Peace Activists, Peace Freaks and the Peace Movement
Ranked #12,450 in Culture & Society, #251,350 overall
Give Peace A Chance
As an ardent advocate, it always surprised me how vigorously some people reacted against peace activists and the peace movement. In the early days, "Peace Creep" or "Peace Freak" were pejoratives hurled back as if our positions insulted their patriotism. In fact, it did, their version of patriotism anyway. Peace activism has been anathema to the core values of large segments of American culture and enterprise for over fifty years now.
There are good reasons and bad reasons, just as there are good and bad results. I'm a peace activist because, having looked at it objectively as well as humanely, I see our addiction to the juices of the war machine as corrupting a culture. The machine has to do do what it does all of the time, and too often, what it does is act like a schoolyard bully with no one around nearly powerful enough to fight back.
And, no, I am not a pacifist. I just don't believe that, knowing all we know, war continues to be necessary. I also believe that war is more of a horror than most of us ever acknowledge, the details of which we prefer to ignore.
As peace activists, most of us in the movement believe, as Ely Culbertson once said, "God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace upon the world, and win it."
There are good reasons and bad reasons, just as there are good and bad results. I'm a peace activist because, having looked at it objectively as well as humanely, I see our addiction to the juices of the war machine as corrupting a culture. The machine has to do do what it does all of the time, and too often, what it does is act like a schoolyard bully with no one around nearly powerful enough to fight back.
And, no, I am not a pacifist. I just don't believe that, knowing all we know, war continues to be necessary. I also believe that war is more of a horror than most of us ever acknowledge, the details of which we prefer to ignore.
As peace activists, most of us in the movement believe, as Ely Culbertson once said, "God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace upon the world, and win it."
Contents at a Glance
Is our economy addicted to war?
It's called, euphemistically, "the military-industrial complex," but it really is a business that does nothing but make tools for killing. Given that we need something as a defense, does it make sense to dedicate 65% of discretionary spending in our national budget? What would we do without it?
John Lennon - People for Peace
Now At Allposters.com
The American Economy vs The Peace Movement
CoExist
Buy An International Symbol of Peace At Allposters.com
One of the friends I remember most vividly from the 1970s, a time during which I got outside the Sixties Counterculture far enough to get to know a much broader world, was Joe McPartland. Joe, a generation and a half older than me, was one of several World War II vets I worked with in a Plant Operations department and not a peace activist by any means. He'd learned his general machinist skills in the military and was now struggling in a deteriorating blue collar job market that was worse than average in Buffalo.
A realist who grew up in the Depression, he told me that "Roosevelt didn't get us out of it. Nobody could find jobs before the war. The war is what finally ended the Depression."
Peace, Love and Harmony
Buy It At Allposters.com
The truth is that our involvement in World War II took the United States from an emerging, somewhat isolationist economy to an international powerhouse. Our resources were used to great advantage. And by resources, I mean human resources as well as minerals, water and the other natural resources. A unity of purpose against a powerful enemy advancing from East and West brought Americans together like never before. It was in many ways the maturing of nation that had always been full of promise that had never quite come fully together.
Industry and labor both gained, even though industry gained the most, and women went to work outside the home in large numbers. Children lead vigorous fund drives. There was a clarity of purpose under Roosevelt's leadership and a sense that all of us were in it together.
True, along racial lines, our country was as segregated as ever. Not until Truman succeeded Roosevelt were our troops integrated for example, and the ugly remnants of the Old South still retained enough hate to explode in murderous violence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the common belief that a rising tide lifts all boats held true. All of us were better off.
Trouble was, our economic uplift was built on a war machine, products and supplies that supported battle. In my hometown, Binghamton, New York, the local plants for Endicott-Johnson supplied virtually all the footwear for our soldiers. Things boomed, then started falling apart as the war machine cooled and E-J lost their lock on military procurement.
Refrigerators on Assembly Line at General Electric Plant
Buy This Allposters.com
America was a powerhouse of production, a place where production per capita outstripped the rest of the world by far. We made everything, refrigerators, cars, chemicals and milled grains. We also made more and more products for war, our economic health becoming increasingly dependent on that sector.
As he left office in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, a president who'd never have run, let alone been elected, without his record as a war hero, set aside what has become the most memorable section of his Farewell Address to concerns about "the military-industrial complex," a term before that unknown to virtually everyone outside government. The nation, he warned, was becoming so dependent on it that a permanent state of war might become inevitable.
