Harry Targ
The
Peace Movement Today
I have been a member of a grassroots peace group for
25 years. We mobilized a teach-in and other activities against Gulf War One,
had daily demonstrations against the bombing of Serbia, mobilized panels and
demonstrations against the lead up to and perpetuation of the brutal war in
Iraq, worked with Palestinian solidarity groups, and marched against proposed
bombing of Syria in 2013. Our numbers have peaked and ebbed over this long
period. Currently membership is less than ten, although many former and current
members have been involved in a variety of other campaigns around such issues
as Moral Mondays, Black Lives Matter, anti-Right-to-Work, BDS, and educational
issues.
I am also a member of a socialist organization,
which has had an active Peace and Solidarity Committee. Members have
participated in the organization of United for Peace and Justice, helped
mobilize large rallies in opposition to nuclear weapons, the war in Iraq, the
bombing of Syria, and also in opposition to climate change and the Trans Pacific
Partnership (TPP). Also members have worked in solidarity with the peoples of
Cuba and Venezuela. But the range of activities, the numbers involved in peace
activities, and the patterns of outreach in solidarity with other organizations
which are part of the peace movement, have declined.
I write about my personal experience only to reflect
on the peace movement at large. First, the history of peace movement solidarity
has been intimately connected to anti-racist, pro-labor, women’s, and
environmental struggles for decades. When Dr. King and Mohammed Ali connected
the evils of Vietnam with racism and poverty at home proponents of peace and social and economic justice gained
in strength.
Second, the relative strength in number, message,
and organization of the peace movement has varied significantly over time.
Since the onset of the Cold War peace and solidarity activities have been most
vibrant during the Vietnam War, the wars against Central America, Gulf War One,
the bombing of Serbia, the Iraq War, Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza, and
threats of bombing Syria in 2013.
However, reflecting on activities I have some
experience with and my perceptions of peace movement activities generally, my
sense is that today the movement is dormant. Paradoxically, with expanding war
and terrorism on the world stage, the spread of new high technology instruments
of slaughter, the deconstruction of whole states and societies, the danger of
the return to big power conflict, and continuing increases in military spending,
the voices of the peace movement have been muted. This is a dilemma not only
for peace but for justice, saving the environment, and ending racism and
sexism. During this disturbing period in world history and an upcoming election
in the United States, it is useful to step back and analyze “the time of day”
on a worldwide basis: as to global class forces and their ideologies;
contemporary techniques of empire and their consequences for the lives of
billions; individual global crises; and where presidential candidates stand on
issues of war and peace and foreign policy in general.
Then assessing the constellation of political
capabilities of the peace movement in the context of the time of day, peace
activists can better pose questions about what they/we should do next.
The
Time of Day:
The
Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World
From a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:
HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves why: It generated unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people out of poverty; democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations; and for seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers. No wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.
The Washington Post editorial quoted above clearly articulates the
dominant view envisioned by US foreign policy elites for the years ahead: about
global political economy, militarism, and ideology. It in effect constitutes a
synthesis of the "neocon" and the "liberal interventionist"
wings of the ruling class. First, it is inspired by the necessity of 21st
century capitalism to defend neoliberal globalization: government for the rich,
austerity for the many, and deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation.
(Neoliberal globalization, the latest phase in the development of international
capitalism is described in an important new book, Jerry Harris, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of
Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).
Second, the Post vision of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted
United States military and economic hegemony that has been a central feature of
policymaking at least since the end of World War II even though time after time
it has suffered setbacks: from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization
across the Global South, and to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia,
the Middle East, Latin America, and even Europe. In addition, despite recent
setbacks, grassroots mass mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and
austerity policies have risen everywhere, even in the United States. The Washington Post speaks to efforts to
reassemble the same constellation of political forces, military resources, and
concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than at any time since the
establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the last World War.
Historian, Michael Stanley, in an essay entitled
“‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism,”
(Common Dreams, February 26, 2016) points to the ideological glue that is used
by foreign policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of
neoliberal globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old
idea of American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been used by elites
since the foundation of the Republic.
The modern version, borne in the context of
continental and global expansion, serves to justify an imperial US role in the
world. Along with posturing that the United States is somehow special and has
much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism presumes the world has little
to offer the United States. The only difference between Democrats and
Republicans on foreign policy is whether the exceptionalism still exists and
must be maintained or has dissipated requiring the need to “make America great
again.” Leaders of both parties, however, support the national security state,
high military expenditures, and a global presence—military, economic,
political, and cultural.
