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August
“War for Peace” and the need to swim
upstream
Resisters to the war in Vietnam touted the slogan,
“Make love, not war,” as a protest to the
prevailing US action in Vietnam. At first hearing
the phrase seems to suggest that dropping out for
sex, drugs, and rock and roll are a replacement for
bellicose activities. But, the cleverness of this
slogan lay not in its sign-of-the-times relevance
to the hippy generation and the “Summer of
Love.” The war and the draft were certainly
serious threats to the “Me Generation,”
who had known few threats to their well being in
growing up. What they identified as the
“military-industrial complex” was about
their future, and they didn’t learn to like it
until they became part of it.
However, buried in the slogan was the important
truth that one cannot not fight violence with
violence without being caught up a cycle that
repeats itself with karmic intensity. While the
slogan and much else turned the tide of much
popular opinion against the war in Vietnam, it
became clear that the war could not go on because
it simply cost too much and could not be won, not
because of a failure of the cultural value of
“war for peace.” In fact, many critics
continue to speak of the failure in Vietnam as due
to a lack of political will that restraints placed
on the military’s use of more aggressive
strategies.
The expression, “War for peace” owes
its US popularity largely to Theodore Roosevelt,
gentleman cowboy turned president (served
1901-1909), whose motto was “Speak softly and
carry a big stick." Roosevelt was himself a famous
war hero for leading the charge of his Rough Riders
up San Jan hill in Cuba. As a result of the
Spanish-American War which he championed, the US
became an imperial power with territorial
possessions around the world. "All the great
masterful races have been fighting races," boasted
Roosevelt, "And no triumph of peace is quite so
great as the triumphs of war." Paradoxically,
Roosevelt achieved most of his goals with both
bellicose and diplomatic rhetoric and strongly
supported international arbitration. The Teddy Bear
is named after him.
Nonetheless, the concept of “war for
peace” seems to be the US reason, or perhaps
rationalization for most of its bellicose activity
in the last 100-plus years. USians have essentially
prided themselves on being a peaceful people who
only went to war for the sake of peace. It is what
we would like to believe about ourselves. War for
peace is not about self-defense. It is about
undertaking military initiatives where one
perceives threat (or perhaps more often than we
would like to believe, political or economic
advantage spiced with threat). Yes, there is
generally a pretext, an offence committed or
purportedly committed by a foreign power that tips
us over the brink into war, a necessary
justification. But, more and more deterrence
through first-strike policies is being
promoted.
Is “war for Peace” actually a US
value? Is the desire for peace is so strong that
one paradoxically accepts its opposite to have it,
despite lessons that tell clearly that wars
“to end all wars” are the chief
generators of future wars? Or, is it indeed one of
those mixed slogans that politicians can sell so
easily because it justifies latent violence with
the highest of motives. Political rhetoric from
Roosevelt through Bush would lead one to believe
the latter is the case. Today we can listen to the
speeches of these men on the Internet and catch the
flavor of the rhetoric, not only the words.
The vision of a peaceful empire is a strong
motivator for many people, and indeed currently an
explicit part of the neoconservative agenda. The
instrument for this is “war for peace”
when and where it seems doable. Doable today seems
to mean where we can do it with few casualties and
quickly and come off looking invincible. Strangely
coincident with the Iraq War was the
intensification of spam to the point that anyone
with an email account is liable to get 15 to 50 ads
daily for aids to “get it up” and
“make it bigger, longer and stronger”
(whether the email recipient has one or not?!)
This explains the choice made in the case of
Afghanistan and twice in Iraq as well as the
reluctance to engage North Korea where we once
experienced over 50,000 casualties and still have
about 9,000 individuals unaccounted for.
Is there an alternative to “war for
peace?” Certainly there have been and could be
many imaginative ways to address conflict. In the
Vietnam years, one heard the line, “What if
they gave a war and nobody came.” The pacifism
of Gandhi is one of the few that has been tried and
found successful. In order to approach conflict
differently, we don’t need solutions as much
as the ability to deal with our own impatience for
action and our own anger and outrage at the other.
It is hard to address and alter a cultural paradigm
with the currency of “war for peace”
because “just” impatience and anger are
daily reinforced both in real world reportage and
in fiction. With a new attitude come new solutions.
Swimming upstream in ones own culture takes much
effort.
© 2007, George
Simons
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There are no elements so diverse that they cannot
be joined in the heart of a man. - Jean
Giraudoux
George Simons
is a US specialist in intercultural and gender
communication who hangs out in Mandelieu - la
Napoule, France, as well as in Santa Cruz, CA. In
the 1980’s he was one of the founders of the
Hidden Valley Center for Men and the Cyberguys
network. He is currently the treasurer on the board
of The National Men's Resource Center™. He is
on the faculty of Management Centre Europe, where
he consults on virtual global teamwork. He has
written over a dozen books on culture and gender
including Working
Together: How to Become More Effective
in a Multicultural
Organization and
with Deborah G. Weissman, Men
& Women: Partners at
Work. (Crisp
Foundation) and is the creator of the award-winning
Diversophy® game. www.diversophy.com
or E-Mail.
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