Military people like to talk about the “bad guys”, apparently not realizing that this makes them sound like small children. Playing cops and robbers at age 8, my friends and I enjoyed the role-playing, but by age 12 we’d lost interest in such childishness. It’s hard to hear adults talking like this.
As I write this, the US has just withdrawn its last soldier from Afghanistan, and a flurry of articles, including one of the most depressing I’ve ever read, has led me to conclude that, in this twenty-year slugfest, there were no “good guys”. We went to Afghanistan with somewhat good intentions, and ended up damaging or destroying almost everything we touched – the same as in a long line of other “interventions” stretching back to Korea. It’s hard to admit, but the modern US military seems to have a Midas touch.
I’m no military scholar, just an American bloke who pays his taxes, thereby funding the destruction machine that is the US military. The American military is mainly good at one thing: killing. Maybe it’s time to accept that killing is never a good thing.
Many thought that the US would rethink its strategies after the Vietnam debacle, that its foreign policy might incorporate a hint of humility; but humility doesn’t seem to be one of America’s defining virtues. With 1940s nostalgia, we keep pining for that intoxicating mirage of moral high ground – even as Japan and Germany have become close allies, and Vietnam a valued trading partner. Exactly what will it take to convince us that the good guy/bad guy narrative is a childish fantasy?
A wise man once noted: he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and that is not the fate I wish for our fair country, or our fair planet. We need to face a simple truth: war is obsolete, a vestige of our primitive past that needs to be discarded to the scrapheap of history. This, in our present world, seems like a comic impossibility, but there’s really no other way forward.
One needn’t be an oracle to see where we’re presently headed: with each technological advance, everyone’s “swords” will get deadlier, more numerous, and more affordable, until one day, through some accident or miscalculation, we’re treated to an apocalypse not of God’s making. It really is time to put away childish things.
Meanwhile, another month, another war. And each one, in a slightly more perfect world, would never have happened – the smallest amounts of empathy, compassion, and pragmatism would have prevented the whole thing. Our toolbox would have contained something other than hammers.
It’s sometimes hard to comprehend the fact that this is all our choice, but every hammer in our toolbox – from bayonets to atom bombs – is there by our choosing. It’s not God; it is we who are choosing to die by the sword. Jesus, 2000 years ago, asked us to make the right choice, and we’re still not making it.
In its hubris and elitism, modern America resembles the Roman empire, where “citizens” were the only people that mattered. With hindsight, we view this as barbaric, yet continue to march through the world with the same attitude, imagining that we, by God’s decree, are the eternal good guys. The tragedy in this is that many Americans sincerely want to do good in the world; we just don’t seem to know how. May I make a simple suggestion? Let’s accept the fact that every life is precious, and put away our guns. Let’s try something audacious: spend trillions of dollars not on killing, but on compassion and respect. We might be amazed at the results.
Seventy years after World War Two, we remain stuck in a wartime economy, a perpetually self-fulfilling prophecy of military solutions. So here’s a crazy idea: rather than trying to stop the unstoppable military-industrial complex, why don’t we use some jujitsu, and start slowly converting our military into one big Peace Corps. Let the soldiers and generals keep their careers and uniforms, and start giving them medals for irrigation systems and solar power installs. Our military has become impressively adept at logistics, and these talents could easily be diverted to other ends. Weapons factories needn’t be shut down; they can just start making things people actually need – like 10 billion heat pumps, for starters. At some point, military strategists might warm to the idea of putting weaponry on the back burner, as they notice the overwhelmingly superior “firepower” of being genuinely helpful.
Of course military hawks might scoff at this idea, but the real resistance will come from the businesspeople who make fortunes off of war, who somehow consistently win the complete cooperation of their governments. But this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle: it’s true that ROI would be lower for peacetime products, because there would be less opportunity for graft, but there would still be bucketloads of money to be made in the new Peace Corps.
The Army Corps of Engineers is another inspiration. An unavoidable consequence of our unfolding climate crisis will be the need for massive public works projects all over the planet. Of course the Corps may have their hands full just with domestic problems, but it will be in our interest to help poorer nations too – the pollution from a coal-fired power plant in Africa is also a “domestic problem”. There’s no end to the peaceful missions our military could be sent on, and we could still decorate our soldiers on their return. The only thing they might miss out on is some PTSD.
There is another thing that soldiers might miss out on: the chance to be heroic in a life-or-death situation. This might in fact be the essential allure of militarism – the opportunity for profound acts of courage, where one is willing to lay down their life for a larger cause. How much better, though, if the cause was something actually good. Climbing a power transmission tower might take some courage too; and my dad took great pride in the fact that he helped build the Shasta River dam. In contrast, the memory of being in a war zone will haunt you for the rest of your life.
There will of course still be a need for national defense for the foreseeable future – other nations will also need to forget about their guns. But in Chinese culture, it’s long been understood that the act of going to war is in itself a failure, regardless of who “wins”. Confucianism and Christianity both unequivocably describe a path of nonviolence. The superior leader finds ways not to go to war.
The quandary is that our military is, domestically, a very positive thing, creating jobs, careers, and stable communities throughout the country. The problem is with its end products. So how can we retain the benefits of these institutions while reducing the harm they inflict on the world, and our standing in the world; even (if I might make a small request) while removing the imminent danger of nuclear annihilation? The solution isn’t that mysterious; the problem is that we, as a people, seem to have an inordinate fondness for guns, missiles, and other expressions of phallic might. I do wonder if we might benefit from a female president.
Two types of inertia, then, are hindering our societywide transition from war machine to purveyor of peace: one involves values and habits of thinking, the other involves physical systems and entrenched financial interests. They both need to change in tandem: tangible results in the direction of peacemaking will encourage us to change our values, and changes in our values will result in new strategies and investments. There’s little precedent in history for this, but it is doable. We need to build a new machine.
Actually, that new machine is already partially built. The cure for wars lies in communication, compromise, and community; and a functioning democratic government provides the framework for these things. To the degree that the United States is a functioning democracy, we’ve enjoyed this sense of community, and have been spared the agony of perpetual wars between the states that otherwise would have been our lot. We take for granted how well democracy has served us, and fail to appreciate how this same framework could benefit the entire world.
If the United Nations, like our own government, is a complete mess, the solution isn’t to abolish these institutions; it’s to fix them. A functioning democracy has one premier product: the absence of war. We can have bureaucracies and committees, political campaigns and intrigue, even impeachments and indictments … or we can have battlefields strewn with bodies – and then, at some inevitable point, mushroom clouds. Is this really a difficult choice?
Democratic governments have shown themselves capable of allowing diverse populations to coexist without violence. Maybe nobody likes lawyers (except lawyers), but I’d rather face a phalanx of attorneys than one person with an AR 15. We understand, though, that there are few video games celebrating the exploits of government bureaucrats or court clerks. This new machine can only be built with with some new thinking. Imagine, if you will, a world where policemen don’t carry guns, where democratic institutions successfully perform their function as keepers of peace, and where all those gleaming swords can finally, joyfully, be beaten into plowshares.
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