War: It's Human Nature only if Collective Suicide is Natural
By David Swanson
Remarks at Michigan Pax Christi annual state conference, April 11, 2015 - Video.
Thank you for having me here. I know a lot of people have been involved in planning this event. Thank you!
I'm going to try this morning to address the question of how we can best talk our fellow human beings out of one of the
primary myths that allows war to continue. And in a second speech later today I'm going to turn more to the question of
activism and building a peaceful world.
I mailed a box of my books here, and I had to mail another one because the first box arrived undamaged except that all
of the books were missing. Although I don't know who stole the books, Mary Hanna recommended I inform you that the
message I bring you was so threatening that the books were taken, and the empty box delivered, by a bunch of -- and I
quote -- Weannie-heads!
Now, you see what I've done. I've called somebody a weannie head in a speech about peace but arranged it so you'll blame
Mary (and maybe the U.S. Postal Service) instead of me. But of course when Michigan State's basketball team beat
Virginia's I said something worse than Mary has probably said in her life, just as I'd done the year before, not that
I'm holding any grudges.
Now, we all know that resentment and blame are tools of war propaganda. So, in Mary's defense and mine: neither of us
called anybody a name in the presence of that person or proposed to harm any person or armed ourselves with massive
machinery of death in preparation for books going missing or a basketball team losing. I didn't put any Michigan State
fans on a kill list and blow them and everyone near them to bits with hellfire missiles. Neither of us launched any
invasions.
It's rather a key distinction, isn't it, getting angry with or without war weapons. But try to find a discussion of wars
in the Middle East that even mentions that 80 to 90 percent of the weapons there are from the United States, with
weapons sales and gifts up significantly under the Nobel Peace President.
So, when you come down to it, we would all probably be better people if we didn't get angry at any other people -- only
at injustice. But since I didn't organize millions of people to plan and prepare for carefully executed crusades of mass
murder, my anger did considerably less damage than, say, George W. Bush's feelings about Saddam Hussein having tried to
kill his daddy.
I bring all of this up in order to comment on the idea of what's called "human nature." If "human nature" is something
distinct from culture, then -- whatever it may be -- one might speculate (why you would I have no idea, but one could
speculate if one wanted to) that my emotions watching basketball are "human nature." War, on the other hand, is a
collective effort. It requires plans, preparations, manufacturing, training, conditioning. How can such a group effort
be distinct from culture? War is absolutely central to our culture. One would have to speculate baselessly and
pointlessly that parts of our culture are "human nature" while other parts are not. But then which would be which?
When you take war participation on the individual level, you find that most individuals want nothing to do with it,
nobody gets post traumatic stress from war deprivation, and in fact intense conditioning developed over decades of
cultural experience is required to get most individuals to participate, many of whom never recover from having done so.
And when you take war participation at the group level, you find that many groups of humans, large and small, rich and
poor, now and in the past, have had nothing to do with war. For most of human existence there was nothing that could be
called war. Since war's creation it has been sporadic. Societies have abandoned it for centuries and brought it back
again. Most groups, most of the time, have left it well alone. And war today bears very little resemblance to war as it
was 1,000 or even 100 years ago. In addition, the 95% of humanity that lives outside the United States mostly thinks
about war very differently from how it is discussed in the United States. Discussion of "the next wars" as if war is
inevitable is not normal. Debates over whether to bomb people in trouble or leave them alone are far less common than
debates over how to help them. Concern over a nation resisting the presence of one's own nation's troops and missiles is
unheard of outside of the imperial Homeland.
An American raised on Hollywood will tell you war is "natural," "human nature," inevitable, and genetic. But there are
numerous well-documented accounts of human cultures not only free of war but unable to even understand what it is. An
anthropologist asked a man why he didn't use a dart gun, meant for hunting animals, against slave raiders coming to
enslave his family, and he replied "Because it would kill them." Probably I shouldn't think of that as ignorance of the
possibility of killing. We always want to treat difference as ignorance. The fact is that killing is the worst thing
possible. It's worse than enslaving. Logically a perfectly good case can be made for the man's action and justification.
