All right, y'all, welcome back to the show at Sandtown War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is John Horgan.
He's a science journalist and director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, former senior writer at Scientific American.
He's written for every important newspaper and magazine in the world, and his new book is called The End of War.
And I was invited by the nice folks over at FireDog Lake to host a book salon with John on Saturday evening.
And if you go to FireDogLake.com, there's a link up near the top that says Book Salon, and you can find the link right there.
And so basically it's like an interview show, only in a comment section and with callers, meaning, you know, other people typing in comments.
So that was a good time, and I thought, well, maybe I should bring John on the show to talk about his thesis with you guys.
So welcome back.
How are you doing, John?
Pretty good.
I'm just trying to figure out if I'm a member of the lamestream media, as your ad referred to it.
Well, you've certainly been published in it.
Yes, I certainly have, but it's often been an awkward fit.
So I love it when I get to talk to people in, I don't know, alternative media, whatever you guys might be called.
Yeah, well, we like it when people up there in the establishment with patches on their elbows and stuff, you know, get with what's right instead of what's wrong all the time.
And so your book is a nice break in the consensus, at least as it appears from here, I'll tell you that.
Well, thanks.
You know, although I'm hoping that my anti-war message, I mean, I deliberately tried to write it in such a way that it would appeal to as broad a range of people as possible, not only traditional progressive anti-war folks, but maybe conservatives, religious people.
I'm trying to appeal to the pacifist core of some of the great religions.
So my hope is and my belief is that actually every particular type of political group and age group, demographic, should really be anti-war.
We should all be anti-war.
So I'm trying to give people as many arguments as possible to convince them that we all need to band together and get rid of war and militarism once and for all.
Well, it's the most important thing that and we certainly need that new consensus.
But you know what you're up against, which is that it's just not believable to most people.
And this is how your book begins.
Yes, people at random or this group or that group of people, whether they think we'll always have war, whether war is innate in mankind, that kind of thing.
And you pretty much scrape up a lot of pessimistic views from a lot of people with ten thousand different, wide and varied reasons why they believe what they believe.
But they all seem to agree that we'll always have these mass conflicts.
Yeah, Scott.
So that was what really drove me to write the book, because I started realizing, I guess it must be eight or nine years ago now, that the vast majority of people, including people on the liberal left, Greens, Doves, and I count myself among those groups, are extremely fatalistic about war.
The basic idea is that we've always fought and we always will.
And then people cite a variety of reasons to support that fatalism, whether it is that war is part of human nature, it's in our genes, and I devote a lot of time to confronting that attitude, or whether war is a result of too many people, population growth, and increasingly scarce resources, exacerbated recently, perhaps, by global warming.
That's a very common belief, especially in the left, that global warming is inevitably going to trigger wars over water and so forth.
So I also look very closely at that belief and try to show that it's just not supported by the empirical facts.
And the overarching message I try to give people is that war isn't something that happens to us.
It's not like an earthquake.
It's not like cancer or tsunamis.
It is something that we make happen.
We have to recognize that war is something that we're responsible for, especially in democracies where we actually have some power to influence our leadership.
And I think if we take responsibility for war, we see war as a choice instead of this kind of force of nature, that's a first step toward getting rid of it.
You know, a friend of mine who I've known since I was a little kid, who's not really a political-type guy at all, said to me one time, Hey, we're working for antiwar.com.
Well, let me tell you, which wars are you opposing?
The resource wars or the religious wars?
Because neither of them are ever going to end, so what the hell are you doing?
You know, that's another reason.
Religion.
Some of my students have said that as long as we have religion, different religions, we will always have war.
And so you get a lot of religion bashing, especially in the secular war movement.
And if you look out across the world today, of course you can see that religion is at least an exacerbating factor in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, certainly in the Middle East.
But what is true of a lot of factors that contribute to war is that they also can be potential solutions to war.
So some of the great pacifists of history have been inspired by religious doctrines.