Techniques
of Empire Today
Although the imperial agenda, and the ideological
precepts justifying it, has remained the same for two hundred years the
techniques of empire have changed as growing resistance at home and abroad and
new technologies dictate. Changes in warfare, other violence, and imperial expansion
include the following:
-Wars are internal much more than international and
casualties are overwhelmingly civilian rather than military.
-The global presence of some form of the United
States military is ubiquitous-between 700-and 1,000 military bases, in anywhere
from 40 to 120 countries
- US military operations have been privatized. A
2010 Washington Post report found
1,911 intelligence contracting firms doing top secret work for 1,271 government
organizations at over 10,000 sites. Ninety percent of such work is being done
by 110 contractors.
-More “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” have been used to
kill alleged enemies over the last eight years as the entire prior period of US
military operations. Drones have come home as their use by the Dallas police
recently showed.
-US agencies, such as the CIA, have been engaged in
the increased use of assassinations and efforts to undermine governments. One
report indicated that there are 13,000 assassination commandoes operating
around the world.
-So-called “humanitarian assistance” is used to
support United States policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
For example, a New York Times story
reported that at least 40 American groups received $200 million in
tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
over the last decade.
Some generalizations we can draw from the new
techniques of war are the following:
-Imperial rule has become global.
-The Military/industrial complex has expanded beyond
President Eisenhower’s wildest nightmares. Large sectors of military
operations—from cooking and cleaning to killing—have been privatized.
-Military operations continue and expand without
“boots on the ground.” Empires can kill with impunity.
Recently, Nick Turse and colleagues reported on data indicating that the United States has
been engaged in secret military training of personnel in many countries, what
they called ‘a shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides
instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police,
and other personnel.” (Douglas Gillison,
Nick Turse, Moiz Syed, “How the U.S.
Trains Killers Worldwide,” Portside, July 13, 2016).
Their report is worth further quoting:
“The data show training at no fewer than 471
locations in 120 countries….involving on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies,
civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military
units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of
five states.” Perhaps most important for the peace movement is the following:
Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some $122
billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training
network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.”
Impacts
of 21st Century Imperialism
By any measure the pain and suffering brought by 21st
century imperialism is staggering. US Labor Against the War recently reported
that sources estimate 1.3 million people, mostly in the Middle East and South
Asia, have died due to the war on terrorism initiated in 2001. They quote a
research report that estimates that one million Iraqis have died since 2003 and
an additional 220,000 citizens of Afghanistan and 80,000 from Pakistan. Other
sources claim these figures are too conservative and remind us of the untold
thousands upon thousands who have died directly from war and violence in Libya,
Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and North
Africa.
These figures, of course, address deaths directly
attributed to war and terrorism but do not include economic sanctions, massive
flight of peoples from war zones, persecution by authoritarian regimes,
environmental devastation and drone strikes and assassinations. Large areas of
the globe, centered in the Middle East and North Africa are ungovernable with
foreign intervention and anomic domestic violence on the rise. In a troubling
essay by Patrick Cockburn the author asserts that:
“We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast
swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven
ongoing wars-in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South
Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart
the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they
will ever recover.” (Patrick Cockburn, “The Age of Disintegration:
Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World,” The Unz Review: Mobile, June 28, 2016).
Cockburn suggests that this fragmentation has core
features: no winners and losers, deconstruction of states, massive population
upheavals and migrations, religious fundamentalism replacing socialist and/or nationalist
politics, and outside interventions. The Global South project Vijay Prashad
described so well in The Darker Nations
has been superseded by a competing fundamentalist projects.
Specific
Cases
NATO/Ukraine/New Cold War
Recently leaders of the 28 NATO countries met in
summit in Poland to reaffirm their commitment to the military alliance that was
established in 1949 for the sole purpose of protecting the European continent
from any possible Soviet military intervention. With the collapse of the former
Soviet Union, rather than dissolving, NATO took on the task of policing the
world for neoliberal globalization and the states ‘victorious” in the Cold War.
NATO was the official operational arm of military operations in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the military force that would destroy the Gaddafi
regime in Libya.
After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, NATO
incorporated the states in Eastern Europe that had been affiliated with it. Now
Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States are the frontline in the ongoing
hostilities with Russia. They and western financiers from Ukraine, with
substantial assistance from the United States, engineered the coup that ousted
a corrupt but elected President in Ukraine. This set off an ongoing civil war
between those in the population who want to continue ties to Russia and others
who want Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO. The instability in Kiev
was orchestrated by high US state department officials who advocate a New Cold
War with Russia.
At the NATO summit it was agreed to establish four
battalion-sized “battle groups” in Poland and the Baltic states. To use the
language of the Cold War, this small force could serve as a “trip wire” that
could precipitate an “incident” and a major war with Russia. NATO agreed to
bolster the Ukraine military. The alliance would commit to establishing a
controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe. And NATO countries promised to spend two
percent of their budgets on the military. The continued commitment of the
United States was affirmed by President Obama.