In the United States, however, the idea that you would hold a gun and not use it against someone enslaving your family
is almost incomprehensible. Probably we should think of that as ignorance. In our culture we praise people by saying "You really killed!" Probably we should think of that as
prejudice. What we shouldn't think of it as is "human nature."
No, I'm not advocating that you let someone enslave your family. I'm simply pointing out that cultures exist that view
murder very differently from how ours does. So, if acceptance of killing and total avoidance of killing both exist, as
they do, how do we choose which one is "human nature." Or if neither is "human nature," is there something else that is "human nature"?
Well, if you try to define "human nature" as what every single human does, its content is vanishingly small. If you try
to define it as things that most humans that you know of at a particular time and place do, how do you pick which things
to include? And why bother? What is the point? The fact is that "human nature" is a meaningless and, to state it another
way, a purposeless concept.
So why does it exist as a concept? Because there are purposes it has tried to serve. I can think of two, which might be
called the normative and the excusatory. By normative I mean the habit some people have had of declaring that anything
most people do should be done by everyone. If it's normal for people to care for their children then everyone should
care for their children. That sounds harmless enough. But what if it's normal in Indiana to be heterosexual? What if
it's normal to hit kids or burn gasoline or eat dogs or sacrifice virgins? Why in the world should something's being
common make it good? On the contrary, whatever is good we should work to make common.
By excusatory I mean to refer to what has probably been the most frequent use of the concept "human nature" over the
years, namely as a means to excuse horrible actions. Am I supporting something cruel and unfair, brutal and destructive?
Do I hit or humiliate people? Do I exploit the weak? Do I steal and cheat? Do I participate in the large-scale murder of
foreigners or the destruction of the natural world? Well, that's OK. It's "human nature," so I'm powerless to stop.
Stopping would require that I transform into some other species. Of course thousands of other people I know of don't do
the evil thing I'm doing, and they're humans, but in my position they would do it too because it's "human nature" —
meaning no more and no less than it's what I happen to be doing at the moment. If we don't do it, supporters of continuing the slave trade argued in Parliament, other nations will do it. But other nations didn't. If we don't garrison the planet, says the Pentagon, others will. Of course, they might or might not, but this won't be determined by their sharing "human nature," only by their
sharing Pentagon nature.
"Human nature" has got to be the grandest term for the most mundane concept ever created. Have you ever heard of anyone
doing something good and announcing that it wasn't human nature? When a dog does something unusual, do the other dogs, or even the humans around chastise the dog for
violating dog nature? Why does the human species alone get to drag around this bizarre concept of a "nature" that is
both just whatever somebody happens to be doing and something very vaguely more than that?
Last October, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore took out an advertisement in the National Catholic Reporter that read: "CRUSADES, INQUISITION, SLAVERY, TORTURE, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, WAR: Over many centuries, Church leaders and theologians
justified each of these evils as consistent with the will of God. Only one of them retains that position in official
Church teaching today. We believe it's time for the Catholic Church to reject 'just war' as inconsistent with the
teaching and example of Jesus and to become a Just Peace Church."
Not a bad statement, huh?
Do you know what people who don't have special access to the "will of God" called and still call slavery, torture,
capital punishment, and numerous other evils? That's right, "human nature." And if two people disagree about the will of
god or the content of human nature they can appeal to exactly the same evidence to settle their dispute, namely nothing
whatsoever -- except either an agreement to disagree or the violent removal of the person disagreeing with one's claim.
We've reached a point, of course, at which continuing with war risks the existence of humanity. The twin dangers of
nuclear apocalypse and climate chaos are advanced more by war than anything else. The primary way in which war kills is
by diverting massive resources away from where they could do good, including the good of environmental protection. In
addition war is, in some ways, our top destroyer of the environment. On top of which wars are fought for the fuels that
we use to destroy the environment. And in addition, the proliferation of nuclear energy and weaponry and the increasing
ease of robotic war increases dramatically the risk of war destroying us all before the climate can.
Now, I'm not a professor of logic but I think we have arrived at something that qualifies as a logical proof.
• If war is "human nature," collective suicide is "human nature." In other words, the nature of humanity is to cease to
be.
