[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: [PEACE] War Isn't Inevitable

[fred Duperrault]

Friends,

Here is an article discussiong arguments regarding whether war is an  
inevitable and legitimate undertaking.

In the spirit of peace, justice and open discussion,

Fred Duperault



Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Hank Stone        " <hstone at rochester.rr.com>
> Date: April 4, 2012 6:02:19 AM PDT
> To: earthplan at lists.riseup.net
> Subject: [PEACE] War Isn't Inevitable
>
>
> I came across the excellent (but long) article below.  I’ve  
> summarized it
> here:
>
> When Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, he said “[W]ar is sometimes
> necessary…Let's face it, we're not going to eradicate war in our  
> lifetimes."
> In a new book, The End of War,	veteran science journalist John  
> Horgan argues
> he was wrong.
>
> Between 80 and 90 percent of people say war will never end. We're  
> always going
> to have wars of some kind or other.  War is part of human nature.
>
> Many scientists believe this too, and argue that we humans are  
> genetically
> similar to chimpanzees, and prone to violence.	But in hundreds of  
> years of
> observations of chimpanzees, there are almost no cases of attacks by  
> one group
> on another leading to death.  Also, we are equally closely related  
> to bonobos,
> who are peaceful.
>
> Furthermore, war is not ancient.  It appeared relatively recently in  
> the human
> record, and then spread rapidly.  Sometimes war emerges, but  
> disappears.
> Previously warlike peoples can become peaceful, so war isn’t deeply  
> engrained
> biological behavior.
>
> Some believe competition for scarce resources explains wars.  But  
> wars can be
> fought for any reason, when a charismatic sociopath convinces his  
> tribe to
> attack another.  Then the attacked tribe has to either run away of  
> fight in
> self defense.  War is insidious.
>
> War is a self-perpetuating meme.  We started war with Iraq based on  
> the notion
> that Iraq might get nuclear weapons and attack us.  Now war against  
> Iran is
> proposed for the same reason.  So we put Iran in the situation of  
> needing
> nuclear weapons to deter our attack.
>
> Back before WWI, President Roosevelt and even pacifist William James  
> believed
> war could be good for the character of the nation.  This was  
> bullshit.	The two
> world wars took a lot of the glamour out of it.
>
> There was a fierce Amazonian tribe, the Waorani, whose villages  
> continued to
> raid each other.  More than 50% of the population died violently.   
> It was
> self-perpetuating, but unsustainable.  Trust levels were so low that  
> they
> couldn’t parlay, but missionaries helped them by dropping leaflets  
> from
> planes saying “Let’s stop this.  It’s stupid.”	This led to a truce.
>
> Switzerland and Sweden both gave up having wars years ago.  Costa Rica
> doesn’t even have an army.  Some people think that to end war, you  
> need
> utopia first, but things work the other way.  Costa Rica showed that  
> by getting
> rid of war and militarism, they drove out poverty and got freedom and
> democracy.
>
> The military did a study and found out that soldiers tend to be  
> reluctant to
> shoot people in battles.  They were horrified, and trained soldiers  
> differently
> to get higher kill rates.  But this led to more cases of Post  
> Traumatic Stress
> Disorder, even for people piloting drone airplanes from a place of  
> safety.
> Most people are not natural warriors.
>
> Machismo doesn’t lead to war, but the other way around; war leads to  
> the
> notion that aggression and toughness are the essence of manhood.
>
> Atrocities in wartime are usually not committed by bad people (“the  
> bad
> apple” idea).  War creates a “bad barrel” that brings out the worst in
> people.  War is at least as much about conformity as it is about  
> aggression and
> hostility.
>
> The military-industrial complex does promote war, but there are much  
> bigger
> companies that have more to gain from peaceful commerce.  With the  
> right
> leadership, we could quickly eliminate the military-industrial  
> complex.
