<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Friends,<div><br></div><div>Here is an article discussiong arguments regarding whether war is an inevitable and legitimate undertaking.</div><div><br></div><div>In the spirit of peace, justice and open discussion,</div><div><br></div><div>Fred Duperault</div><div><br></div><div> <br><div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>From: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">"Hank Stone<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>" <<a href="mailto:hstone@rochester.rr.com">hstone@rochester.rr.com</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Date: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">April 4, 2012 6:02:19 AM PDT</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>To: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="mailto:earthplan@lists.riseup.net">earthplan@lists.riseup.net</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Subject: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><b>[PEACE] War Isn't Inevitable</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> </div><div><br>I came across the excellent (but long) article below. I’ve summarized it<br>here:<br><br>When Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, he said “[W]ar is sometimes<br>necessary…Let's face it, we're not going to eradicate war in our lifetimes." <br>In a new book, The End of War,<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>veteran science journalist John Horgan argues<br>he was wrong.<br><br>Between 80 and 90 percent of people say war will never end. We're always going<br>to have wars of some kind or other. War is part of human nature.<br><br>Many scientists believe this too, and argue that we humans are genetically<br>similar to chimpanzees, and prone to violence.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But in hundreds of years of<br>observations of chimpanzees, there are almost no cases of attacks by one group<br>on another leading to death. Also, we are equally closely related to bonobos,<br>who are peaceful. <br><br>Furthermore, war is not ancient. It appeared relatively recently in the human<br>record, and then spread rapidly. Sometimes war emerges, but disappears. <br>Previously warlike peoples can become peaceful, so war isn’t deeply engrained<br>biological behavior.<br><br>Some believe competition for scarce resources explains wars. But wars can be<br>fought for any reason, when a charismatic sociopath convinces his tribe to<br>attack another. Then the attacked tribe has to either run away of fight in<br>self defense. War is insidious.<br><br>War is a self-perpetuating meme. We started war with Iraq based on the notion<br>that Iraq might get nuclear weapons and attack us. Now war against Iran is<br>proposed for the same reason. So we put Iran in the situation of needing<br>nuclear weapons to deter our attack.<br><br>Back before WWI, President Roosevelt and even pacifist William James believed<br>war could be good for the character of the nation. This was bullshit.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The two<br>world wars took a lot of the glamour out of it.<br><br>There was a fierce Amazonian tribe, the Waorani, whose villages continued to<br>raid each other. More than 50% of the population died violently. It was<br>self-perpetuating, but unsustainable. Trust levels were so low that they<br>couldn’t parlay, but missionaries helped them by dropping leaflets from<br>planes saying “Let’s stop this. It’s stupid.”<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>This led to a truce.<br><br>Switzerland and Sweden both gave up having wars years ago. Costa Rica<br>doesn’t even have an army. Some people think that to end war, you need<br>utopia first, but things work the other way. Costa Rica showed that by getting<br>rid of war and militarism, they drove out poverty and got freedom and<br>democracy.<br><br>The military did a study and found out that soldiers tend to be reluctant to<br>shoot people in battles. They were horrified, and trained soldiers differently<br>to get higher kill rates. But this led to more cases of Post Traumatic Stress<br>Disorder, even for people piloting drone airplanes from a place of safety. <br>Most people are not natural warriors.<br><br>Machismo doesn’t lead to war, but the other way around; war leads to the<br>notion that aggression and toughness are the essence of manhood.<br><br>Atrocities in wartime are usually not committed by bad people (“the bad<br>apple” idea). War creates a “bad barrel” that brings out the worst in<br>people. War is at least as much about conformity as it is about aggression and<br>hostility.<br><br>The military-industrial complex does promote war, but there are much bigger<br>companies that have more to gain from peaceful commerce. With the right<br>leadership, we could quickly eliminate the military-industrial complex.<br><br>The world faces, poverty and hunger, climate change, female inequality, and<br>more. In terms of leverage, we would be better off focusing on reducing<br>militarism, getting rid of nuclear weapons, and creating a more rational<br>international policy. That would make a lot of these other things easier to<br>address.