Remarks in Göteborg, Sweden, November 11, 2024.
It’s wonderful to be here with many of you whose work I’ve known but whom I’ve rarely if ever been with in person. I am very grateful to John Jones and Tomas Magnusson and all those involved in arranging this event.
It’s wonderful to be in a country which — like Norway, where I was yesterday — some of my great-grandparents came from, including here in Sweden the ones who gave me my last name. I imagine some of you are too polite here in this beautiful land to ask the obvious question of whether I plan to go back to Trumplandia or just stay here. I imagine others of you are too optimistic and good to completely resist the fantasy of Trump the peacemaker, dismantler of NATO, and bringer of harmony and stability to the Earth.
I do plan to go back home for at least three reasons: my family is there, I can’t speak Swedish worth a darn, and if everybody runs away from things there will very soon be nowhere left to run to. Good people have been fleeing the United States for decades, probably enough of them to have decided last week’s election. I’m sure they feel the exact opposite of responsible, and I don’t blame them. But I’m going home.
I’m going home even though Donald Trump is a hateful fascistic demagogue who instigates violence against various groups of people. I’m going home even though Donald Trump moved more money from human and environmental needs into militarism last time, just like Biden, just like Obama, and promises to do so again. Trump sent missiles into numerous nations killing a great many people, armed the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen, supported coups in numerous countries (including his own), promised to end the war on Afghanistan and then refused to when the U.S. generals told him to keep it going, and broke with the Obama policy of not sending weapons to Ukraine and started sending the weapons that helped create the current war. Trump escalated weapons sales to brutal dictatorships, just like the guy before him and the one after him but with open celebration. He even tried to have Soviet-style weapons parades in Washington. He also badgered NATO members into more military spending increases than Biden did, and Biden had the help of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden wants your country to spend 2% of its economy on war, Trump wants 3%, and there’s no logical reason someone won’t soon say 4%. Just close some schools and hospitals! What’s the problem? It’s your duty as world citizens and NATO members! With enemies like Trump, NATO doesn’t need friends.
A huge number of people in the United States actually believe that Trump works for Putin. In reality, Trump evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles on Russia’s border, sent weapons into Ukraine, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals (Biden used a more explosive sort of lobbying), left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia’s offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyber war, expanded NATO eastward, added Montenegro as a member (where an inspiring popular movement nonviolently prevented a massive new NATO base), added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, demanded and successfully moved most NATO members to buy significantly more weapons, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (not the largest anymore), condemned all proposals for a European military and insisted that Europe stick with NATO. Putin should really get better servants. Russiagate was mostly made up around a few grains of truth, including the truth that Israel had gotten Trump, prior to his inauguration last time, to appeal to Russia to vote Israel’s way in the United Nations.
U.S. presidents are not servants of Russia. They are servants of the Israel lobby, of weapons dealers, of banks, of corporations, of media outlets, of those who legally bribe them by paying for their campaigns, of those who provide jobs through pretty much the only means the U.S. government supports (the war industry), of those who control the major media cartel, and of those party bosses who decide who can be nominated to be one of the only two people you can choose between for the job that Biden calls running the world.
The U.S. has a winner-take-all election system and way of thinking. Having said bad things about Donald Trump, in the United States it would simply go without saying that I must therefor be a huge supporter of Kamala Harris. If I oppose U.S. warmaking, it’s assumed that I’m a big fan of Russian warmaking. But, of course, Kamala Harris was a disastrous presidential candidate who preferred losing over opposing genocide. And Russian warmaking is mass-murder under a different flag. The U.S. is going more fascist, and it is not alone, and this problem cannot be fixed by getting a girl to kick a hornet’s nest. It has to be fixed with a massive popular movement for democracy.