>
> The world faces, poverty and hunger, climate change, female  
> inequality, and
> more.  In terms of leverage, we would be better off focusing on  
> reducing
> militarism, getting rid of nuclear weapons, and creating a more  
> rational
> international policy.  That would make a lot of these other things  
> easier to
> address.
>
>
> ***********
>
> Why War Isn't Inevitable: A Science Writer Studies the Secret to  
> Peaceful
> Societies
> By Brad Jacobson, AlterNet
>
> Posted on March 18, 2012, Printed on April 3, 2012
>
> http://www.alternet.org/story/154508/why_war_isn%27t_inevitable%3A_a_science_writer_studies_the_secret_to_peaceful_societies
>
> When President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he  
> expressed a
> well-worn notion about warfare: "[W]ar is sometimes necessary, and  
> war is at
> some level an expression of human feelings." Today, as the drumbeats  
> for war
> with Iran once again reach bellicose heights, a timely new book  
> argues that,
> contrary to conventional wisdom, waging war is not an innate part of  
> human
> nature.
>
> In The End of War, veteran science journalist John Horgan applies the
> scientific method to reach a unique conclusion: biologically  
> speaking, we are
> just as likely to be peaceful as we are to be violent. So what keeps  
> humans
> bound by a seemingly never-ending cycle of war?
>
> In a phone interview with AlterNet from his home in New York's  
> Hudson Valley --
> situated within earshot of the mortars and howitzers at West Point  
> Military
> Academy's artillery range -- Horgan dispelled multiple myths about  
> the impetus
> for war, the combination of which, he believes, sustains the  
> institution of war
> despite rational thought and an overwhelming human aversion to  
> killing. A
> longtime Scientific American writer and director of the Center for  
> Science
> Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New  
> Jersey, Horgan
> also charts a new course for rejecting the old paradigm of war's  
> inevitability
> and finally releasing mankind from its destructive grip.
>
> Brad Jacobson: Was there an overriding factor that drove you to  
> write this
> book?
>
> John Horgan: Yeah, it was my discovery that started right after the  
> U.S.
> invasion of Iraq: the vast majority of people, both American and  
> people around
> the world, believe that war is a permanent part of the human  
> condition. That
> we've always fought wars and we always will. I have surveyed  
> thousands of
> people on this issue now, young and old. I ask people this question:  
> Do you
> think war will ever end? And usually between 80 and 90 percent of  
> the time
> people say, "No, war will never end. We're always going to have wars  
> of some
> kind or other." And when I would ask people why they were so  
> pessimistic, they
> would give me a range of reasons. Often it would be, "War is part of  
> human
> nature." "War is in our genes." Or it would be an environmental  
> explanation:
> war comes from the tendency of humans to overpopulate different  
> regions,
> leading to a competition for resources.
>
> There have been other surveys of people's attitudes toward war going  
> back to
> the 1980s. I cited those in my book, too. And those found quite a  
> bit of
> pessimism, but not nearly as much as I found over the last seven to  
> eight
> years.
>
> So I wrote the book basically to rebut this extremely pessimistic  
> point of
> view, which is also held by people at the highest levels of power. I  
> quote
> Barack Obama right at the beginning of my book. At the fucking Nobel  
> Peace
> Prize ceremony, he's giving this incredibly pessimistic and wrong  
> view of
> warfare as dating all the way back to the origin of humanity. And  
> that leads
> him to say, "Let's face it, we're not going to eradicate war in our  
> lifetimes."
> Even if you believe that, I think it's awful for our leader,  
> especially someone
> like Barack Obama, whom I voted for in part because I thought he  
> would not be a
> hawkish president and get us out of these terrible wars we've been  
> in recently.
> Even if he is personally pessimistic, I want vision from him,  
> especially when
> he's accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. How about a vision of a world  
> without war
> instead of saying this is just the way it is and you have to accept  
> it?
>
> BJ: Didn't he also receive the Nobel just days after calling for a  
> troop
> buildup in Afghanistan?