<br><br><br>***********<br><br>Why War Isn't Inevitable: A Science Writer Studies the Secret to Peaceful<br>Societies<br>By Brad Jacobson, AlterNet<br><br>Posted on March 18, 2012, Printed on April 3, 2012<br><br><a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/154508/why_war_isn%27t_inevitable%3A_a_science_writer_studies_the_secret_to_peaceful_societies">http://www.alternet.org/story/154508/why_war_isn%27t_inevitable%3A_a_science_writer_studies_the_secret_to_peaceful_societies</a><br><br>When President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he expressed a<br>well-worn notion about warfare: "[W]ar is sometimes necessary, and war is at<br>some level an expression of human feelings." Today, as the drumbeats for war<br>with Iran once again reach bellicose heights, a timely new book argues that,<br>contrary to conventional wisdom, waging war is not an innate part of human<br>nature.<br><br>In The End of War, veteran science journalist John Horgan applies the<br>scientific method to reach a unique conclusion: biologically speaking, we are<br>just as likely to be peaceful as we are to be violent. So what keeps humans<br>bound by a seemingly never-ending cycle of war?<br><br>In a phone interview with AlterNet from his home in New York's Hudson Valley --<br>situated within earshot of the mortars and howitzers at West Point Military<br>Academy's artillery range -- Horgan dispelled multiple myths about the impetus<br>for war, the combination of which, he believes, sustains the institution of war<br>despite rational thought and an overwhelming human aversion to killing. A<br>longtime Scientific American writer and director of the Center for Science<br>Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, Horgan<br>also charts a new course for rejecting the old paradigm of war's inevitability<br>and finally releasing mankind from its destructive grip.<br><br>Brad Jacobson: Was there an overriding factor that drove you to write this<br>book?<br><br>John Horgan: Yeah, it was my discovery that started right after the U.S.<br>invasion of Iraq: the vast majority of people, both American and people around<br>the world, believe that war is a permanent part of the human condition. That<br>we've always fought wars and we always will. I have surveyed thousands of<br>people on this issue now, young and old. I ask people this question: Do you<br>think war will ever end? And usually between 80 and 90 percent of the time<br>people say, "No, war will never end. We're always going to have wars of some<br>kind or other." And when I would ask people why they were so pessimistic, they<br>would give me a range of reasons. Often it would be, "War is part of human<br>nature." "War is in our genes." Or it would be an environmental explanation:<br>war comes from the tendency of humans to overpopulate different regions,<br>leading to a competition for resources.<br><br>There have been other surveys of people's attitudes toward war going back to<br>the 1980s. I cited those in my book, too. And those found quite a bit of<br>pessimism, but not nearly as much as I found over the last seven to eight<br>years.<br><br>So I wrote the book basically to rebut this extremely pessimistic point of<br>view, which is also held by people at the highest levels of power. I quote<br>Barack Obama right at the beginning of my book. At the fucking Nobel Peace<br>Prize ceremony, he's giving this incredibly pessimistic and wrong view of<br>warfare as dating all the way back to the origin of humanity. And that leads<br>him to say, "Let's face it, we're not going to eradicate war in our lifetimes."<br>Even if you believe that, I think it's awful for our leader, especially someone<br>like Barack Obama, whom I voted for in part because I thought he would not be a<br>hawkish president and get us out of these terrible wars we've been in recently.<br>Even if he is personally pessimistic, I want vision from him, especially when<br>he's accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. How about a vision of a world without war<br>instead of saying this is just the way it is and you have to accept it?<br><br>BJ: Didn't he also receive the Nobel just days after calling for a troop<br>buildup in Afghanistan?<br><br>JH: That's right. When he was in Oslo, Norway, where he accepted the Peace<br>Prize, this was about nine days after he had announced that he was sending<br>30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.<br><br>BJ: You also cite another line from Obama's Nobel acceptance speech, which you<br>dispel in your book: "War in one form or another appeared with the first man."<br>Why do you think this belief has become such entrenched conventional wisdom?<br><br>JH: That's a good question. I have been tracking the anthropology of war<br>literature since the late 1980s. And since then, this view that war is really<br>ancient and innate has become dominant in science. There's a group of<br>scientists at Harvard, in particular, starting with Edward Wilson, also Richard<br>Wrangham, Steven Pinker, Steven LeBlanc. Very influential, very smart,<br>respected scientists who've been repeatedly putting out this idea that war, as<br>Obama said, is at least as old as humans, and might even be older and go back<br>millions of years to the common ancestor with chimpanzees. That theory is now<br>accepted and has seeped down to the level of the general population. I hear it<br>all the time. I see it cited in all sorts of popular books about human nature,<br>human psychology, as well as about aggression and warfare.