Padawanbater2
Well-Known Member
Hampton Roads is military land.
Half of the Hampton Roads economy is defense related. Given the fact that the armed services permeate this region to its very core, you would think that discussions on the propriety of our military’s actions would be plentiful.
However, we see just the opposite here. Stickers that read “Give war a chance” or “I love jet noise” thrive in Hampton Roads, which comes as no surprise as the military built this region. Something about biting the hand that feeds you comes to mind. Nevertheless, Hampton Roads is the perfect setting to talk about the propriety of our military’s actions, as we are the people whose fortunes stand in the balance. Tonight the Naro Cinema is working to facilitate this conversation.
David Swanson served as the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign, was a leading voice in the effort to impeach President Bush, and authored, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. His new book, War is a Lie, is being billed as a “…thorough refutation of every major argument used to justify wars, drawing on evidence from numerous past wars, with a focus on those wars that have been most widely defended as just and good.”
David will be leading a discussion at the Naro Cinema tonight for the premiere of The Tillman Story, which chronicles the government’s lies surrounding Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan. Mr. Swanson was kind enough to answer a couple of my questions and help whet the appetite for dialogue. Come out and join the conversation.
What first moved you to become such a staunch anti-war advocate?
I don’t know if there is any dramatic personal instance to point to. I just view it as one of the worst problems that faces us as humans. We are murdering people both of our country and others. War is demolishing the separation of powers in our nation, eroding our civil rights. It’s so devastating to our economy, the environment and to the risk of nuclear proliferation. We have to put an end to the idea that wars are ever acceptable and justifiable.
The Hampton Roads economy is 47% defense related. What is your message to those whose economic livelihood is dependent upon a robust military?
I respectably disagree with the claim that your economy is ‘defense’ related. I don’t think that most of those jobs have anything to do with “defense.” Of course there is a good justification to provide people jobs, but the worst possible way to get that is the military.
Investing domestically in the military is the worst way to create jobs. Doing anything else, like investing education, the environment, or even just tax breaks creates more jobs. We need to move away from the military economy to a peaceful non-violent, green economy. Frankly, I would oppose wars even if they were good for our economy, but the fact is that they are horrible for our economy, in addition to being bad for so many other aspects of our human life.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted an experiment in which they measured one billion dollars being invested into different sectors in order measure the economic outcome. Investing one billion into domestic military spending gets you twelve thousand jobs back. When you invest that same amount into tax cuts you get fifteen thousand jobs; home weatherization produces eighteen thousand jobs; education produces twenty five thousand jobs; and mass transit twenty seven thousand jobs. If you break this down further by income level you find that the education jobs also have much higher wages and benefits than the military jobs created. It is literally better to do nothing than to invest the one billion into military spending.
The idea that war creates job is not only morally indecent, but economically speaking plain wrong.
What effects do you think the marked increase in the use of contractors by the department of defense has had on the overall institution of the military?
It’s allowed for a bigger military without having a draft, which has been the goal since Vietnam. They use tools like stop loss, bigger benefits, and signing bonuses. We now have more mercenaries and contractors than troops in the Middle East. These contractors have less accountability, and are responsible for more atrocities as they operate outside of the rule of law.
This shift was pushed largely by Dick Cheney as the guy running a company and then as the guy running the Pentagon. We also have a poverty draft in that the people fighting our war didn’t get a fair break and had few other options but to join the military. Not all soldiers join for this reason, but most do, and this helps to hide the military from everyone else by keeping it out of most neighborhoods. By bringing in contractors we can keep it smaller and further hide the military. Many people forget these wars are even happening, and yet Afghanistan has been the longest war in U.S. history.
In 1980 1 in 3 people believed that war was inevitable. In a recent piece done for Radiolab, they found that 9 out of 10 people asked said that war was inevitable and, furthermore, that it is human nature. Do you believe that a war free future is possible, or does it run contrary to human nature?
I would recommend chapter 4 of my new book in which the title is “War is not unavoidable.” War is not inevitable. It is not in our genes. It’s a part of some cultures and it’s not a part of others. Australia never saw war before the Europeans came. For most of human development our ancestors were in small bands that did not have war. It’s the more complex societies that have wars. Most countries today do not engage in war. The idea of war breaking out between Virginia and North Carolina is so absurd it’s not worth mentioning, and yet two other nations side by side fighting is commonplace. Many highly industrialized nations do not partake in wars.