>
> JH: That's right. When he was in Oslo, Norway, where he accepted the  
> Peace
> Prize, this was about nine days after he had announced that he was  
> sending
> 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
>
> BJ: You also cite another line from Obama's Nobel acceptance speech,  
> which you
> dispel in your book: "War in one form or another appeared with the  
> first man."
> Why do you think this belief has become such entrenched conventional  
> wisdom?
>
> JH: That's a good question. I have been tracking the anthropology of  
> war
> literature since the late 1980s. And since then, this view that war  
> is really
> ancient and innate has become dominant in science. There's a group of
> scientists at Harvard, in particular, starting with Edward Wilson,  
> also Richard
> Wrangham, Steven Pinker, Steven LeBlanc. Very influential, very smart,
> respected scientists who've been repeatedly putting out this idea  
> that war, as
> Obama said, is at least as old as humans, and might even be older  
> and go back
> millions of years to the common ancestor with chimpanzees. That  
> theory is now
> accepted and has seeped down to the level of the general population.  
> I hear it
> all the time. I see it cited in all sorts of popular books about  
> human nature,
> human psychology, as well as about aggression and warfare.
>
> And I think that really, as a scientific hypothesis, has a lot to do  
> with
> people's pessimism these days. In addition to a more obvious reason,  
> which
> would be that over the last decade we've had 9/11, followed by two  
> very serious
> wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the war on terror. So I think  
> this bad
> scientific theory has a lot to do with people's pessimism, which is  
> why I
> devote a chunk of my book to rebutting that.
>
> BJ: I found it fascinating that you not only show in the book that  
> humans are
> as equally genetically related to chimpanzees as they are to peace- 
> loving
> bonobos, but also you debunk the idea that chimpanzees are  
> necessarily innately
> violent to begin with.
>
> JH: And not just violent to begin with, which they can be. The claim  
> is more
> specific than that: that chimps in one group band together and raid  
> chimps from
> another group. Usually it's just ambushing one or two. In most  
> cases, it's just
> finding a little baby and ripping it apart.
> What I found when I looked at the literature carefully is we're  
> talking about a
> very small number of these incidents over the past few decades.  
> Depending on
> how you count them, just a couple of dozen. And you have literally  
> hundreds of
> years of human observations, if you count individual scientists  
> watching
> individual troupes [of chimpanzees], but which has accumulated just  
> a handful
> of these troupe raids that lead to deaths. Even anthropologist  
> Richard Wrangham
> -- who's sort of the chief proponent of this idea that human warfare  
> and
> chimpanzee warfare are very similar -- says that this is very rare  
> behavior.
> And Jane Goodall has suggested that this behavior might be a  
> response to
> changes in the way that chimps behave as a result of the  
> encroachment of humans
> on their habitat, even as a result, for example, of Goodall herself  
> putting out
> bananas and so forth.
>
> So, you know, you've got this really dramatic, consequential claim  
> about human
> nature and about war, this great scourge of humanity, based on  
> really flimsy
> evidence. I mean I have great respect for Steve Pinker and Ed Wilson  
> and even
> Richard Wrangham. But they should know better than to be putting out  
> this
> theory as fact when the facts do not support it.
>
> BJ: If humans are as genetically related to bonobos as we are to  
> chimpanzees,
> why isn't that cited more often in discussions on the human impetus  
> for war?
>
> JH: Well, you know, bonobos are getting a lot of press lately.  
> Peaceniks love
> to cite them, especially peaceniks who think that humans are innately
> pacifistic and gentle. Actually, I cite the bonobos research to  
> counter all the
> chimp stuff. But really I think all of that is pretty much  
> irrelevant. We
> really should be forgetting about the chimpanzee and bonobos stuff  
> -- that
> might've evolved very recently. The way that chimps or bonobos act  
> now might
> have nothing to do with what was happening millions of years ago  
> with the
> common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.