<br><br>And I think that really, as a scientific hypothesis, has a lot to do with<br>people's pessimism these days. In addition to a more obvious reason, which<br>would be that over the last decade we've had 9/11, followed by two very serious<br>wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the war on terror. So I think this bad<br>scientific theory has a lot to do with people's pessimism, which is why I<br>devote a chunk of my book to rebutting that.<br><br>BJ: I found it fascinating that you not only show in the book that humans are<br>as equally genetically related to chimpanzees as they are to peace-loving<br>bonobos, but also you debunk the idea that chimpanzees are necessarily innately<br>violent to begin with.<br><br>JH: And not just violent to begin with, which they can be. The claim is more<br>specific than that: that chimps in one group band together and raid chimps from<br>another group. Usually it's just ambushing one or two. In most cases, it's just<br>finding a little baby and ripping it apart.<br>What I found when I looked at the literature carefully is we're talking about a<br>very small number of these incidents over the past few decades. Depending on<br>how you count them, just a couple of dozen. And you have literally hundreds of<br>years of human observations, if you count individual scientists watching<br>individual troupes [of chimpanzees], but which has accumulated just a handful<br>of these troupe raids that lead to deaths. Even anthropologist Richard Wrangham<br>-- who's sort of the chief proponent of this idea that human warfare and<br>chimpanzee warfare are very similar -- says that this is very rare behavior.<br>And Jane Goodall has suggested that this behavior might be a response to<br>changes in the way that chimps behave as a result of the encroachment of humans<br>on their habitat, even as a result, for example, of Goodall herself putting out<br>bananas and so forth.<br><br>So, you know, you've got this really dramatic, consequential claim about human<br>nature and about war, this great scourge of humanity, based on really flimsy<br>evidence. I mean I have great respect for Steve Pinker and Ed Wilson and even<br>Richard Wrangham. But they should know better than to be putting out this<br>theory as fact when the facts do not support it.<br><br>BJ: If humans are as genetically related to bonobos as we are to chimpanzees,<br>why isn't that cited more often in discussions on the human impetus for war?<br><br>JH: Well, you know, bonobos are getting a lot of press lately. Peaceniks love<br>to cite them, especially peaceniks who think that humans are innately<br>pacifistic and gentle. Actually, I cite the bonobos research to counter all the<br>chimp stuff. But really I think all of that is pretty much irrelevant. We<br>really should be forgetting about the chimpanzee and bonobos stuff -- that<br>might've evolved very recently. The way that chimps or bonobos act now might<br>have nothing to do with what was happening millions of years ago with the<br>common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.<br><br>The literature that I think is really significant from this question about the<br>origins of war concerns the first appearance of war in the archeological<br>record. The point I make in my book is that, in spite of what is often said<br>about war being very ancient going back to the beginning of humanity, as Obama<br>said, war is quite recent. The oldest evidence for war is 12,000 years ago and<br>even that is kind of an outlier. Really all the evidence for war starts about<br>10,000 years ago. And war seems to have emerged independently in various parts<br>of the world and then rapidly spread.<br><br>So this is a cultural innovation that happened actually quite late. It happened<br>after -- well after -- the invention of complex tools, the invention of<br>cooking, after we see evidence for religion, after the emergence of art and<br>music. War came after all those things, so in no way is it something that's an<br>instinct or really deeply embedded in us. It's a very recent cultural<br>innovation and it's not something that then became permanent in all human<br>societies.<br><br>The fascinating thing about war, too, is that it emerges in some places and<br>then it disappears. And some societies that were once extremely warlike can<br>become peaceful, at least when it comes to group violence, for very long<br>periods after that. Which again, undercuts the whole notion of war being this<br>deeply engrained biological behavior.<br><br>BJ: So why does war happen?<br><br>JH: After biology, the next most common explanation is that war happens because<br>humans tend to overbreed. We make too many copies of ourselves and then we<br>start fighting over stuff -- water, game, land, women have been a source of<br>conflict for fighting among men. Now we fight over oil and other strategic<br>resources. After biology, this resource competition theory is by far the most<br>common explanation of war. And often the two are combined, biology plus<br>resource competition.