On RAI, Paul Jay and David Swanson discuss the culture and economics of war. This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced December 16, 2013, with Paul Jay.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay in Baltimore. Welcome to Reality Asserts Itself.
This is part two of our interview with David Swanson, who now joins us in the studio in Baltimore. Davidâs an author of many books, including War Is a Lie, When the World Outlawed War, and War No More. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsaCrime.org. He works as campaign coordinator for the online activist organization RootsAction.org. And heâs secretary of peace in the Green Party Shadow Cabinet.
Thanks for joining us again.
DAVID SWANSON, ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR: Great to be here.
JAY: So weâre just going to pick up from part one. And you really should watch part one, âcause itâs sort of Davidâs personal back story and more. But weâre going to pick up with Davidâs book War No More, and Iâm going to read a few quotations and then ask David about them.
So these are sort of disjuncted quotations, out of order, but I think more or less on the same theme:
âThe most significant cause of war, I believe and argue in the bookâ, says David, âis bad information about past wars. The abolition of past practices and institutions means the same can be applied to war. Look at the abolition of slavery, blood feuds, dueling, death penalty, decline of domestic violence and its public acceptance. The first step in abolishing war will be to recognize that it too is possible. The anthropologist Margaret Mead called war a cultural invention. Itâs a kind of cultural contagion. Wars happen because of cultural acceptance. And they can be avoided by cultural rejection.â
JAY: So, David, explain all of this, because it lendsâit leads me to think youâre saying this is primarily a question of worldview and outlook and not a view of what kind of economic system we have, who owns stuff, who has power in the society, that itâsâin terms of Margaret Mead, this quote that you use, is itâs essentially a cultural phenomenon. So if we can get over blood feuds, we can get over war.
SWANSON: I think there are other institutions and factors and cultural traits, from capitalism to racism to xenophobia, that feed into war and that work hand-in-glove with war and that open people up to arguments for war. But the only thing that historians and anthropologists have found that correlates with the presence of war is cultural acceptance of war. And while we donât tend to glorify it as desirable the way that you heard back prior to World War I, we have a lot of peopleâthe vast majority of people in this country think itâs necessary, think you canât get rid of it, and some of those people think itâs part of human nature.
So itâs important for people to understand that war is relatively new, that in 100,000 years of this species, maybe 12,000 years have seen war, very sporadically. Theyâll tell you thereâs always been a war someplace. But of course thereâs always not been a war many, many someplaces. Countries have gone for centuries without war. Countries have had war and done away with it.
When you look at how wars are decided upon, itâs completely random. The same incident can be used as an excuse for war or not, depending on the decisions of individuals, not of some major force or anything in our DNA.
And so when I say that the cause of war is peopleâs bad information about past wars, what I mean is that, you know, a majority of Americans think Iraq benefited from the war that destroyed Iraq. Americans thinkâ.
JAY: Do they really believe that?
SWANSON: If you believe the polls, yes. And a strong plurality believe not just that the Iraqis should be grateful, but they are in fact grateful.
And I fault the peace movement somewhat for our overemphasis on the cost to the aggressor nation. You know, we want to focus on the self-interest. We want to tell people the financial costs, the costs to U.S. servicemen and women, althoughâas we call them, although I donât know what the service isâand not enough on the overwhelming damage of the war to the other side. So, you know, less than 1 percent of the deaths in these wars are to Americans. But all the talk about the deaths in the wars is of the Americans. So people donât understand that weâre dealing with one-sided slaughters, that itâs children and old people and women primarily who are dying in these wars. They donât have a picture of that. And so theyâre more open, therefore, to the idea that a war is necessary or that a war is beneficial.
And so I spoke in our earlier interview about the great victory of stopping the missiles into Syria. A lot of people opposed sending missiles into Syria because the Syrians werenât worth it, they werenât worth that benevolence.
JAY: But letâs go back, âcause I think thereâs kind of two different parts to this argument. Is war part of human nature? Thatâs one question which needs to be dealt with. Then, once you deal with that questionâand letâs talk about thatâthen the question is: is war primarily a cultural phenomenon, or is it a culture reflecting the interestsâfundamentally, economic interestsâof various people, classes, strata within a society who will benefit from that war. So, I mean, the human nature one Iâm sure we agree on pretty quickly, and I thinkâ.