Little did Eisenhower know or intend that his words would fuel a peace movement and generations of peace activists.
Indeed, business leaders had been talking excitedly about the benefits of such a state of perpetual readiness since the wars of the 1940s and early 1950s threatened to wind down. It wasn't anything they were ashamed enough about to keep their talk in the back room. Continuing a long tradition, American businessmen argued for the benefits of war. Soon, we had the debacle in Viet Nam and a booming economy.
View of a Fighter-Bomber Used During the Vietnam War
Allposters.com
War As A Way of Thinking
Dove of Peace
Buy Some Picasso-style Peace At Allposters.com
It's a widely accepted lie we tell ourselves that nobody, nobody, not even the generals likes war. Face it. If that were true, we wouldn't have them. We have wars because there is a potential for violence within each of us that needs only a stir. Political leaders around the world for centuries have been masters at stirring. Keep in mind that few of them ever fight themselves. They get others to do it for them.
I've been reading news stories since I ran a delivery route as a kid about horrible acts of violence. A mother kills her children, or a random act ends the lives of strangers. An inevitable part of each story is a quote from a bystander who just can't believe--it could happen here, to them, right across the hall, etc. We like to pretend we don't know the potential for violence and cruelty in each of us when, in context, it tells a wonderful tale about better choices consistently taken by us.
It isn't easy for us to admit to the capacity for unspeakable horrors in us, but we do know it's there. A bit of recognition might spur pride in the kindness and empathy we show instead while refusing to let the worst of us see the light of day. It takes a lot to drag it out. Peace really does prevail almost all the time, for our simplest interactions to the larger stage of world politics.
It's hard then to break it down and make soldiers, and the soldiers themselves must be more than passive followers.
Pace Flag
Buy This Allposters.com
When I was twenty, I was called to appear before my draft board at a time when the Vietnam War ragged. Surrounded by a table full of veterans assigned to decide who would go to fight, I was told that, in their time, my antiwar position would have been a stigma on my patriotism, and what would be my solution to the "issues of the day."
Unwilling to accept a correlation between World War II and the atrocity in Southeast Asia, I answered, "Which issues?"
"Vietnam." I was told.
"Get out and pay them reparations for what we've done to their country."
A close relative had already been there and came back with this advice: stay the hell out of there.
He'd been on a ship where the main mission was to shell coastal villages north of the demilitarized zone, keeping track of their successes by county how many steeples they knocked down. Well be for the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident that President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff used to start and massive, undeclared war, they were trying to provoke a reaction they could call belligerent enough to justify a fight. From there, the discredited "domino theory" could be trotted out to show how this was leading straight to the West Coast. The war machine was cranking.
My best friend had volunteered, rather than wait for the draft to take him. Three months out of boot camp, he was sending me letters that bragged about his "confirmed kills" and how many were women and children. A year before, we were riding horses all summer, chasing girls and camping out in the woods.
Boot camp designers had perfected ways of getting young men passed any reluctance they had about killing or being killed themselves. It started with the public propaganda about patriotism and equating it with an emotional, but ill-defined "freedom," making it socially acceptable, even heroic. Then, once they had a man's head shaved and put him in a uniform, they began the grim process of teaching him that people in distant countries were not really people at all, but "gooks," which made it much easier to fear and hate them.
Green Peace
Buy This Allposters.com
In our nation's capital we've erected a monument to the fifty-thousand American soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. It's a heartbreaking sight to see, the anguish visible in the many visitors. By contrast, the number of victims in the country we attacked is at least ten times higher and includes many innocents, women, children and the elderly. We barely know about them, proving the propaganda worked. All that for a war fought under false pretenses, sparked by a phonied up incident.
It takes a lot to get us there, and fortunately, it doesn't happen often. Peace is our normal state, and if we are going to be bumped off it again, maybe we should demand a higher standard for commitment.
Peace Movement Versus War Economics
When you get down to the basics, there is nothing inherently wrong with having a war machine, as such, nor is there anything wrong with its consuming so much of our budget. My concerns and those of many peace activists is simple: we're not using the tool we have to the best effect. We could, if we choose, be the most powerful engine for peace the world ever has or ever will know.
I had hopes that President Obama, with his charisma and international acceptance, would leverage those factors to bring about what would be a dramatic change in the face we show the world. I didn't have high hopes because he'd run for the office apparently unaware that his experience didn't honestly qualify him for it and, also, because the subject of the military's growing dominance in our culture never hit the debates by any candidate, pro or con, even though we were fighting two admitted wars and participating in other undisclosed conflicts.
