War and Anti-War Voices

By Gary Berg-Cross

With a bit of militarism in the air I see that the National Geographic Channel has a series on “American War Generals”  The “war leaders” assembled have some familiar names:

 Gens. Collin Powell, Stanley McCrystal, Petraeus, Wesley Clark, Jack Keane, George William Casey, Barry McCaffrey and Raymond Odierno, along with Lt. Gens. Karl Eikenberry and Michael T. Flynn, and Maj. Gen. Herbert R. McCaster.

Some call it must see other ambitious and fantastic. The Air Force Times called it a cautionary tale as:

“… the U.S. escalates its campaign against jihadists in Iraq and Syria, a new documentary offers a cautionary tale about putting too much faith in technology and forgetting hard-fought lessons from the past. American War Generals,” …. looks at how the U.S. military recovered from its disastrous endeavor in Vietnam, remade itself into an all-volunteer force that focused on fighting conventional wars, and then came close to defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan as it faced a type of enemy it vowed never to fight again.”

A cautionary stance is good, especially in these times and some of the generals use the word mistake and Iraq in the same sentence.  So perhaps we owe some thanks to husband-and-wife co-producers  Peter Bergen and Tresha Mabile, whose  film cites sobering statistics on American and Iraqi deaths . They say 4,489 and more than 150,000, respectively but there are estimates of many more Iraqi deaths due to those external effects of war such as via disease and accident.  The cost to US taxpayers comes in at more than $2 trillion, but here too one can estimate additional external costs such as the benefits of investing the money elsewhere. 

Many of us remember the run up to the Iraq war and how militant voices were heard with nary an anti-war quest given time on the air.  Perhaps we’ve learned a bit from that mistake.  Still I’d be very happy to see a series on those very same anti-war voices now and their retrospective and prospective views.  A good start might be selecting a few folks from the site Americans who tell the truth  - Models of Courageous Citizenship which features:

   citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness.

They feature quite a few people worth hearing from. Some like Dr. Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese have been speakers at WASH MDC.  Others like Jane Addams have had featured blogs.

And  we might all be the wiser to hear a bit more from someone like Chris Hedges War Correspondent, Writer : 1956

"Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder."

Humanist William James on Certain Blindness in Human Beings

By Gary Berg-Cross

These are angry times on so many level including the war front.  It seems at times like “The Guns of August II” or to paraphrase a recent WAPO article, “Is this 1939 again?”  Will the dogs of war and the romance of simple military solutions sweep away another generation?

Events don’t make it easy to talk about alternatives to war or the value of the culture of peace, but perhaps such times are exactly when we need this conversation the most.  As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

          “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate

          cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” 

With this hypothesis in mind it seems like a good time share, if not love, then a peaceful space in which to discuss such the topics.  WASH MDC has organized a panel and community discussion on Sept. 6th from 2-4 (Wheaton Public Library, 11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD ) on the topic of Peace and Issues including a Humanist perspective. Edd Doerr, past AHA president, who blogs here often, will be on the panel along with an anthropologist with experience in peace negotiations. 

I thought that I’d get a little jump on the meeting with a few humanist-oriented thoughts on the challenge of peace going back to a time before the WWI Guns of August swept away the Great Powers' peace.  Why not a mini-Renaissance on the prospects of avoiding the damages of war and the building of a culture of peace?

Around the turn of the 20^th Century American

Philosopher/Psychologist William James looking back to the Civil War, a squalid US war with Spain and the recent Boer war.  It was the late colonial period. Looking back to our late 20th and now recent 21st century events in history's rear view mirror they start to uncomfortably resemble the earllier aggressions that James lamented.  Similar too is the specter of war clouds abroad that motivated James to gave talks and write a series of anti-war pamphlets around the turn of the century,  He started with one called “Certain Blindness in Human Beings” in 1899.  In raising anti-war consciousness James was leveraging facts & new understanding from the social sciences.  It seemed to him that the emerging sciences offered some enlightened basis to understand human nature and the tendency toward violence.  Certainly he saw the corruption of language as the word Peace and peaceful activity had come to mean essentially the preparation for war.  And with that start of new factual understanding strengthened with a Progressive philosophy of truth,  knowledge & morality James argued we could begin to take on age old problem & escape the ruptures to civilizations caused by war. But it would, as he later said, take a moral and culture commitment as strong as the commitment to war and militarism. To bring the war-party and the peace-party together an extended discipline was needed and the avoidance ot, as he said:

  “The strength of one’s opposition to war depends on the correctness of one’s position, certainly, but it also requires a better understanding of the permanent enemy among us, namely, “the bellicosity of human nature.”

New understanding in turn calls on moral action. Beyond the mere intellectual conviction that war is morally unacceptable, James argued that we have a

 “bounden duty to resist settling reasonable disputes in a violent manner,”

Instead suggests James one is also obliged to translate one’s beliefs into an active, yet non-violent resistance to the human proclivity to settle disputes  “quickly, thrillingly, tragically, and by force.”

    From http://williamjamesstudies.org/8.1/kipton.pdf

That’s still good advice and a hard task. Sure, we have an even better fact and theory basis to understand human tendencies.  It’s just that empirical science and our best wisdom, tempered by moral sense, seem now to be again out of power and favor.  What passes for statecraft is running somewhat amok.