• But everybody from Aristotle to Bill O'Reilly would agree that the nature of something cannot be its absence.
• Therefore, whether "human nature" means anything or not, it isn't war.
Q.E.D.
Because "human nature" is an excuse for war, you'll hear it most in the places that most frequently make war. And this
of course leads to the humorous situation of the people who make war appealing to all the people who don't to justify
their war-making. The United States is far and away the world's leading supplier of war weapons, buyer of war weapons,
user or war weapons and all around facilitator of war. Ninety five percent of humanity is governed by governments that
don't have anything remotely like the U.S. investment in war. Many countries invest between 0 and 5 percent what the
United States does in war. But if you ask an American why they can't reduce the militarism a bit, they'll tell you it's
"human nature." See, the other 95% of humanity is not really part of "human nature." "Human nature" turns out to be
American nature. You find this same phenomenon across issues. No other country destroys the natural environment, at
least on a per capita basis, remotely like the United States. But the waste and consumption are defended or accepted as
"human nature."
The United States spends over a trillion dollars a year on war preparations, about $1.3 trillion in fact, which is
exactly what U.S. students and former students owe in total accumulated student debt which is understood to be an
outrageous and massive crisis, yet it's what Congress spends on war preparations each year - year after year -- without
comment, discussion, or debate. U.S. military spending has doubled since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, yet the
Congressional Progressive Caucus budget this year proposed to cut it by a grand total of 1 percent and didn't even
mention that in any of its statements about its budget. The rest of the world spends about another trillion dollars all
together. So the average among about 200 other countries is about a half a percent of what the U.S. spends. If the
United States, for whatever cockamamie reason, felt obliged to comply with a "human nature" that included the rest of
the, you know, humans, it would be compelled to reduce its military by 99.5 percent. And if it did that, I'd be glad to
let it defend its behavior with whatever language it wanted.
By the way, if you did the calculation based on per-capita military spending the reduction for the U.S. to meet the rest
of the world's average would be similarly extreme. The U.S. spends about $3,135 per person per year, and the rest of the
world's average is about $143, meaning about a 95 percent cut for the U.S. to start acting human.
If you did the calculation as a percentage of a nation's economy, even by the most conservative measure, you'd still
have to cut U.S. military spending by over a third -- but the idea (quite common in Congressional testimony) that a
country should have more weapons if it can afford them, rather than if they serve some good purpose, is -- in my view --
completely unacceptable, is in fact the root of the problem itself; excusing rich countries' greater levels of killing
because they're rich seems to add insult to injury.
And if the United States reduced its militarism significantly, the path would be made smooth to reduce it entirely. That
is, without losing faith in militarism, the United States could limit its Defense Department to things that serve a
defensive purpose. It could guard its borders with all kinds of weaponry. But doing just that, and closing the foreign
bases and occupations, scrapping the aircraft carriers and submarines, dismantling the nuclear weapons, abandoning all
work on weapons in space, would have some major results. Without the U.S. threat and arms supply, arms races could
reverse. Korea could reunite. Palestine could potentially reach a one-state solution. Without U.S. troops kicking in
doors -- excuse me, I mean policing -- the globe, the U.S. government, the primary holdout, would be able to support
international law.
Most importantly perhaps, any significant fraction of $2 trillion has the power to transform the world for the better if
put to proper use. Gone would be starvation. Gone would be unclean water. (And lack of water in Detroit.) Gone
homelessness. These are problems that end with the proper use of a tiny fraction of $2 trillion a year. Imagine if in
2003 the United States had simply given each citizen of Iraq a quarter of a million dollars. That expense wouldn't
approach what's actually been spent, but I'm willing to bet at least some Iraqis would have appreciated the act. Of
course giving away money is not simple and there are more effective ways to invest in health and education and green
energy then just handing out cash. The point is we spent more money than that and what did we get? Over a million
killed. Millions injured. Millions traumatized. A nation destroyed. The natural environment severely damaged. Our
economy drained. Our civil liberties eroded. Our culture corroded. Our morality poisoned. And most of the world viewing
the United States as a threat. For a smaller expense, the U.S. government could be loved. It chooses to spend more to be
hated. When Gallup polled 65 nations at the end of 2013, and asked what nation was the greatest threat to peace in the
world, the overwhelming winner was the United States.