<br><br>The problem is it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I look at the evidence for the<br>resource scarcity argument and there are some wars where there are clearly some<br>fights over resources, over oil or land or whatever. But there are many wars<br>that aren't. And the fascinating thing about war that a lot of people fail to<br>understand is that war can arise for almost an infinite variety of reasons.<br>Wars happen because maybe you just got some charismatic sociopath who convinces<br>people in his tribe to go and kick the asses of the tribe next door. And when<br>that happens, you have this new behavior that emerges that rapidly spreads.<br>What does that neighboring tribe do if it's attacked by the one led by this<br>sociopath? It either has to run away or it has to fight in self-defense. That's<br>what makes war so insidious.<br><br>War really should be seen as a meme, as a self-perpetuating idea or behavior<br>that becomes very persistent and deep-rooted once it emerges in a given region.<br>And I think you can see the evidence of that over the last decade. What have<br>been the motives behind the wars that have happened starting with 9/11? We<br>invaded Afghanistan because we were attacked on 9/11. That was a war of<br>vengeance. We were trying to get the guys who did it to us. The same with the<br>invasion of Iraq. And if you didn't think Iraq was revenge for 9/11, well, it<br>was because Saddam Hussein was threatening us. We thought he had weapons. So<br>fear of war, in that case, caused us to launch a preemptive attack.<br><br>Now you've got the case of Iran, the drums of war are beating again. Why is<br>that? Is it over resource competition? No, not at all. It's because we think<br>Iran is going to attack us because they're building nuclear weapons. And of<br>course Iran, if it is interested in nuclear weapons, is interested in them<br>because they think we're going to attack them or Israel is going to attack<br>them. So I think you see clear evidence even right now, if you look around the<br>world, as war as something that perpetuates itself apart from any other causes<br>or factors.<br><br>BJ: If the acceptance of war's inevitability is largely a meme, an idea that<br>self-perpetuates in a culture, how do societies counter that?<br><br>JH: Yeah, Jesus, it's a good question. I think we have already seen over the<br>last century a sea-change in popular attitudes toward war. If you go back<br>before World War I, you can find a lot of people, prominent intellectuals and<br>political leaders, who talked about war as something that was intrinsically<br>good. As something that was worth doing for its own sake because it was good<br>for the character of a nation. Teddy Roosevelt talked that way. And so did a<br>lot of prominent intellectuals. Even [the psychologist] William James, who was<br>a pacifist, granted that war can be very stimulating for character and marshal<br>virtues that are admirable. All that kind of bullshit.<br>But the idea that war is just something that's good to do apart from any other<br>higher goal of national purpose or so forth has really diminished. In part<br>because the gigantic industrial scale of wars that we had with World War I and<br>World War II, which really took a lot of the glamour out of war.<br><br>We still glorify the macho virtues of war in some ways. I think the number-one<br>movie last week was the one about the Navy Seals who got Osama bin Laden. But<br>it's not as deep-rooted as it once was. I feel as though there is so much<br>exposure now to the real horrors of war, from the inevitable civilian<br>casualties and so forth. I think morally overall people are more prepared to<br>denounce war once and for all than they were at pretty much at any other time<br>in recent human history.<br><br>BJ: Can you describe the implications of the fierce Amazonian tribe, the<br>Waorani, on the ability of mankind to turn away from war?<br><br>JH: It was this tribe in Ecuadorian Amazon that was first studied more than 50<br>years ago by anthropologists and had extraordinary high rates of violence. They<br>were higher than anything that had ever been measured. More than 50 percent of<br>the population died violently, for the most part, in raids of one village on<br>another. It had just always been that way. And of course, as I said, it becomes<br>self-perpetuating. People in each village would be so fearful of everybody else<br>that if you met somebody in the forest, you would immediately need to run away<br>or you'd try to kill them. And they were constantly carrying out preemptive<br>attacks on each other.<br><br>But they were smart enough to realize that this was crazy. It was<br>unsustainable. But how do you get out? And these missionaries came up with an<br>ingenious idea. They couldn't even have peace parleys because any people<br>meeting together from different villages would be worried that the other guy<br>would pull out a spear and stab them. And so the missionaries came up with this<br>ingenious idea of arranging negotiations by flying a plane over each other's<br>camps to first deliver conciliatory messages. By having people from one village<br>vowing to the other, "Hey listen, we've got to stop fighting. What do you say?"