So Martin Luther King and Gandhi are two prime examples.
I think that religion actually can be a very potent anti-war force.
And so in my book I suggest that secular anti-war activists reach out to religious people and try to create a coalition, an anti-war coalition, in the same way that some secular biologists.
Edward Wilson at Harvard is a wonderful example, who believe in conservation and preserving the diversity of species around the earth, have reached out to the conservative Christian community and said, I revere nature for scientific reasons.
You revere nature as the creation of your God.
Let's join together in this great common cause of trying to preserve nature from human pollution and overpopulation and so forth.
I think something – I honestly believe that something like that could happen in the realm of warfare.
Yeah, well, you know, there's still slavery in the world.
In fact, I oftentimes keep CNN International out of the corner of my eye in the background during the show.
And they have this whole anti-slavery campaign going on.
And I don't know how much of a dent they're making in it.
And there still is human slavery around the world.
And I don't just mean in the, you know, everybody has to submit to their local nation-state sense.
But I mean privately owned slaves.
But it's not legal hardly anywhere left in the world, is it?
Except maybe Sudan, or is it even legal in Sudan anymore?
So that's something that has always existed throughout mankind.
The weak saying you're hired or else kind of thing, and I'll pay you nothing.
That's always been around.
And somehow we outlawed it.
And people can say all-wage slavery, this, that, and whatever exploitation.
But there ain't nothing quite like being outright owned by somebody else.
Right.
I think slavery is – there's a good analogy to be made between slavery and warfare.
You're quite right that there is economic exploitation around the world and even outright slavery.
Although, of course, all nation-states disavow any kind of legalization of slavery.
And yet, over the past 150 years, we have made enormous strides away from slavery.
So yes, it's a continuing problem, but not remotely on the scale that it was 150 years ago.
Or certainly before the Civil War in the United States.
Or a couple of hundred years ago when most of the great European powers participated in slavery.
War is the same way.
We're reaching the point where we see widespread revulsion toward war.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody.
John Horrigan.
The book is The End of War.
All right, so welcome back to the show.
You there, John?
Yes.
All right.
So I'm talking with John Horrigan.
He's the author of The End of War and a former senior writer at Scientific American.
Boy, have I read a lot of you guys at the dentist office before.
All right.
So the point of the book, The End of War, is that war is not in our genes.
It's not a matter of genetic or other causal determinism.
It's a matter of choice, really.
And I guess that's where the optimism comes from, is that you believe in free will.
And especially, look at the example of Iraq.
And I guess I could see why you wouldn't want to dwell on this too much in your book, because you're trying to make a larger point.
The example of Iraq is just perfect for illustrating that you really did not have to do that.
And it was because Dick Cheney made his alliance with the neoconservative faction, and they had this agenda they thought was going to work out real well for Israel, but it turned out to work out real well for Iran instead.
They wanted to do this thing, and so they did it.
And it did not have to be this way.
Now, maybe 200 years from now, when people read the history of this time, they'll say, well, everything changed, and the winds of change blew, and the page of time turned, and the era of the Iraq War dawned, or whatever, as though it's all inevitable.
But that doesn't mean that it is.
It just means that that's what Dick Cheney wanted, and so that's what happened.
Right.
If there's an upside to the last 10 years of war that the United States has been involved in, it would be, I hope, that we will have learned our lesson and realized that even though there might be a tiny minority of people that benefit from war, the defense manufacturers, companies like Halliburton, the vast majority of people are devastated by war, not only directly, not only the soldiers themselves and their families, and of course all the Iraqis and Afghans who have had their lives destroyed by the U.S. occupations, but the entire U.S. economy.
I mean, our economic problems have been worsened, at least in part, by the trillions of dollars we're spending on these wars.
And it's not like we're getting some gigantic windfall out of the oil in Iraq.
The point that I make in my...
I've already discounted resource competition and biology as factors for causing war.
My theory of war dates back to the great anthropologist Margaret Mead, who described war as an invention, which actually is supported by the record of anthropology and archaeology.