I recommend pointing that poll out to people. It seems to me you either have to declare the world severely and
irrationally deluded, perhaps requiring yet more militarism. Or you have to begin opening your eyes to the failure of
militarism on its own terms, at which point you can notice that the United States loses all of its land wars,
exacerbates whatever it claims to be fixing with its air wars, and plants seeds of evil with its drone wars -- and
countless recently retired U.S. officials admit all this.
Our neighbors up in Canada are trying to follow our warlike path, and I've been trying to tell them that they will
regret it, but that it will take them years of work to build up anti-Canadian terrorist groups to rival those the United
States has generated. So-called "defense" spending is counter-productive, but it's not for amateurs. To have each new
militant group in the Middle East using your weapons and imitating your rhetoric while releasing full-length films
begging you to attack it, then growing by leaps and bounds when you do attack it, so that even your own citizens (with
some FBI prodding) want to join it and your media can start pretending that the foreign group has infiltrated your
cities -- that takes skills that the United States has been mastering since before it stopped invading Canada. Did you
see the headline "ISIS IN BROOKLYN"? Of course, no one from Iraq or Syria had come to Brooklyn to work for ISIS or even
contacted anyone in Brooklyn; rather someone in Brooklyn had been poked and prodded into something by an FBI agent
pretending to be ISIS.
The U.S. began in Yemen with murders by missiles, and drone defenders would tell you that missiles are better than other
kinds of war, because with drones nobody dies. Meaning no Americans. A year ago, President Obama was claiming some sort
of success. Several years ago, even I who couldn't predict the basketball final four worth a darn, predicted that the
drone war on Yemen would create a wider war. And now you have the U.S. assisting Saudi Arabia in slaughtering children
to blow up U.S.-supplied weapons using U.S.-supplied weapons. And we get to sit back and think of those Yemenis as
backward violent beasts because of their human nature which justifies our Pentagon which created this disaster.
Did you know there was a big protest in the Czech Republic recently of the U.S. militarism directed at Russia? And one
in Kiev? On Hitler's upcoming birthday, April 20th, the United States will start training Ukraine's neo-Nazi volunteer
military force. The United States has troops and weapons in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe now, right up to the
border of Russia. People take this sort of thing a bit seriously, while we watch our basketball. The U.S. lied to Russia
when the two Germanies reunited, claiming NATO wouldn't expand an inch eastward. The U.S. facilitated a coup in Ukraine
and is building up hostilities there, and Europeans and Russians are outraged. Last July Fourth I spoke outside a U.S.
military base in England where the locals celebrate an Independence from America holiday. I've been talking with
protesters in Sicily who are resisting construction of a U.S. Navy communications base. On Jeju Island, South Korea,
resistance to a new U.S. Navy base is intense. In Okinawa the local government has heeded the protesters and halted U.S.
base construction, against the will of the Japanese government. The Philippines is in an uproar over U.S. military
action there. Around the world, people know the United States through its military occupation of their land. And as I
watch basketball the announcer thanks U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries as if that's good and normal.
Some know it isn't. I applaud Pax Christi for speaking against the idea of a "just war." Once we rid ourselves of the
idea that some wars are good wars, we ought to be able to rid ourselves of the idea that we should be funding the
permanent presence of either troops or robot death planes in darn near every country on earth. One doesn't generally
hear about cases of just child abuse or just rape or just racial discrimination. The Washington Post recently ran a column headlined "War on Iran May Be Our Best Option." Imagine if it had said "Racism may be our best
option" or "Killing kittens may be our best option." Some things are, quite rightly, unacceptable. What if war were made
one of those?