>
> The literature that I think is really significant from this question  
> about the
> origins of war concerns the first appearance of war in the  
> archeological
> record. The point I make in my book is that, in spite of what is  
> often said
> about war being very ancient going back to the beginning of  
> humanity, as Obama
> said, war is quite recent. The oldest evidence for war is 12,000  
> years ago and
> even that is kind of an outlier. Really all the evidence for war  
> starts about
> 10,000 years ago. And war seems to have emerged independently in  
> various parts
> of the world and then rapidly spread.
>
> So this is a cultural innovation that happened actually quite late.  
> It happened
> after -- well after -- the invention of complex tools, the invention  
> of
> cooking, after we see evidence for religion, after the emergence of  
> art and
> music. War came after all those things, so in no way is it something  
> that's an
> instinct or really deeply embedded in us. It's a very recent cultural
> innovation and it's not something that then became permanent in all  
> human
> societies.
>
> The fascinating thing about war, too, is that it emerges in some  
> places and
> then it disappears. And some societies that were once extremely  
> warlike can
> become peaceful, at least when it comes to group violence, for very  
> long
> periods after that. Which again, undercuts the whole notion of war  
> being this
> deeply engrained biological behavior.
>
> BJ: So why does war happen?
>
> JH: After biology, the next most common explanation is that war  
> happens because
> humans tend to overbreed. We make too many copies of ourselves and  
> then we
> start fighting over stuff -- water, game, land, women have been a  
> source of
> conflict for fighting among men. Now we fight over oil and other  
> strategic
> resources. After biology, this resource competition theory is by far  
> the most
> common explanation of war. And often the two are combined, biology  
> plus
> resource competition.
>
> The problem is it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I look at the  
> evidence for the
> resource scarcity argument and there are some wars where there are  
> clearly some
> fights over resources, over oil or land or whatever. But there are  
> many wars
> that aren't. And the fascinating thing about war that a lot of  
> people fail to
> understand is that war can arise for almost an infinite variety of  
> reasons.
> Wars happen because maybe you just got some charismatic sociopath  
> who convinces
> people in his tribe to go and kick the asses of the tribe next door.  
> And when
> that happens, you have this new behavior that emerges that rapidly  
> spreads.
> What does that neighboring tribe do if it's attacked by the one led  
> by this
> sociopath? It either has to run away or it has to fight in self- 
> defense. That's
> what makes war so insidious.
>
> War really should be seen as a meme, as a self-perpetuating idea or  
> behavior
> that becomes very persistent and deep-rooted once it emerges in a  
> given region.
> And I think you can see the evidence of that over the last decade.  
> What have
> been the motives behind the wars that have happened starting with  
> 9/11? We
> invaded Afghanistan because we were attacked on 9/11. That was a war  
> of
> vengeance. We were trying to get the guys who did it to us. The same  
> with the
> invasion of Iraq. And if you didn't think Iraq was revenge for 9/11,  
> well, it
> was because Saddam Hussein was threatening us. We thought he had  
> weapons. So
> fear of war, in that case, caused us to launch a preemptive attack.
>
> Now you've got the case of Iran, the drums of war are beating again.  
> Why is
> that? Is it over resource competition? No, not at all. It's because  
> we think
> Iran is going to attack us because they're building nuclear weapons.  
> And of
> course Iran, if it is interested in nuclear weapons, is interested  
> in them
> because they think we're going to attack them or Israel is going to  
> attack
> them. So I think you see clear evidence even right now, if you look  
> around the
> world, as war as something that perpetuates itself apart from any  
> other causes
> or factors.
>
> BJ: If the acceptance of war's inevitability is largely a meme, an  
> idea that
> self-perpetuates in a culture, how do societies counter that?