SWANSON: Not everybody.
JAY: Well, not everybody, so letâs talk about that a little bit, because the argument is that from the beginning, humans fight over lack of resources. Maybe they donât fight much when thereâs plentiful resources, but as soon as thereâs lack of resources, tribes would fight each other, you know, go back into native tribes in North America or tribes in Africa, you know, and that all gives rise to this idea that people will fight, and that gives rise to war, and itâs who we are. So whatâs your take?
SWANSON: Yeah, but itâs not trueâvast areas of North America, Australia, other regions of the globe that didnât have war until basically our current culture brought it to them, and, you know, tribes that anthropologists have reported on where youâll ask a man, why would you not shoot that arrow that you use to hunt animals at that human who was coming to enslave you and your family members? Why would you not shoot it? And response is because it would kill him, and absolutely no comprehension of any other possible response. That is a cultural difference. That man has the same DNA that we have.
And so war is something thatâs in our culture. The United States is vastly more militarized than the rest of the globe, and we are 4 or 5 percent of humanity. So youâre going to write the other 95 percent off as somehow not exactly human nature? I mean, warâ.
JAY: Well, thereâsâcome on. Thereâs beenâthereâs wars all over the world. I mean, the African tribes did fight each other and native tribes did go to war with each other. But I think you got to add somethingâ.
SWANSON: Nobody gets PTSD from war deprivation. People have to be conditioned heavily to participate in war. And theyâve gotten dramatically better at that conditioning over the past 75 years, but not at the deconditioning. And when they come back out, they suffer. War is not natural. And war used to beâ.
JAY: But Iâm not saying war is natural, but the culture of warâfor example, you would have war dances amongst native peoples of North America, you would have war parties. There was a culture that under certain conditions you would go fight.
But Iâm not suggesting itâs human nature. Itâs at times when thereâs lack of resources and the existence of your tribe is in jeopardy you might go and fight another tribe over lack of resources. But the culture mirrors whatâs coming out of the economics, which is you might starve otherwise.
SWANSON: That argument makes so much sense that a lot of people have gone and researched it. And what they have found is that there is no correlation between population density, lack of resources, and war.
JAY: Well, then why did native tribes fight eachâwhy did certain tribes oftenânot always, and not every tribe, but why did they go to war against each other?
SWANSON: Well, we should not expect universal rationality from them when weâve seen our own insane politicians in Washington, D.C., go to war for irrational reasons. But certainly in some cases itâs over resources. In some cases itâs over grudges. In some cases itâs over territory. In some cases itâs over religious beliefs. And most wars have numerous motivations, and this hunt for the one true motivation is often in vain.
But there are Native American tribes that did not have war, as well as those that did, and they both had the same DNA. War for most of its history was male. Women have gone into war. I mean, since war has not been hand-to-hand combat, women have been just as capable of participating in war as men. Well, if women can join the war-making human nature, why canât men leave it? Well, of course they can. There is no such thing is human nature. Thereâs human culture. And we have a culture that accepts war.
JAY: Yeah, Iâm not arguing with that. What Iâm arguing with is: where does the culture come from? The culture doesnât come out from the sky. The factâif you want to say war culture drives this, you still have to answer where war culture comes from.
SWANSON: Itâs profitable for certain individuals and companies.
JAY: Well, you canâletâs go back in history. Youâre talking now. Letâs start origins, because weâre talking about is it DNA or not. So youâve got to talk, you know, in terms of development of humans as a species, with very, very few exceptionsâand there are some exceptionsâmost of humanity, most of, you know, what we know of human history, there has been war.
SWANSON: Absolutely false. Absolute false.
JAY: Come on.
SWANSON: First of all, as I said, war is relatively new. You can find no record of it back more than 12,000 years. And this is a species that goes back at least 100,000 years, and there would be a record. I mean, this used toâthis was the myth in the 1950s. The anthropologists would tell you that the animal bites on those bones were scars from war. No. We were dinner. We evolved as prey for animals. Right? And when our weaponized segments of our tribes killed off most of those large animals, they needed someone else to fight, to be maintained, to not have to grow food, to not have to do real useful work, just like Pentagon contractors. What did they do? They turned the hunters of the other tribes into their enemies and they had combats.