War is quite recent.
It only started about 10,000 years ago at the dawn of human civilization and agriculture.
And it can start for an enormous variety of reasons, but then it becomes self-perpetuating.
War creates cultures of war that elevate militarism and fighting to the highest values of that society.
And then, of course, also the fear of war perpetuates war.
You've got a belligerent neighbor next to you.
You arm yourself against the attack that you fear, or you even attack them preemptively.
If you look at the wars that have happened recently, Iraq and Afghanistan, those were clearly wars of revenge and fear, I think, even more than wars motivated by greed, although I know a lot of your listeners will probably focus on the greed factor.
If you look at what's happening now in Iran...
Well, there was a strategy behind it.
That's what the president called it.
There was a plan.
It just wasn't a good one.
That's right.
Or you even have the huge irony of trying to create a democracy in this region.
This is something that Bush's cronies, Wolfowitz and others, the neoconservatives, said we were trying to do a democracy and democracies don't fight each other.
So they're actually trying to create peace through war.
It's one of the oldest excuses in the book.
In the situation with Iran, why are we in this tense situation with Iran, we and Israel?
It's because we think that they might be building a nuclear weapon that they can attack us with, and, of course, they fear, with good reason, that we or Israel might attack them.
So it's war perpetuating war.
One of the lessons I take away from this is that, and this is relevant to anti-war activists out there, is that how do you fight war?
The traditional explanations have been you promote democracy or you promote economic justice, you promote gender equality, you try to fight poverty, all these sorts of things.
But the lesson that I've drawn from all my studies of war is that you fight war by fighting war.
You go up against militarism itself because militarism is its own cause.
And it can take root in pretty much any society.
So you have to attack it in and of itself.
And if you can get rid of militarism, I think a lot of the other goals that social activists, that progressives might have, including gender equality, including more economic justice, including more democracy would flow from a decrease in militarism.
At least that's my hope.
I remember an American soldier telling the New York Times quite a few years back now, oh, I enjoy killing Iraqis.
Yeah, you shoot them and you watch them fall and it's great fun.
And you say in your book that that's the 2 or 3% of at least white males, I guess, who are psychopaths.
And that's just how they are.
Maybe it's of all male humans who just really like hacking people to death because it's fun.
But then what's interesting is how you get the 98% to follow.
But what's even more interesting to me is how do you get people who are sniveling cowards like Dick Cheney, George Bush, Barack Obama to lead other people into doing these horrible things?
People who know that on the face of it that Dick Cheney is never brave enough to carry a rifle and put his own hide at risk.
Not for one minute, they'll still follow him.
They'll still volunteer to serve him, putting their own hide at risk.
I think what you're touching on is, again, something that I explored in my book, which is that the vast majority of people wage war not because they are innate warriors, not because we're wolves, but because we're sheep.
But because we're conformists who do what we're told to do.
There are these classic experiments done in the 60s and 70s by people like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo that show that people will do horrendous things that really upset them, that they do not want to do if they have some kind of authority figure telling them to do that.
I think this explains war crimes.
This explains why Americans and other supposedly civilized people go marching off to war better than any biological explanation.
We are herd animals.
And charismatic leaders, or not even charismatic leaders, an idiot like George Bush, with the help of the media, can convince us that we need to engage in these military adventures that are devastating to us, actually.
And that there are many reasons why we shouldn't be doing these things.
There's a positive side to that kind of conformity.
If we can show people the immorality of war with more power than we have so far, if we can show people the stupidity of war, it's a rationality that I'm hoping that people will join together in turning away from this once and for all.
So we need to harness that conformity of humans which can lead to even to the Holocaust and to the horrors of Nazi Germany.
We need to harness that to take us away from war and militarism once and for all.
Yeah, you quote someone in the book, I'm not sure who, saying, well, we just need to characterize it like it's cannibalism.
No society, never mind slavery, no society would come a million miles from endorsing cannibalism, right?
