Anti-War

It’s quite a high hurdle to appeal to a country that’s been militarily invaded — after decades of military defense (and offense) preparations and the accompanying cultural indoctrination in the supposed necessity of military defense — to appeal to said country to construct on-the-fly an unarmed civilian defense plan and act on it despite near-universal lack of training or even comprehension.

We’re finding it to be a high hurdle just to get access to bring in an unarmed team to defend a nuclear power plant in the middle of a war.

A more reasonable proposal is for national governments that are not at war to learn about and (if they really learned about it then this would necessarily follow) establish departments of unarmed civilian defense. World BEYOND War is putting together both an annual conference in 2023 and a new online course on this topic. One place to get the very beginning of an understanding that unarmed actions can repel militaries — even without serious preparations or training (so, imagine what proper investment could do) — is with this list of nearly 100 times people successfully used nonviolent action in place of war.

Declaration by the German Initiative Lay Down Your Arms, on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 16

Though it was clear that Burkina Faso was eventually going to follow in the footsteps of Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), Ouagadougou’s decision to break military ties with France was not as simple as media sound bites want us to believe. 

 The conventional wisdom is that these countries are walking away from their former colonial master, France, to forge alternative alliances with a new ally, Russia. These convenient analyses are largely shaped by the geopolitical tug-of-war between old and new superpowers: The US and its NATO allies on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. 

When I tell some people that the inhabitants of certain mountains in Montenegro are trying to protect their home from being turned into a giant military training ground by NATO, they inform me that the training ground (which, up until that monent, they’d never heard of) in Montenegro (which they’d never heard of) is absolutely required because of Putin.

Needless to say, I think that Putin (and every living U.S. president, and quite a number of other world “leaders”) should be prosecuted for their crimes. But are we supposed to imagine Putin as the enemy of mindless support for militarism we know nothing about? I thought he was supposed to be the enemy of democracy.

David Swanson is the author of the new book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace It With.

The Monroe Doctrine was first discussed under that name as justification for the U.S. war on Mexico that moved the western U.S. border south, swallowing up the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. By no means was that as far south as some would have liked to move the border.

The catastrophic war on the Philippines also grew out of a Monroe-Doctrine-justified war against Spain (and Cuba and Puerto Rico) in the Caribbean. And global imperialism was a smooth expansion of the Monroe Doctrine.

There are a lot of reasons for a progressive caring person not to be focused on the growing threat of fascism in the United States. After getting past all the pressing needs of one’s personal life (in a society of long hours, financial insecurity, poor healthcare, energetic kids drugged, a record number of adults imprisoned, the most finely tuned propaganda system ever devised, not to mention intimidation and fear), the main stumbling block is that everything is turned into a partisan question. If you’re focused on the growing violence and hatred and lawlessness of Republicans, then you’re cheerleading for the Democrats.

In this video recording of a webinar from January 14, 2023, David Swanson discussed his forthcoming book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace it With. See the 26:24 point in the video.

The Monroe Doctrine was and is a justification for actions, some good, some indifferent, but the overwhelming bulk reprehensible. The Monroe Doctrine remains in place, both explicitly and dressed up in novel language. Additional doctrines have been built on its foundations. This book looks at the creation, evolution, and use of the Monroe Doctrine over the years since 1823, and proposes a radically different approach for the U.S. government to take with Latin America and the world.

David is available to speak about this or other topics, as are other World BEYOND War speakers.

--

Remarks on RootsAction.org’s Defuse Nuclear War livestream on January 12, 2023. Video here.

Thank you for all for being here and for including me.

We know the risks. They’re no secret. The Doomsday clock has almost nowhere to go but oblivion.

We know what’s needed. We’ve made a national holiday of a man who said he would oppose all nukes and all wars without any regard to whether it was popular, who said the choice was between nonviolence and nonexistence.

What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief:

“. . . my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors, tackle shared challenges, and set our world firmly on a path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. . . . We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.”

These are the words of President Biden, in his introduction to the National Security Strategy, which lays out America’s geopolitical plans for the coming decade. Sounds almost plausible, until you ponder the stuff that isn’t up for public discussion, such as, for instance:

Here’s a video of John Oliver denouncing FIFA for putting the World Cup in Qatar, a place that uses slavery and abuses women and abuses LGBT people. It’s a video about how everyone else glosses over nasty truths. Oliver drags in Russia as a past World Cup host that abuses protesters, and even Saudi Arabia as a possible host in the distant future that commits all sorts of atrocities. My concern is not just that the U.S., as one of the planned hosts four years hence, gets a pass on its general behavior. My concern is that the U.S. has far outdone FIFA this year, and every year, in Qatar. The U.S. has put six things into that horrific little oil dictatorship, each of which is worse than the World Cup.