David Swanson: US Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity or for Democracy

[G_j]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35766-david-swanson-us-wars-are-not-waged-out-of-generosity-or-for-democracy


In this interview, David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, counters the theory that war is an inevitable part of human nature, says the antiwar movement is larger than the dominant media suggest and shares the view that wars are fought primarily for money and markets.

Mark Karlin: How do you respond to people who say that war is due to human hard-wiring that goes back to battling clans of cave people over territory and resources?

David Swanson: Thanks for the terrific questions. At least 90 percent of humanity is represented by governments that wage war much less than the US government. Over 99 percent of people in the United States are not in the military. There is not a single case of PTSD from war deprivation. The largest cause of death in members of the US military is suicide. So you can try to claim that hunter-gatherers waged wars despite the lack of evidence, or that chimpanzees wage wars despite the lack of either evidence or relevance. But the very claim that humans all wage war is ridiculous on its face. The notion that it comes naturally to them is a horrible joke, given the damage it inflicts even on drastically better-armed aggressors who kill even from the safety of a drone base thousands of miles from their victims. If someone thinks war comes naturally, I would suggest, respectfully, that they should try sexual abstinence, starvation or eating feces.

"No candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending on militarism is too much, too little or just right."
There have been human cultures like the current United States in which people have been taught to accept war as inevitable. There have been many others that have not known war at all and have considered killing utterly unacceptable -- meaning they would in fact never ever do it, not meaning they would kill anyone who threatened to kill someone. Eliminating war does not involve eliminating anger or conflict; it involves disassembling a complex industrial institution that goes to great lengths to create wars and far greater lengths to arm others so that when they become involved in conflicts much more damage is done. The majority of the weapons in the Middle East are made in and shipped from the United States. Taking away those weapons would not require discovering the mysterious seat of "human nature" in West Asian brains and operating on it. It would just require a popular movement that saw profiting from death as shameful and put an end to it, as a congressional committee proposed 80 years ago and the pope suggested to applause from a joint session just recently.
..more..

[bhikkhu]

1. Lots of things come naturally to us

that's pretty much why parenting is such a hard job, why we have cultures with written laws and unwritten rules. The "war is human nature" argument ignores all the other bits of human nature that we don't condone. Behavior is a matter of choice, and learning to make good choices is important for every individual. And every nation, of course.

I wish that our schools taught more of looking at history objectively as a way to make better choices, and less of the "USA! USA!" chant.

[Phlem]

9. +1

[Actor]

26. Watching VEEP last night (very funny HBO series with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) and she is the VP

and at the end of a speech (she is actually prez now in the series) she has to read the

"And may God Bless The United States of America"

at the end. And while the character in the show doesnt mock or make fun of that when she says it, their behavour as soon as the camera goes off, does and does brilliantly and funny as hell.

As for me, there is no god and if there was why in the hell would he like us over others?

[dionysus]

33. yeah that's a great show..

[farleftlib]

2. Profiting from death *is* shameful

We have been desensitized to it in this country. I abhor the thought of
it and whether or not it's "human nature" we spend way too much on it
in the USA.

Our soldiers die, their soldiers and citizens die, our nation is strapped
because of the money we spend on the MIC, other countries are in ruins
and people are dead or maimed or homeless. What is there to cheer about?

[Meteor Man]

3. War Is A Force

That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.

[Boomer]

4. Lack of evidence? Wtf?

"So you can try to claim that hunter-gatherers waged wars despite the lack of evidence, or that chimpanzees wage wars despite the lack of either evidence or relevance."

We have plenty of evidence that chimpanzees wage resource/territorial wars, just as we have evidence that bonobos do not. He only weakens the rest of his argument by dismissing the evidence. If nothing else, at least argue that it's not (somehow) relevant to human nature.

At the very least one can argue that wars waged by government have nothing to do with the territorial anger that an individual might experience when their neighbor walks on their lawn.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

6. Mr. Swanson s trying to sell a book

Not actually say anything informative.

If leftists want to understand how a Bill O'Reilly (or Anne Coulter, or Rush Limbaugh) book appears to the tea party ahderents, validating all their core beliefs through arguments by assertion ("it's true because I say it is&quot , this would be a good example.

- C.D. Proud member of the Reality Based Community

/ The US disproportionately wages "wars" against terrorists and bad state actors, for the same reason that police disproportionately deal with criminals: we do it so that others don't have to. And the system works, because by any overall measure, war is way way down.