<br>And this gradually led to a truce. And this extremely violent society became,<br>not completely non-violent, to be honest, but much less violent. And<br>especially, these rates of group attacks started diminishing in frequency.<br><br>It again shows the self-perpetuating nature of war and also the ability of<br>people collectively to come together and say -- apart from any other conditions<br>of the society like political, demographic, or economic factors -- "We don't<br>want to do this anymore so let's stop. It's stupid. "<br>And of course we've seen examples of this among very sophisticated modern<br>states. Switzerland and Sweden both about 200 years ago decided that war was<br>stupid and they stopped fighting. They are prepared vigorously to defend<br>themselves. They have an army. But they haven't been involved in any war in<br>combat.<br><br>One of my favorite examples is Costa Rica, which in the 1940s went through a<br>terrible civil war in which the army turned against the people. After the war<br>was over, the victors, who were very progressive, especially in retrospect,<br>said, "We never want this to happen again. Armies in this country seem only to<br>cause trouble. So let's get rid of the standing army and invest those resources<br>in education and infrastructure and tourism and so forth." And as you probably<br>know, Costa Rica is in the middle of what has been over the last half century<br>one of the most violent places in the world. It's right next to Nicaragua, near<br>Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. And while war is raging all around it and<br>terrible poverty, Costa Rica has thrived. And according to lots of so-called<br>social happiness indexes, it's the happiest place on earth. And again, it was<br>just something they decided to do.<br><br>Some people think that for war to end we have to first create a utopia. We have<br>to first have complete social justice and economic equality and get rid of all<br>poverty, have complete freedom and democracy and so forth. But actually I think<br>things work the other way. First, you get rid of war and militarism, and then a<br>lot of these other wonderful things can happen in part as a result of that. And<br>I think that's what Costa Rica has shown.<br><br>BJ: You also debunk the notion of man as a natural warrior, exploring the<br>overwhelming reluctance of soldiers in major wars, including the Civil War,<br>World War I and World War II, to fire their guns directly at the enemy, even<br>with a clear shot and when ordered by their superiors. It was definitely<br>eye-opening to me.<br><br>JH: It was eye-opening to me, too. And I love the fact that the person who<br>compiled these data is a guy named Dave Grossman, who is a Special Forces<br>colonel and an instructor at West Point. He's a soldier and a real hard-ass.<br>And he wrote this book called On Killing, which basically makes the case and<br>presents massive data to show that far from being innate warriors who are just<br>dying to kill people, the vast majority of men are extremely reluctant to kill<br>other people. And this has been a real problem for soldiers in wars going very<br>far back, including the Civil War, as you mentioned. There's some evidence from<br>the Napoleonic War. There was a big survey done of U.S. combat veterans in<br>World War II and it found that lots of guys who were infantrymen -- these are<br>kind of the grunts in Word War II -- they were not firing at all or were firing<br>away from the enemy. They did not want to kill someone.<br><br>As a result of that the Army was horrified and they completely revamped their<br>training to boost the firing rates of combat soldiers. They did boost the rates<br>in the Korean War and especially in the Vietnam War. But what Grossman said is<br>that as a result there are higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. For<br>example, in Vietnam, because the soldiers were reacting in horror often to all<br>the death they were meting out.<br><br>BJ: Weren't these types of tactics to ensure higher firing rates still employed<br>by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan? And aren't they, then, continuing<br>to lead to higher rates of PTSD?<br><br>Yeah. And so one of the things that's happened in modern warfare of course is<br>that you're not shooting somebody 30 passes away as often anymore. Firing or<br>killing has become even more automated. You have bombing. You have very<br>long-range artillery and so forth. I mean that was true by WWII as well. But<br>it's become even more true today. And of course now you have the ultimate<br>remote killing machine, which is the drone. You got a guy sitting in an office<br>in Nevada and he's pulling a trigger and blowing away a supposed terrorist in<br>Yemen or Pakistan or Iraq. And what's interesting is that there have been all<br>these reports that drone operators -- who are so far removed from actual<br>bloodshed, and are completely removed from any danger to themselves -- are also<br>experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Which, again, I think shows that<br>most people are not natural warriors. It's not something that most people want<br>to do.