Last week people were screaming in the United States about how they had lost democracy. If we’d lost democracy we’d know how to retrieve it. Unfortunately we’ve lost corporate oligarchy with identity tokenism, and that taught us no useful skills. Two states voted for a higher minimum wage. A few states voted for this or that policy. Those are little bits of democracy. But for the most part people in so-called democracies do not vote on any policies. They choose misrepresentatives from a criminal line-up of proudly fascist buffoons and respectable corporate servants and warmongers who claim to oppose racism and any violence that is too close to them. Should people have voted against someone like Trump? Of course! But to do so they would have had to vote for someone who tried to be crueler to immigrants than Trump, who tried to be more accommodating to corporate monopolies than Trump, who wasn’t going to tax the rich, and who was only going to escalate the wars — someone who was working to get opposition to a genocide labeled “anti-Semitism” and criminalized. Trump is surrounded by actual anti-Semites in the sense of bigots who dislike Jews and all sorts of other groups. But for a peace advocate to support Kamala Harris, he or she had to be willing to be falsely called a bigot. That was a hard sell.
This shift we’re seeing in many parts of the world to rightwing authoritarianism is not a shift away from democracy but a shift away from an offensive pretense of democracy. I would happily let the people who elected Trump vote on every single policy decision and let Trump himself go golfing every day. The people would get a lot more right than Biden did or Trump will. They’d end the wars. The United States almost created the requirement for a public vote prior to any war. That was in the 1930s. It’s not been heard about since. But it sure would be in line with what NATO claims to stand for. Of course war is now illegal, and people shouldn’t be voting on it any more than parliaments should. But at least they’d be more likely to vote the right way.
Some countries have more to lose, have more investment in useful things, have more organized labor, more organized protest movements, more unarmed civilian resistance to misgovernance. Some of us in the United States have always wished we could have things that people have in Scandinavia, things like healthcare, public transit, retirement, vacations, and long lifespans. Now I imagine there are people at Raytheon and Northrup Grumman laughing as the unelected leader of NATO travels the globe instructing presidents and prime ministers to pull money out of human and environmental needs and dump it into war preparations. At the Pentagon too, I imagine a great deal of levity. After all, they’re building their own bases here — dozens of new bases across Scandinavia. Their troops can go anywhere they want here. They can even drive drunk, vandalize, and rape without being subject to local laws. They can poison the drinking water with forever chemicals and not tell anyone. They can refuse to tell anyone whether they are bringing nuclear weapons in and out. Australians have asked and been told it’s none of their business. They can use bases here to assist in some future war quite regardless of what anyone here thinks of that war. They can use bases here to sabotage pipelines or whatever else they like. All things are justified. And all things can be sacrificed — the bases make this beautiful place a target, and good intentions won’t change that.
But didn’t Trump promise to immediately negotiate peace in Ukraine on Day One, and isn’t that wonderful? Maybe. Most promises by U.S. presidential candidates are never kept or even mentioned again after the election. But we should demand that that promise be kept. We should demand that fans of Trump and opponents of Trump both insist on it. When George W. Bush was president, people who identified with the Democratic Party opposed his wars. We need them to start opposing wars now — wars that can be labeled Trump’s wars for purposes of bringing them around — not to the right opinion, which many of them already have, but to caring enough to get active, to protest and compel action. At the same time, we need to push Trump to end wars that should be labeled Biden’s wars for that purpose.
But our goal in Ukraine should be a just and lasting peace and demilitarization as part of global demilitarization for purposes of nuclear survival and environmental survival. A peace that gives Ukraine or Russia everything it wants will not last. A peace that gives the people of the separate provinces of Ukraine as much self-determination as is still possible might last — and, again, would be in line with what Western governments and NATO claim to stand for: democracy.
Biden won’t even speak with Russia. If Trump will speak with Russia, that’s a start. But neither Trump nor Putin cares about the lives of the people of Ukraine. So we need some wiser planners in the room. And we need to learn the lesson that predictably pushing toward war gets you war, the lesson that international law applied equally to all is the path to safety, not the lesson that China is a better enemy than Russia, not the lesson that BRICS and NATO can balance each other with opposing forces, not the lesson that Palestinians and Sudanese should be killed instead of Russians and Ukrainians.