Sure, you could say that it is PAX Americana, and that these nations assume America has everything covered. Yet, when we offer these nations a chance to come and beat up a third world country with us, we struggle to find a partner that will go to war.
From the United States’ vantage point it looks like war is inevitable because we are always at war. For many other countries it is not. There is no biological or physical reason we cannot change that.
Throughout time the violent nature of war has led to people providing elaborate philosophical justifications for armed conflict. What criteria do you feel there should be in order to wage just war?
A war of actual self defense has been considered legal and still is under UN law. The problem is that when you make an exception for self defense, it almost does not need to be said. When attacked, people will fight back. The difficulty is that when you create an exception you provide a law for people to stretch and stretch until the original law has become irrelevant.
Legally we banned all war with the Kellogg-Briand Act, which renounced aggressive war, prohibiting the use of war as “an instrument of national policy” except in matters of self-defense. Again in 1945 we banned war again with but one exception, self-defense.
The two wars going on now are illegal.
How should we handle situations in which the enemy is a non-state actor, as is the case with Al Qaeda?
The earlier attempt to blow up the World Trade Center was treated as a crime, as it should have been. They were tried in a civilian court and put into jail. The 9-11 attackers’s died in the attack, but their collaborators should have been captured and tried in a civilian court of law. This was a choice the Taliban offered the administration, to hand over these collaborators. Now this week Bush insists that he wanted to catch Bin Laden. Bin Laden was a good excuse for a war, and if he had been captured the excuse to occupy and bomb Afghanistan would have gone away. The top priority was not to capture these people and put them on trial. It was to have a war. They were indicted in absentia in Spain and I think that was the right approach.
What was the last war the US was involved in that was justified in your eyes?
I can’t think of one, can you? I spend more time in the book on WWII than any other wars because it’s the one people bring up the most. The United States’ soil hasn’t been attacked since at least 1812. Pearl Harbor was an imperial outpost (situated) in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an effort to provoke Japan. It was not even a state at the time. They wanted nothing more than for Japan to attack. Many people forget this was a war that had nothing to do with saving the Jews. The United States rejected Jews seeking asylum.
People counter my peace advocacy with signs that say things like, What about the Revolutionary War or Civil War? People say if you don’t like war you must like tyranny, slavery, and the Holocaust. Countries around the world freed themselves from British colonialism without war. Simply because these changes coincided with war here does not mean you needed war to gain freedom or to end slavery. We chose to have these wars. We tacked the justifications on afterward.
Do you think we need war heroes?
We do if we are going to have wars. I think we need heroes. We need models for others. But if you look up the word hero in the dictionary it has two definitions. One is that you act bravely, but the other is that you do so for good reason. I think war is the last place to look for a hero because though it is full of people acting bravely, war is full of people acting for a bad reason.
I think soldiers that refuse illegal orders–whether they are conscientious observers or simply oppose a certain war–are heroes. President John F. Kennedy once wrote, “War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”
Why do you think we are awarding fewer Presidential Medals of honors than in any war previous?
I have no idea, but one idea off the top of my head is that you don’t want soldiers walking into NBC with a medal on their chest and spouting off disagreements with the government.
How should we leave Afghanistan, in your opinion?
As rapidly as possible is the short answer. I think we ought to be seriously negotiating with all parties in Afghanistan, not just talking about it, and with a commitment to quickly leave the country. This president thinks he can announce things and then not follow through with them, and we will think they are done. He says he is closing Guantanamo, and that we are leaving Iraq. Yet, we are putting mercenaries into Iraq under the guise of the State Department, which is nothing but a loop hole. I think we have to get out of these countries.
What do you hope people will take away from The Tillman Story?
Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, and one of them was for lying about Pat Tillman. I want people to recognize that just about anything the government says about wars is a lie. On just about any other topic everyone has no problem believing the government is lying, but for some reason when it comes to war people will believe just about anything. We need to develop a healthy skepticism towards war.
The General in charge knew how Pat Tillman died. They chose to lie about the fact that he was killed by friendly fire. The brass never opens their mouths without using the soldiers as an excuse, and yet the idea of actually letting the soldiers have a voice is terrifying to them. Pat Tillman scared people. He was a self-sacrificing warrior who was turning against the war and was denouncing what the government was doing.
If you were given a loud speaker powerful enough to speak to all of Hampton Roads, what one thing would you say?
I would say we need to convert our nation from war jobs and unemployment to full and peaceful employment. We have the resources to do it; you just have to find the political will.
