.

Republicans and Democrats discuss the budget and the 1,800-pound gorilla squats in the living room, eating off of everyone else's plate, and no one from either party or the mainstream media seems to notice. NPR goes over the painful details of cutting non-defense discretionary spending, which is already losing bone--fat was gone back in the time of the Clintstones, and all muscle was excised in the Bush Junior years. Nothing is left of that budget but pain management and we are watching war strip away that.

From the discussion about non-defense discretionary, the discussion quickly leaps to "entitlements." These are trust funds that are being raided by the most untrustworthy of all humans, the war promoters. Social Security fixed an age old problem of old age and we are now fixing to sacrifice more and more elders to the needs of war. Health care is also being fed to the maw of war and neither party can do much besides cluck their tongues. The Republicans from Richistan are grinning and the Ds are wringing their hands impotently.

At some point, just to show us that they know it is in the room, the NPR interviewers mention the gorilla in passing, calling it politically unfeasible. They may claim, in accordance with the gorilla's rhetoric, that the military gorilla will also be cut. The gorilla smiles and grabs more from other people's plates. He can live with that lie.

So, out of sheer desperation, I am calling for war on war. No one will notice, but I will have the personal satisfaction of making that call. And I know that, as my friend George Crocker once said, "We are going to win, and if we don't, it won't matter, since no one will be around to worry about it." Humankind and war are like host and parasite, host and disease. War has seemed to be like the common cold or a leech to many--a temporary problem that we overcome and get back to good health. But it is actually more like cancer. It will destroy us if we don't race for the cure.

The cure for war is a world of structural nonviolence, from the family to the schools to religion to politics to law enforcement to the economy to all security apparatuses and all social institutions. Like fighting cancer, prevention is key and the cures are many for different types of war. We just need to decide to engage. The rest of the world seems to be ahead of us, and our fate is unclear. Our choice right now is war and that hurts us every day, every month, every year. These choices produced our Great Recession and are fueling the erosion of our base of natural resources. These choices drop us farther behind in the race every time we make them, and the budget reflects yet another year of making exactly the wrong choices.

So I shout this call into the wilderness: time to wage war on war and race for the cure.

Sustainable nonviolence

Johan Galtung introduced the concept of structural violence, which is that the daily lives of oppressed people may not look like they are being shot or bombed, but if they are poor and others are rich, the very institutions of society are committing a daily violent suppression of those poor people. In the taxonomy of violence, then, we have physical violence and structural violence.

We also parse out direct violence into physical violence and psychological or emotional violence.

How helpful are these distinctions?

For the most part, all other types of violence still rest on physical violence, and it must be committed often enough to make the threat credible. This is the secret of the abuser who 'only' commits emotional violence with rare physical violence and it is the secret of structural violence as well, with police and other front line forces of violence present enough to deter most people from seeking justice as quickly as they might otherwise.

Historically, this structural violence has been associated with racial, ethnic, religious, and gender oppression, all of which is backed by the threat of physical violence. Legally, what is the distinction? Committing an act of violence with the objective of self-aggrandizement or simply to be cruel is a crime. Threatening to commit violence while demanding someone else's property is called armed robbery. Stealing someone else's property while they aren't looking is burglary and not nearly as serious. What we see in our US current form of capitalism is far closer to a bizarre synthesis of mob 'protection' and robber baron economics. It is structural violence in new and odd permutations.

First, the bailouts

Second, the evermore extreme income disparities.

The rightwing has claimed for years that the only reason that any social safety net exists is to pay off the ruffian elements who would otherwise spread their anarchy. They have accused liberals of trying to shut up lazy ne'er do wells with welfare. Now, of course, they are the ones who are fighting to get corporations more unearned benefits, bailouts and what Dr. Gary Askerooth wrote about years ago as an 'upside-down welfare state" that might be also characterized as "lemon socialism." The overpaid failures--in control of the banking system, the home loan lenders, the hedge funders, the leveraged buyout kings and so forth--say, "Give us massive aid or we will drag you down with us." This is like the mob telling the bartender to hand over a weekly payment or they won't be responsible for any damage that might occur--actually, they would be directly responsible for such damage, but that is the unspoken part. That is illegal for the mob but legal for Goldman Sachs and the rest of the predatory corporadoes who use the US taxpayer like the mob uses the bar owners. Pay up or get hurt.