<br><br><br>It's true also of the origins of war if you go back many thousands of years to<br>right up to the present. There's this wonderful anthropologist Sarah Blaffer<br>Hrdy, who has presented evidence about how war, once it emerged in some of<br>these very early tribal societies, became such an important part of culture<br>that it had a profound impact on male and female roles and identities. <br><br>And it was the emergence of war that led to male macho-ness, the male embrace<br>of the kind of warrior identity and how being really tough and aggressive was<br>the essence of being a man. It wasn't that males are intrinsically tough and<br>aggressive and that's why war happens. It was more that the causality,<br>according to Hrdy, was the other way around. War emerges and then the culture<br>tries to elevate the martial virtues because war then becomes such an important<br>part of the culture.<br><br>BJ: You cite Abu Ghraib and the actions of, as former Defense Secretary Donald<br>Rumsfeld referred to them, a "few bad apples," the guards who were involved in<br>torture and abuse of prisoners and portrayed in the media as natural born<br>monsters. But you show how many people, including Rumsfeld, failed to either<br>acknowledge or understand that most causal factors of cruelty in wartime<br>settings most often stem not from individuals themselves but from the fact of<br>being immersed in a wartime setting, surrounded by war's inherent brutality,<br>bloodshed, fear and madness.<br><br>JH: So again we've been talking about the degree to which humans are<br>biologically predisposed to hurt each other. So one of the questions is: Are<br>there some people who are just bad apples or sociopathic or sadistic?<br><br>In the case of Abu Ghraib, this was a real question. Were the people who<br>committed the abuse at Abu Ghraib just bad people, bad apples? There's this<br>wonderful book written by a very prominent psychologist named Philip Zimbardo<br>called The Lucifer Effect. He made a very good case that it's not bad apples<br>who generally are responsible. There are bad apples out there, but almost all<br>war crimes, abuse and atrocities and so forth, are a product of the environment<br>of what he called the "bad barrel," of a situation that almost forces people to<br>act violently and cruelly toward others.<br><br>Zimbardo did this really dramatic experiment in the 1970s, one of the most<br>famous experiments in the history of social psychology, called the Stanford<br>Prison Experiment, where he got a bunch of good, clean-cut Stanford students to<br>pretend to be guards and prisoners in a fake prison in the basement of a<br>Stanford building. And within a couple of days the guards were acting like<br>absolute sadistic beasts to the prisoners, who were just other Stanford<br>students. These weren't sociopaths. These were kids who were just playacting in<br>the beginning but then quickly got into their roles so much that things really<br>got of hand.<br><br>I think it's a very persuasive piece of evidence. You know, war is like the<br>ultimate bad barrel. Once a war breaks out, then good, humane, decent people,<br>in spite of themselves, often end up acting like absolute monsters. And it's<br>not something innate. It's not something that's always there in their genes.<br>It's something that's brought out by war itself.<br><br>BJ: What is the case for the very small percentage of people who enjoy killing<br>or feel no compunction to kill as being the driving force of war throughout<br>history?<br><br>JH: Well, this emerged from a study by a couple of psychiatrists after World<br>War II of combat veterans. They found that the vast majority of people after<br>continuous combat for 60 days basically go crazy. But a very small percent,<br>about 2 percent, are having a great time.<br><br>There are some people who would say these natural-born killers or sociopaths<br>are responsible for all war. And some of them end up being leaders, like Stalin<br>and Hitler. Except that the evidence for that is not really good. You can't<br>underestimate the degree to which these people actually do contribute to<br>certain wars. Another case, for example, is the Rwanda genocide [where a small<br>percentage of people actually carried out the majority of the killing].<br><br>But I think that when you look at the totality of war through history,<br>including wars that are happening right now around the world, that explanation<br>doesn't work very well. It's not like all the American soldiers who are<br>volunteers now in Iraq and Afghanistan are sociopaths. War is more about<br>conformity, or at least as much about conformity as it is about innate<br>aggression and hostility.<br><br>Modern warfare is so disconnected from the kind of basic male aggression that<br>leads to bar fights or hockey fights and that sort of thing. It really needs to<br>be explained more by political, social and cultural factors. It's much more<br>often that war turns people into sociopaths than sociopaths causing war.