[malaise]

8. It is obvious thay you don't know Swanson n/t

[whereisjustice]

13. Might be the most ill informed and insipid thing I've read all day, excepting your inevitable reply

[ConservativeDemocrat]

16. Your supposed "refutation" is merely an argument by assertion

Proving that it's worthless for me to cite news or reference facts to explain anything to you. Extremists of every stripe always prefer their opinion to actual reality.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[KG]

15. I lulz'd.

[cpwm17]

31. More performance art from you,

because it's impossible for any human being to be so clueless and reality challenged as almost all your posts seem to indicate. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume you are doing it on purpose.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

32. All of your friends in San Francisco agree with you?

You canvassed your pot growing collective in Denver, and they all just think you're always right?
All your headmates in Greenwich Village just completely agree?

Maybe you should get outside a bit. Stop reading the DU like a Republican watches FOX, and actually learn a few things. It might reset your expectations a bit about reality.

Facts would be nice things for you to learn as well. They're useful, if ever so much more uncomfortable than imagining that your opinions are true.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[Phlem]

11. +1 Spot on.

[dionysus]

34. swanson is just as full of crap now as he was when he was posting here...

[davekriss]

5. K & R, say it brother David!

[malaise]

7. I miss his posts

Good read - thanks

Rec

[cantbeserious]

10. War Is A Racket - Smedley Butler

eom

[Dragonfli]

12. K&R for needed exposure /nt

[Octafish]

14. Gee. An educated, well-fed, hard-working, healthy, sane population is something we can't afford.

Not if we want the wars for the mineral extraction industries of the new corporate global colonialism to continue bringing the enormous profits from theft, creating the greatest wealth in human history, going directly into the pockets of the billionaire class.

We can't even get kids to a school without the danger of lead poisoning.

[Enthusiast]

18. Huge +1!

[Enthusiast]

17. Kicked and recommended!

An excellent article.

[TBF]

19. David used to post here way back ...

he's a committed activist. I'd question the sanity and agenda of anyone posting against him. He's one of the few who truly does give a damn about people over profit.

[Odin2005]

20. His dismissal of facts regarding chimps makes me dismiss him.

Chimps are violent and engage in something akin to warfare in humans, that is an accepted fact.

[Albertoo]

21. Yup. Looks like this Swanson guy didn't do a lot of hard research

There are wars between ant colonies.
There are turf wars between chimpanzee communities.
http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/chimp-war-behavior.htm

So it appears war is more hard wired in our animal nature than Mr Swanson imagines.

[The_Commonist]

25. I watched a war movie on the TV machine last night...

"Monkey Kingdom."
It wasn't chimps, it was adorable macaques.

It was about a rather cruel society, much like ours, where the powerful, literally at the top of the tree, eat all the ripest fruit and shit on the lower classes, forced to live on the ground where all the danger is. An invading army came in and forced the members of the society out of their stronghold.

Then our heroes, again quite literally, invaded the (human) city and stole the resources they needed to regroup. Once they did, they went back and reconquered their home. The story was told from the perspective of a female who, well... fucked her way up to the top of the class structure.

As Tina Fey was narrating the happy ending, where our heroine gets to eat the juicy berries at the top of the tree for the first time in her life, I asked my wife "OK, so whose neck does SHE have HER boot on now?" Sweetie's response - "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

All that being said - War may well be a "part of human nature," but that does not mean we need to pursue it as gleefully as we seem to. We can eliminate it, if we choose to. We should be smarter than macaques, although maybe we are not? Compassion and cooperation are also parts of "human nature." We can do anything as a species that we want, as long as it fits into the physical laws of the universe. We just choose not to, because we are a lazy, greedy and shortsighted species. Kinda sad, really. We had such potential, but we chose to squander it...

[ReRe]

22. K&R

We definitely need to go look David up and get him back over here to DU. From some of the responses on this thread, one can tell he's been gone way too long.

David Swanson: Come home!

[JackRiddler]

23. Beautifully put.

[Overseas]

24. K&R. Well said.

[stone space]

27. This may be why questions about how we can possibly afford free tuition seem disengenuous to me.

"No candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending on militarism is too much, too little or just right."

[Admiral Loinpresser]

28. It also requires decoupling the treasonous MIC from Congress. n/t

[Fast Walker 52]

29. war is a racket, war is a lie, war must end

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

30. Most of the people on earth throughout history never participated in wars.

It' no more "in our genes" than rape or robbery is.

[Quantess]

35. Invading countries and killing people is, of course, WONDERFUL!

Wars, people dying in hordes (life is cheap), no respect for human life, and minus zero respect for life on earth in general.

I was born in 1970 and when I was a kid, I was convinced that humankind would have become just a tiny bit more enlightened while I grew up. Not a chance!