JAY: Yeah. I said since thereâs been human civilizationâand Iâm not talking pre-civilization humanity, and I donât know whatâthere might have been some fighting over resources at that time too. But my point is the culture doesnât comeâis not just some invention. The culture comes because of the economics, because ofâif you want to take obviouslyâif you take colonialism, why did Europe go to war with each other and war against other countries as they conquered them? It was obviously an economic motive. It wasnât just some cultural imperative. They wanted raw materials, they wanted markets, they wanted cheap labor, and they fought each other over who was going to have all these things.
SWANSON: And we like to laugh at the book that was quite popular just before World War I that explained that wars are not economically beneficial anymore and therefore wonât happen, but the argument was right. Theyâre not economically beneficial, not to a society, not to a countryâto certain parties. And when you have decision-makers who are not acting on behalf of an entire population but on behalf of certain unscrupulous profiteers, then you have motives like greed.
JAY: Well, not just profiteers, but a whole class of people that profit if they win. Itâs not just the war manufactures that profit. I mean, take the fact that the United States has the biggest military in the world and dominates through it. A whole sector of the society benefits.
SWANSON: A whole sector benefits, but itâs a narrow sector. And the people who we talk about as benefiting because they work in the military-industrial complexâthey have jobs for the subcontractors to the Pentagonâthose are real jobs, and theyâre making real money, but those same dollars invested in anything other than military spending would give more people more jobs at better pay and jobs they could be prouder of. And so itâs actually a drain on our economy. I mean, the studies that have been done by the University of Massachusetts Amherst that look at what you get in the way of jobs for the same dollar if you put it in green energy or education or anything other than the militaryâ.
JAY: And weâve done these interviews, and if you search Bob Pollinâs name, youâll find a lot of the information from these studies.
SWANSON: And nobody disputes this. Thereâs not another case. This is the economics. And tax cuts for working people, not tax cuts as we know them for billionaires, but tax cuts for working people produce more jobs than military spending. So itâs a negative, itâs a drain on the economy. You know.
And if you moved the money, you could save so much money that you could invest in a program of retraining and retooling so that no one would have to suffer. We donât have to throw anybody out of work. Those are real people with real jobs, but nobody has to be damaged in the process. So Connecticut now, just in recent months having set up a conversion process to work on converting from military industry to peaceful industry in Connecticut, that should be a model for the other 49 states and for Congress, where such a thing hasnât been heard of in decades. And thatâs just the economic argument.
But what about all of the damage to our morality, to the humans killed and injured and traumatized, to the natural environment, to our civil liberties, to the loss of freedom and the wars for freedom? I mean, the benefits are incredible, but the economic argument alone does it.
JAY: The idea that itâs just a cultural phenomenon or primarily a cultural phenomenon, that if you can change enough peopleâs minds, you could put an end to war, I mean, is that what youâre saying? If you change the culture, youâll end war?
SWANSON: Well, I mean, that sounds like we have a democracy or at least a representative government, and Iâm not suggesting that. I mean, overwhelmingly, on all the big issues, the government in Washington goes against majority opinion. I mean, thereâs no question. And war is not an exception in those terms. And we often have a majority against war in Congress and the president for it.
JAY: More often than not.
SWANSON: More often than not.
JAY: At least in the lead-up to war. Usually when war starts and the drums are beating, you can see a shift in public opinion. But like in the Iraq War, generally people are against war. Once the war starts, it seems to change.
SWANSON: Yeah, Afghanistan and Iraq, at the beginning, you had a majorityâor close to itâin favor, and within a year and a half you had a strong majority saying it was wrong, never should have done it, should end it from then on out,â
JAY: Once it was a debacle.
SWANSON: âwhich didnât mean end it, right? Because ending it is anti-troops and so forth. Once youâve started it, thereâs a section of the population and of course the congressmembers who say you have to continue itâeven though it was wrong and itâs a bad idea, we still must continue it. So thatâs why itâs so much better to prevent a war before it starts.