James followed him 1899 work with 2 later ones. The Essence of Humanism & The Moral Equivalent of War.  In the first James pointed to the hopes of Humanism mixed with a Pragmatic philosophy which he saw as levers  to advance society’s enlightenment:

Humanism is a ferment that has "come to stay." It is not a single hypothesis of theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new center of interest or point of sight.

A humanist perspective might be marshalled to avoid war, but in Moral Equivalence he starts with the observation that:

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”

It certainly hasn't been easy and The Great War proved to be a steam roller that ended peace and progress for a generation.  James saw militarism well entrenched asd as Chris Hedges later wrote, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. As James put it:

"The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. .."

These ideas are  protected by irrationality, paradox and old human tendencies claimed as the highest of virtues not balanced by enlightened passion .

“ The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals   from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade…

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. 

James could see the factors that militaristic times leverage to trample peaceful stances.  There is seemingly paradox there too as some things so horrible should propel us into action, but they are rationalized away with ego defenses and spin:


"Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him (people). The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”   From   http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

 Yes, and we still are willing to pay for war over pre-school and the like.

James worries and paradoxes & double personalities of civilized man still hold sway even as the Humanist perspective and a better understanding of human nature sheds light on factors like irrationality, the politics of fear, scapegoating, personalizing evil, religious & self-justification, the seduction of glory, the fear of shame, tribal solidarity, pugnacity.  James saw it all and rang the bell of warning that is hard to hear with the thump of bombs.

Still sadly still  too true. In our time the Dept of War has become the Dept of Defense. We have perpetual preparation of war and plans for attack masked in the right of self defense. As James said:

"Peace" in military mouths today is a synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the 'peace'-interval."....and

"...no legitimate interest of any one of them (Great Powers) would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests."

Cartoon from http://cybertrails.org/mil/

Martin Luther King’s Inspired (Humanist) Life and Thoughts

By Gary Berg-Cross

Today marks the official opening of the MLK monument and it is a suitable time to reflect on the life, work and thought of this great moral, American voice. The Memorial, like the FDR complex, sits astride the Tidal Basin, across from the Jefferson Memorial and near to the Lincoln Memorial. It celebrates another step in our progress from the time of the Founders but also reminds us of these four giant’s unfinished dreams. I know that we’ll never get a Monument, but as Norm Allen and others have pointed out long before Martin Luther King, our Robert Ingersoll uttered similar words:

"I have a dream that this world is growing better and better everyday and every year; that there is more charity, more justice, more love every day. I have a dream that prisons will not always curse the land; that the shadow of the gallows will not always fall upon the earth; that the withered hand of want will not always be stretched out for charity; that finally wisdom will sit in the legislatures, justice in the courts, charity will occupy all the pulpits, and that finally the world will be governed by justice and charity, and by the splendid light of liberty...." (The Works of Ingersoll, (The Dresden Edition), Volume IX, p. 186)

King’s Monument involves both a “mountain of despair” and a “stone of hope” in which MLK’s likeness partially emerges dreamlike. In the context the Occupy movement the moment reminds us of unfulfilled democratic dream and King’ legacy as a polarizing figure in support of inconvenient truths. His has won begrudging support over time while the Occupy movement is still in its early phase. See my blog on the DC Occupy and Occupy the issue of objectives.

We all know that as a Christian King drew ethical inspiration from the Bible, and his speeches are full of these ideas and phrasing. An example is "We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

But non-believers joy in his Humanist spirit as well. As freethinkers, such as Susan Jacoby, have pointed out, King's moral appeal, while rooted in his own faith, transcended all religions and open to the participation of all. He was highly influenced by Humanists. One of these was the black humanist movement and several black atheist leaders of the late 19th and early 20th century. Norm Allen, in his speech for the Center for Inquiry entitled Martin Luther King, Jr. from a Humanist Perspective, argues that only later did churches provide organizational capacity that nurtured its form of Black activism. Jeff Nallin Remembering the Humanism of Martin Luther King provides several key quotes showing King’s pluralistic & religion-neutral positions. When asked how he felt about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision ruling school prayer unconstitutional his response was:

I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally, or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision.

Another declaration on church-state relations was that the church "is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool."

As a truth seeker King was not hesitant to blame organized religion where it was due, one case being support of violent resolutions:

In a world gone mad with arms buildups, chauvinistic passions, and imperialistic exploitation, the church has either endorsed these activities or remained appallingly silent. During the last two world wars, national churches even functioned as the ready lackeys of the state, sprinkling holy water upon the battleships and joining the mighty armies in singing, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." A weary world, pleading desperately for peace, has often found the church morally sanctioning war.

These are not the type of passages that earned a space on the Monument but 14 select passages are
enshrined there. As a humanist I find inspiration in the words and ideas which I find reflected in much of the discussion by the Occupy movement, starting with the idea of ultimate goals of things like Justice and Fairness in a Moral World:

Justice

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice." And

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

The Goals of a Moral Society

"We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience."

*********************************************************************

But other values that Secular Humanists might agree with, and sometimes make up topics on this Blog, include:

Generosity Towards and Love of Fellow Humans

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."

The Value and Role of Truth & Reality

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

Opposition to War and Militarism

"I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world."

"It is not enough to say, 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace."

Cosmopolitarianism’s Role in Peace

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective." and

"Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."

Human Rights

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits."

The Virtues of Conviction, Fortitude and Thoughtful Action in Support of Inconvenient Truths

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."