This is the case we're making at World Beyond War: there is no upside to war, no excuse for war. It is all negative and it is the most negative thing we do, the most
evil institution on earth. And there is no way to fix it. Human Rights Watch recently wrote a report on the horrors
inflicted on Iraqi towns, not by ISIS, but by the Iraqi militias said to be "liberating" people from ISIS. But rather
than acknowledge that such horrors have been part of every single war ever waged, Human Rights Watch urges reform plans
and benchmarks and compliance with the so called laws of war. Amnesty International just came out with a report on the
2014 assault on Gaza that condemns the rockets shot out of Gaza for being insufficiently precise, as if better U.S.-made
rockets would be more legal and acceptable. The UN is planning another meeting on inhumane weapons, but which are the
humane weapons? You cannot use laws to reform the greatest violation of law. You cannot reform an institution of mass
killing. Imaging trying to reform cancer.
Studies have actually found that talking about a so-called "war" on cancer hurts the cause of reducing cancer because
people don't adjust their behavior to avoid risks, focusing instead on medical hopes to eliminate cancer from the world.
But at least the understanding is there that cancer is entirely undesirable, that we don't need Geneva Conventions for
the proper creation and use of good cancer.
A remarkable article appeared in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. I quote:
"Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States
launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including
Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 20th century, 190 million deaths could be directly and indirectly related to war --
more than in the previous 4 centuries."
Beyond the death, war injures and traumatizes on a far vaster scale. It is the leading cause of homelessness. It is, by
various measures, the leading destroyer of the natural environment. It is by far the leading justification for the
erosion of civil liberties and self-governance. It is the leading drain on wealth and prosperity in the world. Imagine
if such an institution were newly proposed. Wouldn't we immediately reject it out of hand?
It was wonderful to see push back when Indiana proposed to allow discrimination against people based on their sexual
orientation. Imagine if Indiana proposed the creation of the institution of war. I mean, imagine if we didn't have war,
and Indiana came up with the idea. We'll dump over half of government spending into this new operation, Indiana would
propose, and it won't do us any good, but it will put our lives at risk while murdering thousands upon thousands of
innocent people, and we'll lose a lot of rights in the process. Who would stand for such an outrage?
But then why should something be acceptable just because it already existed yesterday? Shouldn't we bloody well be
outraged? Isn't there an appropriate anger here? Might there not even be a place, at least generically, for the term
Weannie-heads?
What if, instead of Indiana, it was a foreign country that did some of the things the United States does? When Ecuador
said the United States could keep its bases there if Ecuador could have a base in Florida, the idea was seen as
ludicrous. Why? When Iran tries to keep U.S. ships a bit further from its coast, the U.S. sees this as aggressive, but
how close would the U.S. like Iranian ships to be to its coast? If Mexico was murdering people with drones in the United
States, would the U.S. approve? If Cuba bombed Miami for harboring terrorists, would U.S. State Department lawyers
defend that action? This is always a good test of morality, sometimes known as the golden rule, but also in this case a
good test for nationalism. One way to test whether you're identifying with a nation is to ask yourself if you would
approve of the same actions if performed by a different nation. You can identify with a nation but want it to behave
fairly toward other nations, but only if you're identifying more so with humanity.
Another way for people to question their beliefs is to ask how you would feel if the so-called collateral damage, that
is to say the bulk of the people killed in a war, the innocent civilians, were in the United States. Could you justify
it as a price worth paying for ... whatever it is supposedly a price worth paying for? Most people clearly could not,
but do not ask the question and do not let themselves even know that wars are one-sided slaughters of people from the
dispensable nations rather than the indispensible one.
Another good test is to ask yourself what you would approve if another political party did it. If a Republican president
were going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays and picking which ones to murder, would you react in
exactly the same way in which you have reacted to President Obama's kill list? This question begins with the question of
whether you would allow yourself to know about a story that has been public knowledge for three years since a frontpage New York Times article covered it, or would you avoid knowing about this outrage? Secondary is the question of what you would do if
you allowed yourself to know.
A similar question is what you would think if a different branch of government did something. If the House Armed
Services Committee were going through a kill list, picking victims, and murdering them and anyone nearby, would you
approve, dissent, or ask for details?
In the case of the one war that President Obama does not want, Iran, people have suddenly discovered that they can
advocate for alternatives to war. Another good question to put into people's minds is this: Why not prefer alternatives
to war in the case of each of the other wars being waged or contemplated? Why only in Iran? Why object to the rush to
war only when one U.S. political party does so? Why object to gruesome executions by ISIS but not by Saudi Arabia? Why
get outraged on command rather than everywhere events are outrageous?