But, no, Iâm not suggesting that you get majority opinion on your side and Washington immediately listens. I mean, we have to deal with the corruption of our government, but you get majority opinion significantly on your side and actively on your side, and you get opinion within the halls of power in Washington on your side, as we had there in a limited way for a limited time on Syria, and then war goes away. And thereâs not some force of history or DNA or testosterone thatâs going to stand in the way of that.
JAY: In a particular situation. But, as you said, there are people that benefit from war in the United States, and itâs a big stratum, certainly a big stratum of the elite, both in the military-industrial complex, certain sections of finance, certainly sections of the political elite, many of them who have alliances with other countries. Weâre going to be doing a series on the Saudis and, you know, the amount of money the Saudis put into the American military-industrial complex, in terms of buying weapons, and their alliances with this, and other countries who make money out of war, that this is not just a cultural phenomenon if you want to change it. I guess what Iâm getting at is you canât change it just by changing culture. You have to change how stuff is owned and who has power.
SWANSON: You have to start by changing culture. I mean, we cannot have a democratic movement for a just cause when we donât have a majority with us. Thatâs not a democratic movement. Thatâs a first step.
From there we need to make appeals to those sections of our economy and those constituencies that ought to share our interest. I mean, green energy companies that ought to want the money thatâs going to the missiles and the bombs and the aircraft carriers ought to see the value of moving the money from the military to green energy, just as those in favor of investing in education and in all of the other places where the money could go. I mean, we think of the damage that war does in terms of killing people, but the money could save many, many times more lies than the lives that are taken. And that money, there are interested parties who can be organized to demand that money. There is another side to the economic pressure if we can organize it.
JAY: Of course one needs this cultural shift. You need, you know, a consciousness amongst a broad section of the population to change on these issues. But in the final analysis, you need to change who has the power to decide whether to go to war or not, and you have to, you know, wrest that power away from people who profit from war. I mean, itâs very, you know, embedded in the economic system and in the political system. You need to unravel that. I guess what Iâm pushing back on: if you just talk about it as a question of beliefs and culture, youâre not dealing with the real politics of this.
SWANSON: Yeah. Well, I donât. And I have put out a book called The Military Industrial Complex at 50 with a bunch of other authors where we make the case for the sort of coalition thatâs going to be needed to shut down the military-industrial complex. And itâs going to need more than teachers. Thereâs no question whatsoever. Weâre going to need incredible pressure to be brought against those forces that are pushing for war and imagineâfalselyâthat they are benefiting from war with this sort of crackpot realism where theyâre destroying themselves and everybody else in a process that they imagine is benefiting them personally and defending us from the damage of their past exploits.
But we also have to take power away from a corrupt government in Washington and from a single individual in the White House, who now need not declare war, can send a flying robot with Hellfire missiles into anywhere on the globe and is teaching the rest of the world that thatâs going to be acceptable and legal, and you have 80 other nations now with that technology. The United Nations says that it is makingâthereâs a special rapporteur, in his preliminary report, a guy who is the law partner of Tony Blairâs wife, says this is making war the norm, not the exception anymore. Jonathan Turley, a lawyer whoâs by no means a radical and with whom I disagree on many things, says this is taking us back to the state of nature before the era of international law and civilization. We have gotten rid of declarations of war. We have gotten rid of congressional powers of war. We have gotten rid of even public knowledge of war. We have a single individual having meetings on Tuesdays, going through lists of men, women, and children, picking which ones to murder, murdering them, and justifying it to compliant liberal lawyers and human rights groups by calling it war, as if that makes murder okay because itâs on a bigger scale.
This is actuallyâwe think of this as moving to more civilized war, more targeted, wore surgical, but itâs actually very, very dangerous in the sense of taking institutions like the United Nations set up to work against war and using them to justify and legalize a new and insidious and dangerous form of warfare, one that is not susceptible to our economic arguments because itâs cheaper than the other forms. So we have to make the moral argument that youâre killing children and grandparents and demand that our neighbors, our American fellow citizens, care about that.
JAY: Okay. In the next segment of our interview, weâre going to talk about is there such a thing as a just war, âcause David doesnât think so. So please join us for the continuation of our series of interviews with David Swanson on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