>
> JH: Yeah, Jesus, it's a good question. I think we have already seen  
> over the
> last century a sea-change in popular attitudes toward war. If you go  
> back
> before World War I, you can find a lot of people, prominent  
> intellectuals and
> political leaders, who talked about war as something that was  
> intrinsically
> good. As something that was worth doing for its own sake because it  
> was good
> for the character of a nation. Teddy Roosevelt talked that way. And  
> so did a
> lot of prominent intellectuals. Even [the psychologist] William  
> James, who was
> a pacifist, granted that war can be very stimulating for character  
> and marshal
> virtues that are admirable. All that kind of bullshit.
> But the idea that war is just something that's good to do apart from  
> any other
> higher goal of national purpose or so forth has really diminished.  
> In part
> because the gigantic industrial scale of wars that we had with World  
> War I and
> World War II, which really took a lot of the glamour out of war.
>
> We still glorify the macho virtues of war in some ways. I think the  
> number-one
> movie last week was the one about the Navy Seals who got Osama bin  
> Laden. But
> it's not as deep-rooted as it once was. I feel as though there is so  
> much
> exposure now to the real horrors of war, from the inevitable civilian
> casualties and so forth. I think morally overall people are more  
> prepared to
> denounce war once and for all than they were at pretty much at any  
> other time
> in recent human history.
>
> BJ: Can you describe the implications of the fierce Amazonian tribe,  
> the
> Waorani, on the ability of mankind to turn away from war?
>
> JH: It was this tribe in Ecuadorian Amazon that was first studied  
> more than 50
> years ago by anthropologists and had extraordinary high rates of  
> violence. They
> were higher than anything that had ever been measured. More than 50  
> percent of
> the population died violently, for the most part, in raids of one  
> village on
> another. It had just always been that way. And of course, as I said,  
> it becomes
> self-perpetuating. People in each village would be so fearful of  
> everybody else
> that if you met somebody in the forest, you would immediately need  
> to run away
> or you'd try to kill them. And they were constantly carrying out  
> preemptive
> attacks on each other.
>
> But they were smart enough to realize that this was crazy. It was
> unsustainable. But how do you get out? And these missionaries came  
> up with an
> ingenious idea. They couldn't even have peace parleys because any  
> people
> meeting together from different villages would be worried that the  
> other guy
> would pull out a spear and stab them. And so the missionaries came  
> up with this
> ingenious idea of arranging negotiations by flying a plane over each  
> other's
> camps to first deliver conciliatory messages. By having people from  
> one village
> vowing to the other, "Hey listen, we've got to stop fighting. What  
> do you say?"
> And this gradually led to a truce. And this extremely violent  
> society became,
> not completely non-violent, to be honest, but much less violent. And
> especially, these rates of group attacks started diminishing in  
> frequency.
>
> It again shows the self-perpetuating nature of war and also the  
> ability of
> people collectively to come together and say -- apart from any other  
> conditions
> of the society like political, demographic, or economic factors --  
> "We don't
> want to do this anymore so let's stop. It's stupid. "
> And of course we've seen examples of this among very sophisticated  
> modern
> states. Switzerland and Sweden both about 200 years ago decided that  
> war was
> stupid and they stopped fighting. They are prepared vigorously to  
> defend
> themselves. They have an army. But they haven't been involved in any  
> war in
> combat.
>
> One of my favorite examples is Costa Rica, which in the 1940s went  
> through a
> terrible civil war in which the army turned against the people.  
> After the war
> was over, the victors, who were very progressive, especially in  
> retrospect,
> said, "We never want this to happen again. Armies in this country  
> seem only to
> cause trouble. So let's get rid of the standing army and invest  
> those resources
> in education and infrastructure and tourism and so forth." And as  
> you probably
> know, Costa Rica is in the middle of what has been over the last  
> half century
> one of the most violent places in the world. It's right next to  
> Nicaragua, near
> Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. And while war is raging all around  
> it and
> terrible poverty, Costa Rica has thrived. And according to lots of  
> so-called
> social happiness indexes, it's the happiest place on earth. And  
> again, it was
> just something they decided to do.