<br><br>BJ: What about the idea that if there were more women running countries then<br>that would lead to the end of war?<br><br>JH: It has a lot of appeal and I kind of was favoring that for a while in the<br>way that I thought if all nations were democratic, then there would be no war.<br>The only problem is that there's so much counter-evidence. The United States<br>has remained extraordinarily belligerent and militaristic even as women's<br>rights have advanced. We haven't had a female president yet, but we've had some<br>very powerful female figures in politics, including Hillary Clinton, who, as<br>far as I can tell, is probably more hawkish than Barack Obama himself. And you<br>also have somebody like Condoleezza Rice. And there are very militaristic<br>female war leaders throughout history.<br><br>BJ: One main criticism of your book is that you give short shrift to the power<br>and influence of the military-industrial complex, of weapons manufacturers and<br>their lobbyists and friends in government. How do you respond to that?<br><br>JH: Yeah, I think that's a valid objection to my book. The military-industrial<br>complex is extremely important. Some people broaden that and say, "You're not<br>going to get rid of war as long as you have capitalism because we'll always<br>have war profiteering, where people are going to benefit too much from war for<br>it to go away." My response to that would be that the great titans of<br>capitalism right now are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple. Haliburton<br>is like loose change in the pocket in one of these companies. It's tiny. Even<br>big aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin are tiny compared to these other<br>companies that just see the rest of the world not as places to be conquered<br>through war but as potential markets. They don't want war. They want free trade<br>and commerce. This is the impetus behind globalization.<br><br>Globalization can lead to problems. It can lead to economic exploitation and so<br>forth. But capitalism, in general, and I hate to say this -- I'm like a liberal<br>socialist myself -- can be a very progressive force, a profoundly antiwar force<br>that I think, with courageous political leadership, will make the problem of<br>the military-industrial complex go away very rapidly. It's happened in the<br>past. It happened after the Civil War. It happened after World World I. The<br>problem is that since World War II the military-industrial complex has become<br>very powerful and entrenched. But I think with enough collective will of the<br>people and some decent political leadership, that's not going to be a problem.<br><br>BJ: Who is Gene Sharp and how has he influenced your thoughts on war?<br><br>JH: He's one of the great minds and great moral leaders of our time. He's a<br>political scientist who started in the 1970s. He's churned out an enormous<br>number of papers and books on the power of nonviolent activism to bring about<br>extraordinary political change -- toppling dictators, overcoming injustice<br>within a society. He's looked not only at the obvious examples of Gandhi and<br>Martin Luther King, but at many other examples through history and compiled all<br>these techniques that people can use to accomplish pretty much any<br>political-social goal in their society. Very quietly he has had an enormous<br>influence on world affairs. Just recently he's gotten a lot of attention<br>because it turns out that activists in Tunisia and Egypt, people who were part<br>of the Arab Spring, had adopted some of Sharp's techniques.<br><br>I wish his writings were better known because I think the world would be a<br>better place. Obviously there is still a lot of tyranny and injustice in the<br>world. But Sharp holds out the hope that that can be overcome nonviolently and<br>that the consequences of nonviolent revolution are almost always much better<br>than violent revolution.<br><br>BJ: What type of action do you hope your book inspires?<br><br>JH: I mention somewhere in the book and would like this to be discussed among<br>progressive activists: What should your priorities be? You know, do you work on<br>environmental issues, against global warming? Against poverty and world hunger?<br>Do you work on the advancement of women's rights? I mean all those are worthy<br>causes. But I actually think that in terms of leverage, of focusing on one<br>thing that can then have a cascade of other positive effects, focusing on<br>militarism and war should be the priority. Because if we can really reduce the<br>militarism of this country, really cut back on our military budget, get rid of<br>nuclear weapons and create a more rational international policy, then I think<br>that a lot of these other things will be much easier to address. Environmental<br>issues, economic injustice issues, female inequality, all those sorts of<br>things.<br><br>Brad Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and contributing<br>reporter for AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter @bradpjacobson. <br>© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.<br>View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154508/<br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>