There have always been sensible people around, even in our militarized culture, people who have said “If you keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border, if you keep putting missile bases on Russia’s border, if you keep fueling violence by rightwing forces in Eastern Ukraine, if you keep tearing up treaties and abandoning disarmament agreements, you’re making war more, not less, likely.” Others have pointed out that if the U.S. government and NATO support and arm the Ukrainian government and refuse to allow peace negotiations, even while blowing up Russian pipelines, ending communications with Russia, and expanding NATO further yet, peace will be very difficult.
But the clever retort has always been heard: “What do you mean the Russian government is a saintly force for peace and prosperity that has never harmed a soul?”
Of course, it isn’t. A blatantly provoked illegal immoral attack is still an illegal and immoral attack. Russian warmaking must be condemned, just as both sides of a duel must be condemned. War is, after all, less, not more, intelligent than dueling. But condemnation of Russia elicits the immediate response: “What do you mean NATO is a saintly force for peace and prosperity that has never harmed a soul?”
It’s easier for people to oppose war in the abstract. Or if it’s a little bit farther away. Or if we’re only asked about one side of it. Some people are able to oppose Israeli warmaking and warmaking by Hamas. They don’t worry that one cancels out the other or that the two are somehow being equated despite their different scales. Many are able to oppose Western warmaking in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, or Yemen, and to simply avoid the question of the morality of the approaches taken by the other sides. There wouldn’t be much point in having an opinion on what Iraqis should do, and one would be accused of blaming the victims merely for thinking about it. But what to do with an endless deadly stalemate here in Europe that puts all life on Earth at risk while slaughtering thousands for gains of inches as in World War I?
In most cases, people either declare all blame to lie with Russia or all blame to lie with Ukraine and NATO — an obvious oversimplification of a sort that most children have learned to reject on the playground, but that governments promote heavily. In reality, both sides in this war are forcing people to fight against their will, locking up resisters, censoring freedom of speech and press, avoiding fair and open elections, using banned weapons while condemning the other for doing so, rejecting negotiation, insisting on control of territories rather than on the right of local residents to determine their fate democratically, and failing to develop unarmed resistance in their populations chiefly because people so trained can resist not only invaders but their own governments as well. Both the United States and Russia oppose the International Criminal Court and defy the rulings of the International Court of Justice. Of 18 major human rights treaties, Russia is party to only 11, and the United States to only 5. Both nations violate treaties at will, including the United Nations Charter, not to mention their abuse of the veto in the Security Council. While most of the world upholds disarmament and anti-weapons treaties, the United States and Russia refuse to support and openly defy major treaties. Russia and the United States stand as rogue regimes outside the Landmines Treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and many others. Neither supports the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons or complies with the disarmament requirement of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S. and Russia are far from being the same, but if either of them is taken as a model for the world, then the world will be doomed.
The fact that there’s no good solution easily available in Ukraine does not justify continuing to increase the risk of nuclear apocalypse. In fact, nothing ever justifies war, and nothing ever justifies preparing for war. Even if we imagine a war that has never been, a necessary and noble war that does more good than harm, that protects against subhuman monsters, that does not slaughter the innocent for the gleam in a politician’s eye . . . even if we imagine such a war, the fact will remain that keeping around the bases, weapons, ships, and personnel that make war possible does more harm than war itself — and will until war goes nuclear. The institution of war wastes money that could save many more lives than are lost in wars. War preparation, like war, is a major destroyer of the environment, and the chief impediment to international cooperation on the environment, on disease, on poverty, on homelessness. War is, of course, the chief cause of homelessness. War preparation is the justification for government secrecy and surveillance. It is a major source of bigotry and hatred, and the biggest influence in our culture in favor of continued violence. It concentrates wealth, corrupts politicians, erodes liberties, and celebrates sadism.