>
> Some people think that for war to end we have to first create a  
> utopia. We have
> to first have complete social justice and economic equality and get  
> rid of all
> poverty, have complete freedom and democracy and so forth. But  
> actually I think
> things work the other way. First, you get rid of war and militarism,  
> and then a
> lot of these other wonderful things can happen in part as a result  
> of that. And
> I think that's what Costa Rica has shown.
>
> BJ: You also debunk the notion of man as a natural warrior,  
> exploring the
> overwhelming reluctance of soldiers in major wars, including the  
> Civil War,
> World War I and World War II, to fire their guns directly at the  
> enemy, even
> with a clear shot and when ordered by their superiors. It was  
> definitely
> eye-opening to me.
>
> JH: It was eye-opening to me, too. And I love the fact that the  
> person who
> compiled these data is a guy named Dave Grossman, who is a Special  
> Forces
> colonel and an instructor at West Point. He's a soldier and a real  
> hard-ass.
> And he wrote this book called On Killing, which basically makes the  
> case and
> presents massive data to show that far from being innate warriors  
> who are just
> dying to kill people, the vast majority of men are extremely  
> reluctant to kill
> other people. And this has been a real problem for soldiers in wars  
> going very
> far back, including the Civil War, as you mentioned. There's some  
> evidence from
> the Napoleonic War. There was a big survey done of U.S. combat  
> veterans in
> World War II and it found that lots of guys who were infantrymen --  
> these are
> kind of the grunts in Word War II -- they were not firing at all or  
> were firing
> away from the enemy. They did not want to kill someone.
>
> As a result of that the Army was horrified and they completely  
> revamped their
> training to boost the firing rates of combat soldiers. They did  
> boost the rates
> in the Korean War and especially in the Vietnam War. But what  
> Grossman said is
> that as a result there are higher rates of post-traumatic stress  
> disorder. For
> example, in Vietnam, because the soldiers were reacting in horror  
> often to all
> the death they were meting out.
>
> BJ: Weren't these types of tactics to ensure higher firing rates  
> still employed
> by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan? And aren't they, then,  
> continuing
> to lead to higher rates of PTSD?
>
> Yeah. And so one of the things that's happened in modern warfare of  
> course is
> that you're not shooting somebody 30 passes away as often anymore.  
> Firing or
> killing has become even more automated. You have bombing. You have  
> very
> long-range artillery and so forth. I mean that was true by WWII as  
> well. But
> it's become even more true today. And of course now you have the  
> ultimate
> remote killing machine, which is the drone. You got a guy sitting in  
> an office
> in Nevada and he's pulling a trigger and blowing away a supposed  
> terrorist in
> Yemen or Pakistan or Iraq. And what's interesting is that there have  
> been all
> these reports that drone operators -- who are so far removed from  
> actual
> bloodshed, and are completely removed from any danger to themselves  
> -- are also
> experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Which, again, I think  
> shows that
> most people are not natural warriors. It's not something that most  
> people want
> to do.
>
>
> It's true also of the origins of war if you go back many thousands  
> of years to
> right up to the present. There's this wonderful anthropologist Sarah  
> Blaffer
> Hrdy, who has presented evidence about how war, once it emerged in  
> some of
> these very early tribal societies, became such an important part of  
> culture
> that it had a profound impact on male and female roles and identities.
>
> And it was the emergence of war that led to male macho-ness, the  
> male embrace
> of the kind of warrior identity and how being really tough and  
> aggressive was
> the essence of being a man. It wasn't that males are intrinsically  
> tough and
> aggressive and that's why war happens. It was more that the causality,
> according to Hrdy, was the other way around. War emerges and then  
> the culture
> tries to elevate the martial virtues because war then becomes such  
> an important
> part of the culture.