Half of the Hampton Roads economy is defense related. Given the fact that the armed services permeate this region to its very core, you would think that discussions on the propriety of our military’s actions would be plentiful.
However, we see just the opposite here. Stickers that read “Give war a chance” or “I love jet noise” thrive in Hampton Roads, which comes as no surprise as the military built this region. Something about biting the hand that feeds you comes to mind. Nevertheless, Hampton Roads is the perfect setting to talk about the propriety of our military’s actions, as we are the people whose fortunes stand in the balance. Tonight the Naro Cinema is working to facilitate this conversation.
David Swanson served as the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign, was a leading voice in the effort to impeach President Bush, and authored, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. His new book, War is a Lie, is being billed as a “…thorough refutation of every major argument used to justify wars, drawing on evidence from numerous past wars, with a focus on those wars that have been most widely defended as just and good.”
David will be leading a discussion at the Naro Cinema tonight for the premiere of The Tillman Story, which chronicles the government’s lies surrounding Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan. Mr. Swanson was kind enough to answer a couple of my questions and help whet the appetite for dialogue. Come out and join the conversation.
What first moved you to become such a staunch anti-war advocate?
I don’t know if there is any dramatic personal instance to point to. I just view it as one of the worst problems that faces us as humans. We are murdering people both of our country and others. War is demolishing the separation of powers in our nation, eroding our civil rights. It’s so devastating to our economy, the environment and to the risk of nuclear proliferation. We have to put an end to the idea that wars are ever acceptable and justifiable.
The Hampton Roads economy is 47% defense related. What is your message to those whose economic livelihood is dependent upon a robust military?
I respectably disagree with the claim that your economy is ‘defense’ related. I don’t think that most of those jobs have anything to do with “defense.” Of course there is a good justification to provide people jobs, but the worst possible way to get that is the military.
Investing domestically in the military is the worst way to create jobs. Doing anything else, like investing education, the environment, or even just tax breaks creates more jobs. We need to move away from the military economy to a peaceful non-violent, green economy. Frankly, I would oppose wars even if they were good for our economy, but the fact is that they are horrible for our economy, in addition to being bad for so many other aspects of our human life.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted an experiment in which they measured one billion dollars being invested into different sectors in order measure the economic outcome. Investing one billion into domestic military spending gets you twelve thousand jobs back. When you invest that same amount into tax cuts you get fifteen thousand jobs; home weatherization produces eighteen thousand jobs; education produces twenty five thousand jobs; and mass transit twenty seven thousand jobs. If you break this down further by income level you find that the education jobs also have much higher wages and benefits than the military jobs created. It is literally better to do nothing than to invest the one billion into military spending.
The idea that war creates job is not only morally indecent, but economically speaking plain wrong.
What effects do you think the marked increase in the use of contractors by the department of defense has had on the overall institution of the military?
It’s allowed for a bigger military without having a draft, which has been the goal since Vietnam. They use tools like stop loss, bigger benefits, and signing bonuses. We now have more mercenaries and contractors than troops in the Middle East. These contractors have less accountability, and are responsible for more atrocities as they operate outside of the rule of law.
This shift was pushed largely by Dick Cheney as the guy running a company and then as the guy running the Pentagon. We also have a poverty draft in that the people fighting our war didn’t get a fair break and had few other options but to join the military. Not all soldiers join for this reason, but most do, and this helps to hide the military from everyone else by keeping it out of most neighborhoods. By bringing in contractors we can keep it smaller and further hide the military. Many people forget these wars are even happening, and yet Afghanistan has been the longest war in U.S. history.
In 1980 1 in 3 people believed that war was inevitable. In a recent piece done for Radiolab, they found that 9 out of 10 people asked said that war was inevitable and, furthermore, that it is human nature. Do you believe that a war free future is possible, or does it run contrary to human nature?
I would recommend chapter 4 of my new book in which the title is “War is not unavoidable.” War is not inevitable. It is not in our genes. It’s a part of some cultures and it’s not a part of others. Australia never saw war before the Europeans came. For most of human development our ancestors were in small bands that did not have war. It’s the more complex societies that have wars. Most countries today do not engage in war. The idea of war breaking out between Virginia and North Carolina is so absurd it’s not worth mentioning, and yet two other nations side by side fighting is commonplace. Many highly industrialized nations do not partake in wars.