The Asian Pivot
In 2011, US spokespersons announced that the country
would shift resources and attention to Asia from the Middle East, an area with
demanding security and economic interests. Although US/Chinese dialogue
continues the United States has criticized China’s repositioning of what it
regards as its possessions in the South China Sea. The United States has
expanded military relations with Vietnam, reestablished military bases in the
Philippines, and has generally avoided criticizing efforts by ruling Japanese
politicians to revise their constitution to allow for a full-scale
remilitarization. The United States has threatened North Korea over their
military maneuvers and has bolstered the South Korean military. On the economic
front the United States has been instrumental in building support for the Trans
Pacific Partnership (TPP) to challenge Chinese economic hegemony in the region.
With a growing US presence the possibility of a New Cold War in Asia becomes a
possibility.
The Middle East
Most American politicians express their belief that
the US must maintain a special relationship with the state of Israel. One of
the few active mobilizations for peace today is the worldwide campaign to
demand governments, corporations, and other institutions boycott, and divest
holdings in what is regarded as an apartheid state, Israel, which oppresses its
Arab population and those living in the Occupied Territories. The campaign is
so effective that along with national politicians, governors and state
legislatures have taken stands against the BDS campaign.
Next to the historic US ties to Israel, most
analysts see the deconstruction of the Middle East that Cockburn wrote about as
a direct result of the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Over the next decade, Syria,
Libya, Yemen and other countries have been torn apart by civil war fueled by
western, primarily US, intervention, continuing US support of Saudi Arabian
militarism, and the fractionalization of states in the region, most recently
Turkey.
This ten year war on the Middle East has created a
growing terrorist response directed at western targets and an ideological campaign,
including calls to violence, against all the traditional imperial powers who
dominated the region for one hundred years. As Cockburn suggested, with the
successful United States and European war on radical nationalism in the region
since the onset of the Cold War, secularism has been replaced by religious
fundamentalism as the dominant ideological force in the region.
With this as a backdrop, the United States response to violence is stepped up high-tech killing
justified by a public campaign that demonizes Muslim people in the United
States and everywhere in the world.
AFRICOM
Nick Turse reports on the growing US military
presence on the African continent. A special command structure, AFRICOM, was
established in 2008 to oversee US security interests on the continent.
Initially, Turse reports, the Pentagon claimed that it had one larger base,
Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But enterprising researchers have discovered that
the US military has a dense network of “cooperative security outposts,” bases and
other sites of military presence, at least 60 across the continent, in 34
countries. The US has defense attaches in 38 countries.
An Oxford researcher was quoted by Turse on the new
oversite of the African continent.
“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a
laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing
forces….Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops,
equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward
operating bases…so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very
large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary” (Nick
Turse, “America’s Empire of African Bases,” TomDispatch.com,
November 17, 2015).
Latin America
United States foreign policy toward Latin America
has taken a variety of forms since the onset of the 21st century.
The United States, in the older mold, encouraged and assisted in the failed
military coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and gave at least quiescent support
to the military overthrow of Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. At the same
time the United States has curried the favor of upper class opponents of the
regimes transformed by the Bolivarian Revolution: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, and Uruguay. Two larger countries Argentina and Brazil have
experienced domestic political turmoil in recent years, to some extent driven
by internecine politics and corruption. The United States, in all these cases
have networked with opposition political forces, sometimes encouraging
countries like Brazil and Venezuela to launch votes of no confidence or
impeachment proceedings against governments that have stood against the US
neoliberal economic agenda. Some have referred to the new US strategy in the
region as one of creating “silent coups.”
The influence of the United States has weakened
since the onset of the Bolivarian Revolution and the distain Latin Americans
hold toward the United States because of its long-standing efforts to isolate
Cuba. President Obama in collaboration with President Castro announced a new
opening of relations between the two countries in December, 2014 and ever since
US economic constraints on travel, trade, and investment have been reduced
(although the blockade remains). What remains similar to past US policy toward
Cuba, however, are the stated aims of the new relationship: the promotion of
democracy and markets. It was no mere coincidence that President Obama visited
Cuba in March, 2016 and then flew to Argentina to negotiate with the newly elected
neoliberal President Macri of Argentina.