>
> BJ: You cite Abu Ghraib and the actions of, as former Defense  
> Secretary Donald
> Rumsfeld referred to them, a "few bad apples," the guards who were  
> involved in
> torture and abuse of prisoners and portrayed in the media as natural  
> born
> monsters. But you show how many people, including Rumsfeld, failed  
> to either
> acknowledge or understand that most causal factors of cruelty in  
> wartime
> settings most often stem not from individuals themselves but from  
> the fact of
> being immersed in a wartime setting, surrounded by war's inherent  
> brutality,
> bloodshed, fear and madness.
>
> JH: So again we've been talking about the degree to which humans are
> biologically predisposed to hurt each other. So one of the questions  
> is: Are
> there some people who are just bad apples or sociopathic or sadistic?
>
> In the case of Abu Ghraib, this was a real question. Were the people  
> who
> committed the abuse at Abu Ghraib just bad people, bad apples?  
> There's this
> wonderful book written by a very prominent psychologist named Philip  
> Zimbardo
> called The Lucifer Effect. He made a very good case that it's not  
> bad apples
> who generally are responsible. There are bad apples out there, but  
> almost all
> war crimes, abuse and atrocities and so forth, are a product of the  
> environment
> of what he called the "bad barrel," of a situation that almost  
> forces people to
> act violently and cruelly toward others.
>
> Zimbardo did this really dramatic experiment in the 1970s, one of  
> the most
> famous experiments in the history of social psychology, called the  
> Stanford
> Prison Experiment, where he got a bunch of good, clean-cut Stanford  
> students to
> pretend to be guards and prisoners in a fake prison in the basement  
> of a
> Stanford building. And within a couple of days the guards were  
> acting like
> absolute sadistic beasts to the prisoners, who were just other  
> Stanford
> students. These weren't sociopaths. These were kids who were just  
> playacting in
> the beginning but then quickly got into their roles so much that  
> things really
> got of hand.
>
> I think it's a very persuasive piece of evidence. You know, war is  
> like the
> ultimate bad barrel. Once a war breaks out, then good, humane,  
> decent people,
> in spite of themselves, often end up acting like absolute monsters.  
> And it's
> not something innate. It's not something that's always there in  
> their genes.
> It's something that's brought out by war itself.
>
> BJ: What is the case for the very small percentage of people who  
> enjoy killing
> or feel no compunction to kill as being the driving force of war  
> throughout
> history?
>
> JH: Well, this emerged from a study by a couple of psychiatrists  
> after World
> War II of combat veterans. They found that the vast majority of  
> people after
> continuous combat for 60 days basically go crazy. But a very small  
> percent,
> about 2 percent, are having a great time.
>
> There are some people who would say these natural-born killers or  
> sociopaths
> are responsible for all war. And some of them end up being leaders,  
> like Stalin
> and Hitler. Except that the evidence for that is not really good.  
> You can't
> underestimate the degree to which these people actually do  
> contribute to
> certain wars. Another case, for example, is the Rwanda genocide  
> [where a small
> percentage of people actually carried out the majority of the  
> killing].
>
> But I think that when you look at the totality of war through history,
> including wars that are happening right now around the world, that  
> explanation
> doesn't work very well. It's not like all the American soldiers who  
> are
> volunteers now in Iraq and Afghanistan are sociopaths. War is more  
> about
> conformity, or at least as much about conformity as it is about innate
> aggression and hostility.
>
> Modern warfare is so disconnected from the kind of basic male  
> aggression that
> leads to bar fights or hockey fights and that sort of thing. It  
> really needs to
> be explained more by political, social and cultural factors. It's  
> much more
> often that war turns people into sociopaths than sociopaths causing  
> war.
>
> BJ: What about the idea that if there were more women running  
> countries then
> that would lead to the end of war?
>
> JH: It has a lot of appeal and I kind of was favoring that for a  
> while in the
> way that I thought if all nations were democratic, then there would  
> be no war.