Reforming war isn’t going to work. Taboos on certain weapons aren’t going to hold. Restrictions on war’s cruelty are not going to be honored. During each war in recent years, we have heard the cries of the outraged: “This is not a war, it’s a genocide!” “This is not a war, it’s an occupation!” “This is not a war, it’s terrorism!” “This is not a war, it’s a crime!” And so forth. All perpetuating the myth that there ever has been or can be a war that isn’t cruel, that doesn’t terrorize, that kills only the proper people for killing. The desire to reform war has always been a noble one, but survival requires that we End it, Not Mend It.
Our heroes should not be those who kill to enrich Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Saab and Volvo. Our heroes should be those Norwegian teachers and others who refused to be occupied. We should recall what gave the world the word “Quisling” to describe an official who obeys a foreign government, something every NATO member does. We should remember the nonviolent movements in the Baltics that took apart the Soviet Union without the use of F35s. We should celebrate the history of neutrality in countries like Finland, so beneficial to the world. Perhaps we should even celebrate the peace efforts that produced something like the Oslo accords, although the secrecy and one-sidedness, and the circumventing of the actual leaders of the first intifada, show that such things could be done better. We should thank national governments like Norway’s and Sweden’s for supporting the International Criminal Court and recognizing the state of Palestine.
While it’s not my place to suggest what anyone outside the United States do — even though my loyalty is to humanity and not to the U.S. government, and borders are maintained against my will — it is a shame that Norway and Sweden do their bits in exporting weapons to the world, ranking #16 and #13 respectively. Sweden even got into NATO by agreeing to sell weapons to Hungary.
But what is NATO? And why would one become a member by selling deadly weapons?
NATO is an institution that has expanded in great part, especially in the 1990s, through the corruption of weapons dealers promising membership to nations if they would buy weapons, and then insisting that elected officials whose campaigns they had funded support those nations’ memberships. Nations are also pressured to privatize their economies to become NATO members. Lately, of course, NATO has expanded by provoking war, escalating conflict, and offering nations spots on its team in a world brought to image no alternatives to war.
NATO members and NATO partners need not even pretend to be democracies. NATO’s first additions were undemocratic Greece and Turkey, in both of which nations coups also had no impact on their membership. NATO has no human constituency, makes decisions at odds with its member governments, and wages wars in violation of international law. NATO partners with and arranges weapons deals for such governments as Israel, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The war minister — or so-called defense minister — of Sweden agreed to fill Sweden with U.S. military bases a half a year before the Swedish parliament considered the matter, which has never gone to the Swedish people. Nowhere are the people asked. Again, democracy is what we need, not what we’ve tried and found lacking.
NATO has no internal democracy, and only has transparency to the extent of its shamelessness. On various occasions, carrots and sticks are used to achieve “consensus.” For example, when Turkey objected to Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Secretary General, Turkey backed down after a deal was made to shut down an international television network disliked by the Turkish government. NATO’s preference has always been for a government that agrees with NATO over a government that agrees with its people.
NATO has never fought a war in defense of one of its members, and for the first 45 years of its 75-year existence did not fight any wars at all. Since NATO’s first war-making in Yugoslavia, it has waged war in various ways in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine. NATO had been in danger of lacking any excuse to exist, after the dismantling of the Soviet Union. It manufactured a reason to exist as a rogue global police force. It developed “humanitarian” war, a line of propaganda that would eventually lead to the “responsibility to protect” (by bombing). NATO had no UN authorization in Bosnia and Kosovo, but discovered that it could self-authorize. The world could be told that NATO had itself legalized its crimes. It had no ability to generate “consensus” for wars among all of its members, but found that it could move ahead with just some members.
Only once — in the case of Afghanistan — has NATO even pretended that one of its members was waging war in defense. Although every NATO member has experienced foreign terrorism, when the United States did, a war on an impoverished distant land — already begun by the U.S. alone — became a NATO war. But the wars have all been the same in their lawlessness, their murderous destructiveness, and their counterproductive results.
