Yes, I’m going to say this again. I’ve heard not the slightest hint of a refutation or objection to it, and yet so many, many people ignore it.
For the love of all that is decent, immediately stop the self-defeating idiocy of calling every goddamned war “not a war.”
Please. With all due respect.
“It’s not a war. It’s terrorism.” “It’s not a war. It’s genocide.” “It’s not a war. It’s an occupation.” “It’s not a war. It’s ethnic cleansing.”
This refrain is growing.
It’s used for pretty much every war. It’s used by people who want warmakers prosecuted for the crime of waging war or for “war crimes,” or who want compliance with the “rules of war” or “laws of war.”
It’s used by people who have no conscious intention of pushing the myth that there has ever existed a good and respectable war that didn’t terrorize anyone or slaughter countless innocent people.
Imagine if we were trying to abolish prisons, and upon visiting each prison we declared
“That’s not a prison. That’s human cages!”
Imagine if we needed to abolish police, and we declared of each police force
“That’s not police. That’s an armed gang!”
The problem with war is not improper wars. The problem with war is war.
There are not genocides that are not also wars.
Lockheed Martin does not manufacture a different set of tools for genocides.
The U.S.-led slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq were probably more one-sided than the Israeli slaughter in Gaza over the past year. The rhetoric from the warmakers was different. But typically defining a crime as a “hate crime” still leaves it a crime, and a genocidal war looks to any reasonable observer on the ground like it is a war.
Did you know that something can have two labels simultaneously? You can call every single genocide a genocide — and damn well should. Why commit the gratuitous own goal of also declaring it “not a war.” What is it that you like about war?
But we can’t just abolish WAR, can we? Don’t we need the good ones? Or at least the imaginary ones where mostly soldiers die, and they die pretty evenly on both sides, and nobody gets raped or tortured, and little children are safe, and the slaughter happens far away from the cities and villages where actual real wars are waged?
Isn’t it better to rename a war an ethnic cleansing than to rename a war a “special military operation” or an “overseas contingency operation” or a “humanitarian intervention”?
But don’t you see that the warmongers want to pretend not to be waging wars? Why assist them in that pretense?
OK, but ABOLISH war?
What would that even look like?
Luckily there’s an annual conference of World BEYOND War happening online September 20-22. Check it out!