It soon became apparent that he was cowed by the military and, in spite of his campaign promises and the sentiments of the people who elected him, was not going to substantially change anything. The war in Afghanistan has won us nothing and threatens to be a permanent drain, and as of this writing, we've not gotten entangled in Libya. Obama has changed nothing, not even philosophically.
So, as Peace Activists and Peace Freaks, what can we do?
We can vigorously promote an awareness that the energies, inventiveness and passion we devote to the destruction of war can be turned to a more effective result in peace. The majority of the nations of the world are utterly devoted to this. That's why, almost ten years ago, we were showered with international empathy after 9/11, but George Bush was barely able to scrape together a symbolic "Coalition of The Willing." Willing to go to war, most of the world was not.
Peace I
Buy This Allposters.com
So, what if we changed course in our cultural challenge to the Arab world and spent the same money on industrial development, education and the arts as we're spending on war? Our position is based on the illusion that we are threatened by Arabs, Muslims especially. We use religious zealots as an appealing tool in painting a huge section of the planet as a danger. But are they really? How could they be? We spend more on our military than the rest of the developed world combined? How is it possible be could be endangered by a largely impoverished Third World?
We're not. What we're really afraid of is their independence, their desire to own their own countries. That threatens American business interests who demand special treatment in selling and special access to resources. We use our power to deny them the right to their own lands, enabling us to continue to drive gas guzzlers when we chose and to pick out wars that keep feeding the economic engines.
But is it really necessary? Would a truly charitable approach to the Muslim communities in their homelands, based on the respect, produce a worse result than endless wars? Wars brutalize, to some degree, everyone involved in them, including taxpayers who consent to paying the freight in every election. International brotherhood is an impossibility as long as we always need an enemy to spike our economy.
Attributes I
Buy This Allposters.com
Elections are coming up, aren't they? The media feeding frenzy has already started for an election to take place next year.
If the peace movement can step back from the constant media focus on the noisy lunatic fringe now holding the stage, peace activists still have time to insist on candidates who will talk in something more than soundbites and tell the truth. Whether you agree with me politically or not, I hope you agree that we need better representatives on all sides. We can't continue to put in office people who seem to come prepaid and hold positions that disregard the simplest facts. I also believe that, if we can do this, we will elect men and women who find peaceful alternatives for spending our immense wealth.
Nobody likes war, right? If that's true, let's show how American ingenuity can be mobilized to rid ourselves of it.
Peace Panel
Buy A Symbol of Peace at Allposters.com
I had hopes that President Obama, with his charisma and international acceptance, would leverage those factors to bring about what would be a dramatic change in the face we show the world. I didn't have high hopes because he'd run for the office apparently unaware that his experience didn't honestly qualify him for it and, also, because the subject of the military's growing dominance in our culture never hit the debates by any candidate, pro or con, even though we were fighting two admitted wars and participating in other undisclosed conflicts.
It soon became apparent that he was cowed by the military and, in spite of his campaign promises and the sentiments of the people who elected him, was not going to substantially change anything. The war in Afghanistan has won us nothing and threatens to be a permanent drain, and as of this writing, we've not gotten entangled in Libya. Obama has changed nothing, not even philosophically.
So, as Peace Activists and Peace Freaks, what can we do?
We can vigorously promote an awareness that the energies, inventiveness and passion we devote to the destruction of war can be turned to a more effective result in peace. The majority of the nations of the world are utterly devoted to this. That's why, almost ten years ago, we were showered with international empathy after 9/11, but George Bush was barely able to scrape together a symbolic "Coalition of The Willing." Willing to go to war, most of the world was not.
Peace I
Buy This Allposters.com
So, what if we changed course in our cultural challenge to the Arab world and spent the same money on industrial development, education and the arts as we're spending on war? Our position is based on the illusion that we are threatened by Arabs, Muslims especially. We use religious zealots as an appealing tool in painting a huge section of the planet as a danger. But are they really? How could they be? We spend more on our military than the rest of the developed world combined? How is it possible be could be endangered by a largely impoverished Third World?
We're not. What we're really afraid of is their independence, their desire to own their own countries. That threatens American business interests who demand special treatment in selling and special access to resources. We use our power to deny them the right to their own lands, enabling us to continue to drive gas guzzlers when we chose and to pick out wars that keep feeding the economic engines.