I think we need to ask these questions and get organized to work for a stronger push to eliminate war and replace it
with nonviolent means of resolving conflicts, because contrary to certain Western academic pretenses war is not going
away, much less going away on its own. On the contrary, war is worsening its destruction, and the use of drones is
normalizing war in a way that makes greater and greater destruction likely.
I've drafted some remarks for later today in which I look at how we might get to a world beyond war and what a world
beyond war might look like. I think properly understanding a world devoted to war is the only place to start. And I
think we should understand it not as an entire world hopelessly condemned to war but as a world making the completely
optional decision to proliferate war primarily at the insistence of the United States government. Understanding that war
is a choice, means that peace too is an available option.
I had planned to leave time here for questions but learned that there's a whole separate section on the schedule for
questions, so let me instead begin the topic of What Do We Do About It?
How do you get enough people sufficiently active to push back against war and militarism? Well, we had enough people
active from 2001 to 2007 to spread a great deal of at least short-lived awareness of at least some of the evils of war
and to force an end, temporary as it turned out, to the U.S. war on Iraq -- albeit on a three-year delay.
And we had enough people informed and active in 2013 to prevent a massive assault on Syria that Wall Street, the
corporate media, and all the top politicians in Washington favored and expected to begin imminently.
But by 2014, President Obama, who'd been forced out of Iraq by Bush's treaty, was right back in, and the U.S. was
engaged in the same war it had failed to fully join in 2013, albeit on the opposite side.
Yet in 2015 publicly supported diplomacy with Iran was holding off the neocon vision of a war there.
What makes the difference between moments when peace succeeds and moments when war does? Well, it helps when other
interests align. Obama wants peace with Iran but Iranian war along with U.S. war against ISIS. The reason peace only
succeeds for a moment, though, is that peace doesn't advance beyond a pause for reloading. The U.S. didn't bomb Syria
two years ago, but it didn't invest in aid, diplomacy, or arms embargoes either. Instead it armed and trained killers,
bided its time, and waited for better propaganda. The propaganda that seems to do best is not that of the humanitarian
war but that of the war against evil demons coming to get us: ISIS throat slitters bringing Ebola from Mexico to our
children's schools.
What makes the difference in terms of public engagement in the United States at the moment -- and we'd better change
this or it will kill us all -- is partisanship. A couple of scholars, Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas have a new book out
called Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. Some of you may have run into them as they did surveys of participants in peace events for years. They found that
identification of the Democratic Party with peace was the primary factor in enlarging the peace movement toward the
beginning of the Bush presidency and in shrinking it toward the end of that presidency.
So the obvious answer as to how you enlarge the peace movement is not really a secret at all: you install a Republican
president. Now, you can debate whether the cure is worse than the disease, but the cure is as certain as Advil for a
headache. You want a big peace movement, swallow a Republican President and a Republican Vice President and see how
things look in the morning.
Now, determining whether Republican presidents are worse war makers, even with activist resistance, is not so simple and
not actually going to help us. Unless we build a peace movement larger and more principled than alliance with either big
political party will allow, we're done for.
The top risk from war is nuclear holocaust. That danger continues to grow with active U.S. assistance. The second worst
thing a U.S. president can do about war is grab more war powers and pass them on to all future presidents. In that
regard, President Obama has outdone President Bush. Lying to Congress is now totally routine: Congress and the United
Nations can simply be ignored. Secrecy has mushroomed. President Obama picks out men, women, and children to murder from
a list on Tuesdays. The public, the Congress, and the courts have no say and often no knowledge. President Obama has
dramatically increased U.S. weapons sales abroad -- the U.S. being far and away the top supplier of weapons to regions
that the U.S. public thinks of as inherently violent.
While Obama's body count doesn't yet begin to approach Bush's in terms of people directly and violently killed, that's
not a standard that will get us to survival, much less peace and prosperity.