Okay, maybe if you're playing Crashes in the Andes or whatever, but not under normal traditional circumstances.
It's just absolutely unthinkable to 6-7 billion people on Earth right now.
We could make war the very same thing.
What, are you crazy?
You're going to drop high explosives on people?
It's insane.
You can't do that.
Here's the difference.
I completely agree.
I think we need a moral sea change that turns us against war once and for all in the same way that the civilized people turned against cannibalism and then later slavery, even though slavery, of course, persists in various forms around the world.
We need to pay attention to what many of our moral leaders have been telling us throughout history.
But here's the problem.
Here's what makes war different from some of these other great crimes of humanity that we have overcome.
War is paradoxical because war can be used to defeat war.
Violence can be used to defeat violence.
And so there is such a thing as a just war, even though I would put quotation marks around just.
There are some wars that are certainly more morally justifiable than others.
I think there is such a thing as a genuine humanitarian intervention type of war.
But I think we need to be much more restrictive in how we wage wars like that.
For example, I don't think we should have used military force against Libya.
And the reason is that because I think our use of force against Libya led to a greater evil, which is legitimizing force once again as a solution to our problems.
We need to be much more creative in how we come up with alternatives to the use of force in situations like Libya, now with Syria, or even with Iran.
We've obviously got these hot spots on the world.
We have to do something about them.
The thing is, though, when you talk about humanitarian interventions, you take the most extreme example that could justify some kind of humanitarian intervention like Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Well, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan backed Pol Pot in Cambodia.
They were on the wrong side of that.
At the same time, they were helping all the death squads kill everybody who resisted them in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world.
So it's pretty hard for the guy with the most blood-soaked clothes on to be the hero to come and save the people from themselves.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
I think the biggest problem that the United States has and that the entire world has is that the United States, which could be a leader in taking the whole world past the era of war and militarism, is the biggest problem.
So the United States could be a solution, but it's a problem because our military, as I'm sure you and your listeners know, is as big as all other militaries around the world combined.
We spend, if you count nuclear weapons and everything, about a trillion dollars with this crappy economy that we have on weapons, armies, and so forth.
We're also by far the biggest arms dealers in the world.
And we are constantly developing new weapons like high-tech drones and using them to assassinate people just because we feel like it without answering to any court of law anywhere around the world.
So when we lecture somebody like Assad in Syria and tell him that he shouldn't be killing his own people, who the hell are we?
You're absolutely right.
We have no moral credibility, but I think we can potentially with some good leadership.
I think we're ripe.
We're in a wonderful situation for a politician with some guts and some imagination and eloquence to come forward and make a case for a world without war and spell out how we can get there and how the U.S. can lead us to that point by taking steps to reduce its own military, to act more morally in the world, to stop its international arms sales, and to help give some moral credibility to its rhetoric.
Well, I absolutely agree with you, and you don't focus on this all that much in the book, but it's apparent in the book that you have this very little-L liberal premise that people are individuals and that they have a will, maybe constrained by circumstances, but they have choices and they make them, and it does not have to be this way, and then you proceed to debunk myth after myth after myth about why it does need to be this way.
And I actually think that a world without war is possible and is more possible probably just because of the existence of this thing.
Hopefully many copies will be printed and sold and will help people to realize that it really does not have to be this way at all.
Well, thanks a lot, Scott.
If anybody wants to learn more about my book, they can check out my website, johnhorgan.org.
I'm giving a lot of talks, especially around the New York area.
I want to go out and spread the messages as widely as I can, so if people want me to give a talk at their local school or church or whatever, please contact me, because I've never felt more passionately about anything that I've written than this book.
And I really want to thank you for talking to me on Firedog Lake over the weekend and on your show today.
Well, I really have enjoyed it and appreciated it, and I'll probably never see this book again, because I'm going to loan it out soon, and it'll be out circulating around.
Everybody run out and get The End of War by John Horgan.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