In the United States NATO is used as cover for crimes. The Congress can’t investigate if NATO did it. And people, it seems, can’t question it if NATO did it. Placing a primarily-U.S. war under the banner of NATO prevents Congressional oversight of that war. Placing nuclear weapons in “non-nuclear” nations, in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, is also excused with the claim that the nations are NATO members. By being part of a war alliance, NATO’s members legitimize the wars that alliance engages in. By pulling nations into NATO, the U.S. government claims the right to act on behalf of “The International Community,” even if most people on Earth are still not in it.
NATO’s members should withdraw, not to create a balance of warmongers, not to support a different empire, not to build up a European military, but to turn instead to the rule of law, to disarmament, to compliance with the treaty on nuclear nonproliferation, to compliance with the UN Charter (which the NATO charter grossly violates), to upholding the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and to the democratization and universalization of institutions, including — first and foremost — through demanding the elimination of the veto in the UN Security Council.
What can we do to move the world in that direction?
Some of us try to nudge the world along through books, as well as articles and speeches. I work for two organizations — RootsAction.org in the U.S. and World BEYOND War globally that, like many others, have an impact through online actions, organizing, and webinars. At World BEYOND War we also create in-depth online courses that provide an education often missing in schools. And we work with universities and schools to change that.
Most importantly, we organize local chapters with volunteer organizers who get assistance from our paid staff. World BEYOND War chapters hold meetings, book clubs, rallies, demonstrations, protests. They pass resolutions through local governments. They persuade institutions to divest from weapons profits. They put peace messages into local media. They oppose new and existing military bases.
On the World BEYOND War website we’ve created a tool that lets you spin a globe and zoom in on any of 917 U.S. military bases outside of the United States. We need your help with making sure we’ve got all the new ones. But we’re also taking them off when they’re closed, and never adding them when they’re planned but those plans are stymied. We’ve helped people in Montenegro prevent a major new NATO base from being built. People in the Czech Republic have kept a U.S. base out of their country. In Colombia, activists have blocked base construction on one island and are now protecting another. In Italy, activism failed to prevent a new base but kept it to a smaller size than planned. People have gotten bases out of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Ecuador. The president of Ecuador told the United States that it could keep a base in Ecuador if Ecuador could have a base in the United States. Now there’s a new president who wants to bring U.S. bases back, so the struggle never ends. But can you imagine the Swedish government demanding a Swedish military base in Wisconsin in exchange for the U.S. having bases here? I certainly cannot imagine the U.S. government allowing it.
The lesson I draw from having worked to oppose bases in several countries while based in the Washington, D.C., area or not too far from it, is that we are stronger when we have solidarity across borders, and in particular when we are working together both at the location of a base or a proposed base and at the location of the heart of the empire in Washington. A number of times now I have worked with opponents of U.S. bases in distant corners of the globe and watched as they were asked the inevitable question by U.S. Congress members or staffers, namely: “Well, if you don’t want the base there, then where do you want it?” And in each case, to their everlasting credit and praise, these good people have responded “We do not want it anywhere.”
That kind of principled opposition should be coordinated globally. We should have days of protest at U.S. bases across Scandinavia, together with protests delivering the same message in Washington, D.C. We should put our organizers, but also our writers and video producers and photographers, artists and song writers to work building a movement to get the bases out. But not because war will be better without a particular base, rather because closing a particular base can move us a bit closer to the total abolition of war.
We desperately need to turn our attention to non-optional crises instead of these ginned up festivals of the lowest depravity that Russia calls special military operations and the U.S. calls overseas contingency operations or Israel’s right to defend itself, but the rest of us call war. There is nothing in our genes or the laws of physics requiring war. There is just something in our culture that says the most useful thing you can do, as done in virtually all Hollywood movies, is to pick up a weapon. We need a culture in which the most admirable and courageous thing you can do is to refuse to turn to violence.