But is it really necessary? Would a truly charitable approach to the Muslim communities in their homelands, based on the respect, produce a worse result than endless wars? Wars brutalize, to some degree, everyone involved in them, including taxpayers who consent to paying the freight in every election. International brotherhood is an impossibility as long as we always need an enemy to spike our economy.
Attributes I
Buy This Allposters.com
Elections are coming up, aren't they? The media feeding frenzy has already started for an election to take place next year.
If the peace movement can step back from the constant media focus on the noisy lunatic fringe now holding the stage, peace activists still have time to insist on candidates who will talk in something more than soundbites and tell the truth. Whether you agree with me politically or not, I hope you agree that we need better representatives on all sides. We can't continue to put in office people who seem to come prepaid and hold positions that disregard the simplest facts. I also believe that, if we can do this, we will elect men and women who find peaceful alternatives for spending our immense wealth.
Nobody likes war, right? If that's true, let's show how American ingenuity can be mobilized to rid ourselves of it.
Please share this with your friends and followers on Twitter,
Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.
Related
Additional Links to Consider
- Who Owns The United States Of America: Updated
- Who Owns The United States Of America: Updated
A report on my research into this subject. - Taliban Announces Spring Offensive
- After nearly a decade in this useless war, another example of the wastefulness and cruelty of war. Don't they know? What became of our antiwar president
- Newark Inner Peace Conference Featuring Nobel Laureates
- The Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra and others discuss the virtues of inner and outer peace and how they relate.
- Obama Calls For Mideast Peace Based on 1967 Borders
- If it's going to happen in our lifetimes, here's something of how it will happen. Respect for everyone, peace to all.
- U. S. Expands Into a Fourth War In Yemen
- While falling all over himself to agree with conservatives that we can't afford good healthcare, teachers and schools, job training or incentives to help massive numbers of unemployed Americans, the administration of Barrack Obama, the first black Republican President, has managed to afford yet a fourth war (not counting the secret and CIA wars they aren't admitting), this time in Yemen, in support of a dictator certain to keep democracy out of his desert territory.
Again, we are backing elitists against freedom fighters. In an article, the New York Times, long established mouthpiece for the military industrial complex, dutifully notes that the freedom fighters are somehow connected to Al Qaeda, thereby throwing a sop to the television addicted American public, proving again that the U.S. holds the title of most gullible population in the world. - Bruce Bartlett: Can We Afford the Military Budget?
- While many nations have cut military spending since the end of the Cold War, the United States has scarcely done so -- and now needs to rethink its military priorities, an economist writes.
- Obama Overrules His Own Top Lawyers to Continue War
- Obama does yet another Bush, in the Nixon tradition, continuing to spill ten-million a day into Libya for a war effort that congress never approved. Is it any wonder we don't have money enough for anything else with four wars in progress at once?
- Critics Question The Cost of War in Poor Economy, Neglecting to Notice the Other Two
- For those who still have a stomach for this information churned out with no perspective whatsoever about the more painful cost of war, here's an account in the New York Times about how our ever brilliant politicians see it mainly as a budget issue.
- Theodore Roszak Dies
- Roszak may have invented the term "counterculture," and certainly was the only person able to clearly explain what made my generation different and special. In the obit, also, there is the added benefit of getting to read the sort of thing Pete Hamil has always said to expose himself as an impossible to shut up jerk.
- The Hippie Movement & Counterculture, 1960s: Garden of What Was and Was Not
- Story drawn from roots deep in the Sixties, full of the color, passion, play and adventure that stuck.
- Wavy Gravy, His Walk Through Life As The Hippie Movement's Stride
- The first time I noticed Wavy Gravy, then known by his given name, Hugh Romney, I was sitting in the balcony of a movie theater in Buffalo, watching "Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace" Mu...
- If I Were President... - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
- What leaders in fields other than politics would do if they ran the country.
Andrew Weil: "I'd tell the nation that I was powerless to control the war machine, Wall Street, big oil and the other interests that run the country, and I would urge Americans to form a new political party not beholden to them."
Advice from a pioneer of the Hippie Movement and Sixties Counterculture. - Carl Oglesby, An Antiwar Pioneer From The Sixties Dies
- Oglesby fell afoul of SDS when he didn't want to go extreme Marxist, but his values stayed.
