The Abolition of War

The Abolition of War Requires New Thoughts, Words, and Actions

By David Swanson

Remarks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, December 12, 2018

There’s action happening now in the U.S. Senate on ending U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. There’s a big loophole in the bill. There’s the matter of selling Saudi Arabia its weapons. There’s the House of Misrepresentatives to worry about. There’s the veto threat. There’s the question of getting compliance out of a president you’ve pretty well promised never to impeach, at least not for any of dozens of documented offenses unrelated to Russia. All that being said, the current action is a very good thing, and New Mexico’s senators have thus far been on the right side of it.

If the U.S. Congress were to stand up to a president on one war, people might raise the question of every other war. If the U.S. were to stand up to Saudi Arabia, not by giving it weapons and military assistance and protection from international law while asking it gently to mend its ways, but by refusing to be its partner in crime, somebody might ask why the same couldn’t be tried with Israel or Bahrain or Egypt, and so on.

But you can’t just end a war, can you? What should we replace the war on Yemen with? This is a question I get asked. When this war was what President Obama called a “successful” drone war, the question was usually something like this: “Hey, would you rather have a real war? With a drone war at least nobody gets killed!” Without commenting on who counts as nobody and who doesn’t, I’ll just recall that I would respond that I’d replace it with nothing whatsoever, but that it would eventually replace itself with a worse war — as it has now done.

Wars are different from other things one might propose to end. If I say we should get rid of mass incarceration or gerrymandering or fossil fuel subsidies or livestock or nations or religions or war monuments or major television networks or corporate tax breaks or the United States Senate or the Central Intelligence Agency or the off-sides rule or the acceptability of revenge or private campaign funding or aircraft carriers or telemarketing or the Electoral College or the Commission on Presidential Debates or advertising on stadiums — sorry, sometimes it’s hard to stop — it may or may not make sense, depending on one’s perspective, to ask what I would replace each of those things with. You might be asking, in the absence of gerrymandering, exactly how would districts be drawn. But in the absence of advertising on stadiums, the answer could be stadiums with taxes on corporations or it could just be stadiums without advertising on them, couldn’t it? Not everything needs a replacement.

If I say we should get rid of murder or theft or child abuse or rape or the torture-of-kittens, there are a lot of people who would not ask “But what would you replace it with?” 

The rest of the article is here.