We should not, of course, think of the political party that lied the United States into two world wars, the Korean war,
the war on Vietnam, the Kosovo war, the Libya war, and the war on ISIS -- the party that dropped the nukes on Japan --
as a party for peace. Longtime war advocates like Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton shouldn't get a pass. Hillary was
instrumental in persuading her husband to bomb the former Yugoslavia against the will of Congress. She pushed for the
2003 attack on Iraq and the 2011 attack on Libya. She tried to get a U.S. war on Syria going in 2013. She pushed for the
Obama-era escalation in Afghanistan -- a war that is now more Obama's than Bush's by every measure. Hillary has urged
Iran to be aware that she could "obliterate" it. She has giggled with pleasure at having killed Muamar Gadaffi. She's
hawkish on Ukraine. But the sort of candidate the Republicans will nominate will be just as bad. The answer to a broken
electoral system begins with ceasing to look for new messiahs through elections. Imagine the world survives to 2024 and
the Democrats are dedicated to electing a Latino warmonger or perhaps even a gay warmonger, valuing tokenism over human
life. I don't think such a world would last to 2026.
But Democratic-party-style opposition to a Republican president won't save us either. Opposing the war on Iraq because
of the 3 percent of the deaths that were American or because of the fraction of the financial damage that was American
left people ill-informed and ill-prepared to oppose other wars. Opposing the war on Iraq because the war on Afghanistan
was more important, was not a way to end war. Opposing the war on Iraq because it drained military preparedness was a
way to elect a new regime intent on enlarging the military and preparing for more wars. Opposing Pentagon corruption and
wasting money on weapons that don't even work is not the way to oppose war. I love the weapons that don't even work,
when compared with the alternative.
What should give us some inspiration is the public resistance in 2013 to the so-called missile strikes into Syria,
because the support for it was bipartisan, and the opposition was bipartisan. That opposition is what we can build on.
But it needed to be far stronger to make its momentary success last. It needed to undo the phony debate between bombing
and doing nothing. It needed to make clear the alternatives of diplomacy, cease fires, arms embargoes, negotiations,
aid, peaceworkers, human shields, journalists, and video cameras, rather than weapons and trainers and war planners and
that horror of an embarrassment known as the CIA.
So we need a bigger better peace movement, and we need it allied with other movements, including one to create open,
free, and verifiable elections. And I'll talk about that in my second speech.
OK, do you want to hear my paranoid suspicion as to why my first shipment of books arrived here as an empty box? I think
I annoyed the CIA. There was a trial of Jeffrey Sterling. Raise your hand if you know about Jeffrey Sterling. He was the
CIA handler of a former Russian used by the CIA to slip nuclear bomb plans to Iran in 2000. The plans had mistakes
inserted into them, which was supposed to slow down Iran's nonexistent nuclear bomb program, except that the mistakes
were glaringly obvious, to the Russian among others. So, Sterling went to Congress with this information, and Congress
did nothing. So, somebody went to a New York Times reporter named James Risen, and the New York Times would do nothing, but Risen published it in a book. So they've now convicted Sterling of giving secret information to
Risen based on what the NSA calls meta-data. That is, they know Sterling spoke to Risen on the phone but not what he
said. Many other people could have told Risen. And it was secret not to protect you and me but to protect the conniving
weannie heads at the CIA.
In the course of the trial, the CIA made a document public with certain words blacked out. It was a report on plans in
2000 to give nuclear bomb plans to another country. Well, I wrote about this document and pointed out that the country
was Iraq, that not long before the big Iraq mushroom cloud scare of 2002, the CIA had been at least planning to give
nuke plans to Iraq. There were two clues, which frankly Encyclopedia Brown could have found quite easily, that made the
blacked out country in the CIA report Iraq. First, it was proceeded by the article "an," not "a," meaning that it began
with a vowel. Second, the document was written on a grid, with the characters lining up in vertical columns, so it was
obvious exactly how many letters had been blacked out. Only Iraq or Oman would work, and Oman made no sense at all.
Of course, my goal is not to annoy the CIA but to encourage those working at the CIA to quit, those funding the CIA to
cut it off, and those tolerating in the CIA a secret warmaking machine to at least imagine how they would feel about
that if the president were a Republican.
Thanks for being here today.
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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs atDavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.