Income disparity in our political democracy has been drifting farther from economic democracy each year. We now are worse than the former 'banana republics' such as Nicaragua, Guyana, etc. Our richest one percent controls at least one-fourth of all US wealth (24 percent almost four years ago and it's on a downhill slide for most of us). The elites have used highly subsidized demagoguery to help the Tea Party's astroturf constituency prevail in seeking an extension of obscene tax credits for the richest of the rich, the top one-tenth of one percent. The Tea Party ignorance has them supporting those who are most engaged in structural violence against the average member of the Tea Party and their allies in the Republican Party. At least some groups--e.g., African Americans, Native Americans--have a collectively firm grasp on that picture. Impoverished whites seem impatient with critical thinking and learning the facts and have as a result picked up their cherished guns and taken direct aim at their own collective foot.

The understanding of structural violence is key, and the promotion of alternative institutions based on the emergence of structural nonviolence is the answer. Developing a culture of peace, nonviolence, economic democracy and a robust social safety net is the kind of multipronged approach that might respond to our most disturbing trends downward.

Flipping our structures

Johan Galtung coined the term structural violence to describe the practice of negative peace, imposed peace, peace of the empire, peace at the point of a gun. So, what would structural nonviolence look like, that is, positive peace?

I hold the unchanging conviction that religion exists to serve humanity; humanity does not exist to serve religion. And it is by pursuing the challenge of serving humankind that religion can overcome the tendency toward fundamentalism and authoritarianism and provide the fertile soil from which a genuine culture of peace and empathy may grow.

¾Daisaku Ikeda, Subverting hatred (p. 8)

When religion serves humanity rather than humanity serving religion, we can expect a transformation in at least one driver to war. How can we extend Ikeda's challenge to other realms?

When money serves humanity instead of humanity serving money, that will be a welcome change in the Gordon Gekko Greed Creed.

When homes are built so that they prepare a person for a lifetime of low energy consumption, that will help housing serve humanity instead of humanity serving housing.

When nationalism serves humanity, so that ethnic dances and food and legends of loving serve a nation rather than aggression and hatred of others forcing humanity to serve nationalism, that will transform another driver to war.

When the safety of our families serves a common security rather than notions of individual security serving the security state, we will finally begin to value true security in peace rather than the illusory security of one people at the expense of another.

When a nonviolent military serves humankind rather than a nation of sheep serving a domineering military, we will have achieved the sustainable result Ikeda and others have worked so hard to reach.

These are visions, of course, that quickly become hard work, undertaken by those who understand that they will be regarded as quixotic at best, and sometimes as dangerous threats. That is why, even when those who favor violence in the name of justice are investigated by the security state, the nonviolent challengers are also investigated, again and again. This is just what happened when the FBI decided to investigate some of the groups who were organizing demonstrations against the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis in 2008. Some of the organizers posted photos and videos of molotov cocktails far in advance, possibly not understanding that the FBI and Homeland Security have zero sense of humor about such things. Sure enough, there has been a far-reaching investigation, including the well known pacifists, Catholic Workers. We are used to it.

Yes, some of the organizers of the opposition to the Republicans had expressed admiration for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the FARC in Colombia, as well as the violent Palestinian insurgents. I'm sure some were rooting for the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are using violence to get the US military out of their respective nations. When people do that, they are using this quaint thing called freedom of speech. Is it smart speech? No. Is it speech that will win adherents in America? No. But it is still free, we hope.

We on the pacifist side should be able to organize opposition to war without harassment and intimidation by the state. We want to draw in others to this peace point of view, not drive them away. We think our message of nonviolence is one that could resonate with people and we want, then, to strikingly differentiate our message from anyone who promotes or even permits violence as a method of change.

"But we need solidarity," say those who are more morally flexible about methods. "We want the same thing in the end."

No, we don't. They want a world in which armed force resolves the question. They happily accept our wimpy nonviolent help, but reserve the right to kill others in the name of their goals. We want to be seen as quite different and as committed to nonviolence. We want a world where violence doesn't resolve or manage conflict and we cannot get there by countenancing violence, period.

The means and ends are twinned, intertwined, and inextricable. As a pacifist, I refuse to join with those who use violence. They are not my people and I am not with them, fundamentally. I'd encourage factionalism. I'm a splitter. But I'd join with others who are also seeking change using nonviolence, even if they only use it tactically and strategically, as long as they commit to only nonviolent conduct in the cause for which we work.

That, to me, is how you actually build a movement. It's not by agreeing to act in unthinking coalition with the self-anointed radical fringe. It's by reaching to the majority and convincing them that it is in their enlightened self interest to support the policy change you believe is crucial. When you outreach to them as a nonviolent activist, they are more likely to be drawn in. If they think you are allied with wingnuts who want to throw bombs, they will logically avoid you.

Thus, in the end, those who look like dividers become uniters. Pacifists should divide from those who favor a permission of violence. That will help them unite the majority toward peace, toward a culture that rejects violence at every level.

References

Smith-Christopher, Daniel L., ed., Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1998.