By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 28, 2024
Without a handful of nations — and principally one nation — arming the world to the teeth, we wouldn’t have wars, or at least not wars that looked like these horrors that we do have and that risk nuclear apocalypse. Most wars have identical weapons on both sides and almost nothing rational or sensible, and almost nothing honest ever said, about the entire enterprise.
Without the long-running predictable and predicted and protested efforts of both sides to get wars started most wars would never get started. With a bit of effort redirected into avoiding wars rather than getting them going, most wars would never happen.
But until the day that governments at least slightly represent the will of people, and until laws and diplomacy become the norm, what are people to do whose villages are being invaded or bombed or bulldozed? What good does it do them to think about what counterproductive steps their own government may have taken? What good does it do them to think about something more they could have done earlier? What good does it do them to think about how evil the warmongering government is that is attacking them or what its people ought to be doing to stop it? What good does it do them to think about a distant government that is supplying the weapons while most of its population goes shopping and watches football? What, if anything, can they themselves do now?
If we cannot answer this question in a way that leads toward disarmament rather than arms races, we will only exacerbate the ever growing risk of nuclear war. So even the most slightly plausible answer is worth investigation and development. Go ahead and accuse me of bias from the start, but my bias is purely in favor of the continuation of life on Earth.
An answer that works even sometimes, but moves us away from apocalypse is clearly preferable to the answer of war and violence and terrorism which works almost never and moves us toward apocalypse. The expansion of NATO worked for weapons profits but failed at defending life. The Russian invasion of Ukraine worked for weapons profits but failed at defending life. The warmaking by both sides for years now has been a total failure with catastrophic results. Israel’s attacks on Palestine work as sadism and for weapons profits but fail as defense or peacemaking. Hamas’ attacks on Israel fail at anything other than boosting Israeli public relations in support of its genocide.
In fact, studies suggest that violent resistance to injustice, including invasion and occupation, fails far more often than does organized or even largely spontaneous nonviolent resistance, and that when it succeeds, those successes tend not to last very long. So, you can have a nonviolent resistance fail. You can be so thoroughly destroyed that you are unable to effectively resist at all. Or you can be so reduced that the communications portion of your action (always a critical component) is most of what is left to you: documenting and communicating the crimes. You can have a nonviolent success fail to endure. But to avoid the evidence that nonviolent or unarmed civilian resistance is more likely to succeed than violence is to deny the facts, the same as pretending climate change isn’t real or filling houses with guns isn’t stupid or a lesser evil political candidate isn’t evil, etc.
Of course we have vastly more data on violent resistance to war, but the evidence that we have from nonviolent resistance to war suggests that in it we have a tool that is superior and that could be made far more so. Nations could train their populations to nonviolently resist, non-cooperate, and sabotage any occupation, and advertise that they have done so. The chief reasons that they do not are (1) there’s no profit or corruption in it, (2) governments whose populations can resist bad government will resist their own governments’ abuses. But we can support private organizations like Nonviolent Peaceforce that are doing this work and training others to do it.
We can lobby the United Nations, which has used unarmed peacekeeping with great success, to use it more. We can make people aware of success stories — and why they succeed, which includes taking the moral highground and bringing in larger numbers of participants.
World BEYOND War just held our annual conference and heard about success stories preventing and closing military bases. https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2024
In Montenegro people placed their bodies in the way of military training and protected their mountains from becoming a military training ground. Successes like that are numerous. But even when we narrow the list to serious attacks and occupations, the list is becoming quite substantive. We’ve posted it conveniently at https://worldbeyondwar.org/list
Our annual conference last year was on unarmed civilian defense and you can watch that one at https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2023