Sure, you could say that it is PAX Americana, and that these nations assume America has everything covered. Yet, when we offer these nations a chance to come and beat up a third world country with us, we struggle to find a partner that will go to war.
From the United States’ vantage point it looks like war is inevitable because we are always at war. For many other countries it is not. There is no biological or physical reason we cannot change that.
Throughout time the violent nature of war has led to people providing elaborate philosophical justifications for armed conflict. What criteria do you feel there should be in order to wage just war?
A war of actual self defense has been considered legal and still is under UN law. The problem is that when you make an exception for self defense, it almost does not need to be said. When attacked, people will fight back. The difficulty is that when you create an exception you provide a law for people to stretch and stretch until the original law has become irrelevant.
Legally we banned all war with the Kellogg-Briand Act, which renounced aggressive war, prohibiting the use of war as “an instrument of national policy” except in matters of self-defense. Again in 1945 we banned war again with but one exception, self-defense.
The two wars going on now are illegal.
How should we handle situations in which the enemy is a non-state actor, as is the case with Al Qaeda?
The earlier attempt to blow up the World Trade Center was treated as a crime, as it should have been. They were tried in a civilian court and put into jail. The 9-11 attackers’s died in the attack, but their collaborators should have been captured and tried in a civilian court of law. This was a choice the Taliban offered the administration, to hand over these collaborators. Now this week Bush insists that he wanted to catch Bin Laden. Bin Laden was a good excuse for a war, and if he had been captured the excuse to occupy and bomb Afghanistan would have gone away. The top priority was not to capture these people and put them on trial. It was to have a war. They were indicted in absentia in Spain and I think that was the right approach.
What was the last war the US was involved in that was justified in your eyes?
I can’t think of one, can you? I spend more time in the book on WWII than any other wars because it’s the one people bring up the most. The United States’ soil hasn’t been attacked since at least 1812. Pearl Harbor was an imperial outpost (situated) in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an effort to provoke Japan. It was not even a state at the time. They wanted nothing more than for Japan to attack. Many people forget this was a war that had nothing to do with saving the Jews. The United States rejected Jews seeking asylum.
People counter my peace advocacy with signs that say things like, What about the Revolutionary War or Civil War? People say if you don’t like war you must like tyranny, slavery, and the Holocaust. Countries around the world freed themselves from British colonialism without war. Simply because these changes coincided with war here does not mean you needed war to gain freedom or to end slavery. We chose to have these wars. We tacked the justifications on afterward.
Do you think we need war heroes?
We do if we are going to have wars. I think we need heroes. We need models for others. But if you look up the word hero in the dictionary it has two definitions. One is that you act bravely, but the other is that you do so for good reason. I think war is the last place to look for a hero because though it is full of people acting bravely, war is full of people acting for a bad reason.
I think soldiers that refuse illegal orders–whether they are conscientious observers or simply oppose a certain war–are heroes. President John F. Kennedy once wrote, “War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”
Why do you think we are awarding fewer Presidential Medals of honors than in any war previous?
I have no idea, but one idea off the top of my head is that you don’t want soldiers walking into NBC with a medal on their chest and spouting off disagreements with the government.
How should we leave Afghanistan, in your opinion?
As rapidly as possible is the short answer. I think we ought to be seriously negotiating with all parties in Afghanistan, not just talking about it, and with a commitment to quickly leave the country. This president thinks he can announce things and then not follow through with them, and we will think they are done. He says he is closing Guantanamo, and that we are leaving Iraq. Yet, we are putting mercenaries into Iraq under the guise of the State Department, which is nothing but a loop hole. I think we have to get out of these countries.
What do you hope people will take away from The Tillman Story?
Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, and one of them was for lying about Pat Tillman. I want people to recognize that just about anything the government says about wars is a lie. On just about any other topic everyone has no problem believing the government is lying, but for some reason when it comes to war people will believe just about anything. We need to develop a healthy skepticism towards war.
The General in charge knew how Pat Tillman died. They chose to lie about the fact that he was killed by friendly fire. The brass never opens their mouths without using the soldiers as an excuse, and yet the idea of actually letting the soldiers have a voice is terrifying to them. Pat Tillman scared people. He was a self-sacrificing warrior who was turning against the war and was denouncing what the government was doing.
If you were given a loud speaker powerful enough to speak to all of Hampton Roads, what one thing would you say?
I would say we need to convert our nation from war jobs and unemployment to full and peaceful employment. We have the resources to do it; you just have to find the political will.