> The only problem is that there's so much counter-evidence. The  
> United States
> has remained extraordinarily belligerent and militaristic even as  
> women's
> rights have advanced. We haven't had a female president yet, but  
> we've had some
> very powerful female figures in politics, including Hillary Clinton,  
> who, as
> far as I can tell, is probably more hawkish than Barack Obama  
> himself. And you
> also have somebody like Condoleezza Rice. And there are very  
> militaristic
> female war leaders throughout history.
>
> BJ: One main criticism of your book is that you give short shrift to  
> the power
> and influence of the military-industrial complex, of weapons  
> manufacturers and
> their lobbyists and friends in government. How do you respond to that?
>
> JH: Yeah, I think that's a valid objection to my book. The military- 
> industrial
> complex is extremely important. Some people broaden that and say,  
> "You're not
> going to get rid of war as long as you have capitalism because we'll  
> always
> have war profiteering, where people are going to benefit too much  
> from war for
> it to go away." My response to that would be that the great titans of
> capitalism right now are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple.  
> Haliburton
> is like loose change in the pocket in one of these companies. It's  
> tiny. Even
> big aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin are tiny compared to  
> these other
> companies that just see the rest of the world not as places to be  
> conquered
> through war but as potential markets. They don't want war. They want  
> free trade
> and commerce. This is the impetus behind globalization.
>
> Globalization can lead to problems. It can lead to economic  
> exploitation and so
> forth. But capitalism, in general, and I hate to say this -- I'm  
> like a liberal
> socialist myself -- can be a very progressive force, a profoundly  
> antiwar force
> that I think, with courageous political leadership, will make the  
> problem of
> the military-industrial complex go away very rapidly. It's happened  
> in the
> past. It happened after the Civil War. It happened after World World  
> I. The
> problem is that since World War II the military-industrial complex  
> has become
> very powerful and entrenched. But I think with enough collective  
> will of the
> people and some decent political leadership, that's not going to be  
> a problem.
>
> BJ: Who is Gene Sharp and how has he influenced your thoughts on war?
>
> JH: He's one of the great minds and great moral leaders of our time.  
> He's a
> political scientist who started in the 1970s. He's churned out an  
> enormous
> number of papers and books on the power of nonviolent activism to  
> bring about
> extraordinary political change -- toppling dictators, overcoming  
> injustice
> within a society. He's looked not only at the obvious examples of  
> Gandhi and
> Martin Luther King, but at many other examples through history and  
> compiled all
> these techniques that people can use to accomplish pretty much any
> political-social goal in their society. Very quietly he has had an  
> enormous
> influence on world affairs. Just recently he's gotten a lot of  
> attention
> because it turns out that activists in Tunisia and Egypt, people who  
> were part
> of the Arab Spring, had adopted some of Sharp's techniques.
>
> I wish his writings were better known because I think the world  
> would be a
> better place. Obviously there is still a lot of tyranny and  
> injustice in the
> world. But Sharp holds out the hope that that can be overcome  
> nonviolently and
> that the consequences of nonviolent revolution are almost always  
> much better
> than violent revolution.
>
> BJ: What type of action do you hope your book inspires?
>
> JH: I mention somewhere in the book and would like this to be  
> discussed among
> progressive activists: What should your priorities be? You know, do  
> you work on
> environmental issues, against global warming? Against poverty and  
> world hunger?
> Do you work on the advancement of women's rights? I mean all those  
> are worthy
> causes. But I actually think that in terms of leverage, of focusing  
> on one
> thing that can then have a cascade of other positive effects,  
> focusing on
> militarism and war should be the priority. Because if we can really  
> reduce the
> militarism of this country, really cut back on our military budget,  
> get rid of
> nuclear weapons and create a more rational international policy,  
> then I think
> that a lot of these other things will be much easier to address.  
> Environmental
> issues, economic injustice issues, female inequality, all those  
> sorts of
> things.
>
> Brad Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and  
> contributing
> reporter for AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter @bradpjacobson.
> © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154508/

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