No more war - No more armies

Parades, medal ceremonies and fly-pasts over three Scottish cities are being held to mark Armed Forces Day. The main celebrations centre on Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness, Perth and Aberdeen on Saturday, with other events around the country. The UK's fifth Armed Forces Day is being held to show support and appreciation for the armed services.

 One must be quite starry-eyed, in fact, delusional, to see war as the humanitarian instrument of peace.

The United Kingdom  decides whether or not to wage war according to the chances of succeeding and to their own assessment of their strategic, political and economic interests. And once a war is begun, they want to win at all costs. It makes no sense to ask them to carry out only good interventions, against genuine villains, using gentle methods that spare civilians and innocent bystanders.  It makes no sense to ask them to protect but not to bomb, because armies function by shooting and bombing. Those who say “support our troops” serve to neutralise any peace or anti-war movement. Opposition is attacked as “support for dictators”, another “Munich appeasement”, or “the crime of indifference”.

The problem is that every war is justified by a massive propaganda effort which is based on demonising the enemy. To-days Armed Forces Day actually canonises the combatants.

 When the media announce that a massacre is imminent, we hear at times that action is “urgent” to save the alleged future victims, and time cannot be lost making sure of the facts. This may be true when a house is on fire, but such urgency regarding other countries ignores the manipulation of information and just plain error and confusion that dominate foreign news coverage. The slightest mistake by the anti-war movement will be endlessly used against us, whereas all the lies of the pro-war propaganda are soon forgotten. The “we must do something” brushes aside any serious reflection as to what might be done instead of military intervention.

We've always had wars. Humans are a warring species. Without an army to defend us, someone will always try to conquer us." How often is this heard to make it acceptable to encourage people to engage in killing?

 Some people declare that human nature makes peace impossible, that war is built into our genes. They point to research by evolutionary biologists that indicates our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, make war. Therefore war must be part of our heredity. It's true that in certain situations chimpanzees do raid neighboring colonies and kill other chimps. Those studies on killer apes got enormous publicity because they implied that war is hardwired into human nature. Most scientists didn't draw those conclusions from the evidence, but the mass media kept reinforcing that message. Further research, however, led to a key discovery: The chimps who invaded their neighbors were suffering from shrinking territory and food sources. They were struggling for survival. Groups with adequate resources didn't raid other colonies. The aggression wasn't a behavioral constant but was caused by the stress they were under. Their genes gave them the capacity for violence, but the stress factor had to be there to trigger it into combat. This new research showed that war is not inevitable but rather a function of the stress a society is under. Our biological nature doesn't force us to war, it just gives us the potential for it. Without stress to provoke it, violence can remain one of the many unexpressed capacities our human evolution has given us.

Our society has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism's need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We've been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it's really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they're so built into us. We don't have to live this way. We can reduce the stress humanity suffers under. We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world's resources according to those needs. We can live at peace with one another. But that's going to take basic changes.

These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it's not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemies. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable. In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule over us, blacks were inferior to whites, women should obey men. We've outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.

Let us cease celebrating war.