The
Idea of the Deep State
The contradiction that still needs an explanation is
the fact that for the most part the American people oppose wars and
intervention. This is particularly so in the twenty-first century when so much
pain and suffering has been caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008
Americans elected Barack Obama, in part because he had opposed the war in Iraq
and had called for a new American foreign policy based on respect for other
nations and peoples. He promised to use diplomacy not war as the primary tool
of international relations and in some instances has tried to do that. He
probably wanted to end the two awful wars and show some respect for others,
even while promoting a neoliberal global agenda in a world of diverse centers
of power and wealth. But why have Obama’s cautious efforts to promote United
States economic and political interests been contradicted by the patterns of
interventionism and the rhetoric of military globalization so common over the
last few years?
The answer can be found in a variety of explanations
of United States imperialism including
what Mike Lofgren calls the “deep state.” Lofgren defines the “deep
state” as “… a hybrid association of
elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is
effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent
of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.” (Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the ‘Deep State’:
Hiding in Plain Sight,” Online University
of the Left, February 23, 2014).
Others have examined invisible power structures, including class, that
rule America (from C. W. Mills’ classic The
Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 2000 to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong,
and David Wright, The New Class Society:
Goodbye American Dream? Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).
The roots of analyses like those above are that
power to make critical decisions reside not in the superstructure of the
political process; the place were competitive games are played for all to see,
but in powerful institutions embedded in society that can make decisions
without requiring popular approval. Over and over again, the “deep state”
apparatus has led the American people into war or covert interventions that
destroyed the rights of people in other countries to solve their own problems.
In the end these hidden institutions have involved the United States in death
and destruction all across the globe.
So
Where Does the Peace Movement Go From Here?
Analyses of what is wrong are easier to develop than
thinking through ways to respond. This essay opened with a dilemma; a broken
peace movement locally and nationally. It then argued that the foreign policy
elites have a hegemonic vision of the role of the United States in the world
today and tomorrow. And they have at their disposal 21st century
military technologies to maintain their power in the world. The consequences of
force and intervention have been horrific for billions of people.
Having
outlined the scope of the problem, we have briefly described current US foreign
policy “trouble-spots:” Russia and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East,
Africa, and Latin America.
Phyllis Bennis has written about the inadequacy of
US mainstream responses to the problems the United States faces in the world
today. Her assessment of the recently constructed Democratic Party platform
illustrates that even the more liberal elements in the political process call
for continued reliance on military means to solve festering problems. The DNC
still insists that the United States must remain the number one military power
in the world. The DNC still ignores the complexities of the causes of violence
and hatred in the Middle East. And Phyllis Bennis argues that a serious even-handed
approach to the conflict in Palestine is central to the instability in the
region. Only the BDS movement today exemplifies the militancy and global
solidarity that a revitalized peace movement must develop.
As Bennis wrote:
“An anti-war position, in the broadest sense of
reducing military budgets, calling for diplomacy over war, condemning the
‘inevitable’ civilian casualties, calling out how military assaults create
rather than destroy terrorism…these are enormously unifying principles among
progressives….movements matter.” (Phyllis Bennis, “What the Democratic Party
Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War,” Portside, July 8, 2016).
Approaches the peace movement can take in the near
term include the following:
1.Develop a theory, a conceptual scheme about the
multiplicity of connected issues that affect peoples lives linking economics,
politics, militarism, and culture. Think about a diamond shaped figure. At the
base is an economic system, at this point in time finance capitalism. Above the
base at the two side points are militarism on one side and racism and sexism on
the other. At the top add destruction of nature. Conceptualizing the war
problem in this way we begin to see the connections between the 21st
century state of capitalism as a global system and war, racism, sexism, and
environmental destruction.
2.Use the theory or schema to develop an educational
program that begins with efforts to understand the fundamentals of the war
system (direct and structural violence as peace researchers put it). Use the
schema as programs on specific issues are prepared. Always relate the specific
issue at hand: Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, undermining regimes in Latin America
for example, to the diamond.
3.Participate in grassroots organizing in solidarity
with others, always linking issues to the war/peace paradigm. One error
participants in the various Moral Mondays campaigns have made is to accede to
the idea that Moral Mondays should only be about state legislative issues, not
national or international ones. And work to network with peace groups all
across the nation to rebuild the national peace movement that so effectively
fought against war and imperialism in the past.
4.Engage in global solidarity. The analysis above
has emphasized the forces of global hegemony, or imperialism. It is critical to
be aware of and support the grassroots ferment that is occurring all across the
globe; from Arab Spring; to the Bolivarian Revolution; to anti-austerity
campaigns in Greece, Spain, Quebec, and elsewhere, and the broadening climate
change movement that encompasses the globe.
The tasks of a 21st century peace
movement are not different from those of the past. They involve education,
organization, and agitation. With the growth of worldwide resistance to
neoliberal globalization, austerity, racism, sexism, and destruction of nature,
it seems natural to incorporate concerns
for peace and the right to national and personal self-determination to the
budding radical movements of our day.