- We Lost The War on Terror | Socyberty
- It isn't even over yet, but the costs in dollars and cents, astronomical though they are, are dwarfed nest to the human costs, directly and indirectly, that came from the War On Terror launched by President George W. Bush. But I wondered how many really knew the costs; so, I pulled every reliable th
- A Book About the Uselessness of the War In Iraq
- By implication, the uselessness also of the all the other current wars, acknowledged and not acknowledged, we engage in as a world power devoid of principles and interested only in power and money. Told by an insider who was there and paints a whole picture.
- We Paid In Lives, Money and American Unity for This?
- A Republican war they ran like Conquistadors on your money and with your lives, the carnage being left behind is something every American who consented should have a talk with themselves about. Don't blame George W. Bush, Barrack or anyone else. We elected them, and in our behalf, they built a foundation for this.
- First Steps To A War With Iran
- Things getting quiet in the world? Popularity declining? Election coming up? Can you always count on the CIA to cook evidence?
Off Obama goes to crank up hostilities in Iran. Wouldn't it have been better to do something about the economy years ago and not try to start a war now to save your ass?
More to consider
Peace-wise
Peace Is The Way
Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
Amazon Price: $7.00 (as of 06/03/2012)
List Price: $15.00
Release Date: 03/01/1992
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
A Hero For Peace
![In Search Of Freedom: Excerpts From His Most Memorable Speeches [Spoken Word]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41TKXWMA0TL._SL160_.jpg)
In Search Of Freedom: Excerpts From His Most Memorable Speeches [Spoken Word]
Amazon Price: $1.30 (as of 06/03/2012)
List Price: $6.98
Release Date: 01/23/1996
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
The Peace Movement Is Too Little Too Late
Military History
You'll have to look at this side. There is not history category for peace, even if it's prevailed most of the time.
Appreciate this discussion. Give me a "Thumbs Up."
Thank you.
This module only appears with actual data when viewed on a live lens. The favorite and lensroll options will appear on a live lens if the viewer is a member of Squidoo and logged in.
Any thoughts you'd like to share?
-
-
Mermaiden
Sep 28, 2011 @ 4:40 pm | delete
- I really enjoyed your lens. Sometimes it's so frustrating to believe in a cause that often seems unattainable....but I never let go of hope.
-
-
-
DaveStone13
Sep 28, 2011 @ 4:43 pm | delete
- The alternative is way ugly.
-
-
-
ChrisDay
Apr 21, 2011 @ 3:45 pm | delete
- I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said words to the effect that war does not determine who's right, it determines who's left.
-
-
-
DaveStone13
Apr 21, 2011 @ 3:48 pm | delete
- Sounds like Shaw. Thanks, Chris.
-
-
-
raphaelo
Apr 21, 2011 @ 3:15 pm | delete
- So wonderful peace and war lens .. Dave :) I love your style of its lens. It's so unique and great. I'm so happy to see your beautiful work here and all. 5 stars for your hard work and 2 big thumbs up for you. Have a wonderful time.. Dave :)
PS: Would you mind if I would like to suggest to add more about John Lennon imagine music video and its posters. I think a lot of people will love it. Don't be serious if you would not like, too. Just only give you an idea :)
-
- Load More
What are your thoughts on Peace and War?
Loading poll. Please Wait...
If peace will prevail, it must start with the young.
One Peace: True Stories of Young Activists
Amazon Price: $11.51 (as of 06/03/2012)
List Price: $19.95
Release Date: 10/01/2008
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Other writings and recommends...
Peace, like charity, begins at home.
Please, if you can, donate here.
Environmental law defender Earthjustice, the top American ecological law firm, because the earth needs a good lawyer. Formerly Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
Search further here.
Fresh Lenses
by DaveStone13
- 161 featured lenses
- Winner of 33 trophies!
- Top lens » Esther Hicks Scam's Mean Streak
Feeling creative?
Create a Lens!
Explore related pages
- 1960s Hippies Still Proud To Be Hippie Bums 1960s Hippies Still Proud To Be Hippie Bums
- Hippies In The 1960s: An American Invention Hippies In The 1960s: An American Invention
- Hippie Symbols and Peace Signs Hippie Symbols and Peace Signs
- Universal Soldiers Universal Soldiers
- Phil Ochs Ain't Marching Anymore Phil Ochs Ain't Marching Anymore
- Make Peace Not War- Peace Crafts Make Peace Not War- Peace Crafts
Writings in other spaces.
The Straight Dope on History
A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
Amazon Price: (as of 06/03/2012)
History As It Happend
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
Amazon Price: $12.25 (as of 06/03/2012)
