Tag: Civil War

Systems so perfect

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

“dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

Man frightened by specter of national spying.
Image by Carlos Latuff, copyright free. (FRA refers to Swedish wiretapping law).

C.S. Lewis wrote those words for his verse play The Rock, but they could just as well apply to U.S. foreign policy and security affairs. (Witness the current daily National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping bombshells.)

We have always been dazzled by our technological prowess when it comes to security. In the American Revolution, the British had muskets, but we had rifles. The Civil War had aerial observation, repeating rifles, railroads, and steam-powered warships. In World War I, every machine gun on all sides had at least one American patent; in World War II, we had long-range bombers that could deliver the atomic bomb.

Nowadays we can listen to everyone everywhere.

Maybe we should take a lesson from our use of the atomic bomb. It took awhile, but many of us finally realized that this was something awesomely and terribly different. In spite of some impassioned calls to do so, neither the U.S. nor any other nation has used nuclear weapons since World War II ended in 1945. In my Navy days we used to deride “capabilities in search of a mission.”

Perhaps we can learn that our ability to eavesdrop on everyone, like our ability to deploy nuclear weapons, has a serious downside. We ought not to use this “system so perfect” everywhere without clear and agreed-upon restraints. Yes, terrorists do present a serious threat to our society–but so does the breakdown of trust between citizens and government and among those who should be our allies and partners in fighting this scourge.

We have incredibly effective, near-perfect systems, like “smart” weapons, drones, electronic intercept equipment, and so on. We humans need to be good and smart, too.

Historical strands of peace activism

Posted on by kathiemm

Review of Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement, by Thomas F. Curran (228 p, Fordham, 2003).

Review by Edward Agro

I’d long been anxious to read Soldiers of Peace, hoping it might shed light on successes as well as missteps in the current-day antiwar movement. And so it has.

Soldiers of Peace by Thomas F. CurranThe main character in Soldiers of Peace is Alfred H. Love, who was possessed of the idée fixe that the only way to peace before, during, and after the Civil War was to rebuild government and civil society on a Biblical model.

Reading the story of Love and the Universal Peace Union (UPU) he founded leads to an understanding of several strands of American civic culture and activism of 150 and more years ago that contribute substantially to perspectives we bring to peace and social change work today.

Curran’s evidence persuasively shows how doctrinal rigidity within the UPU and its secular twin, the American Peace Society, most likely lessened the positive things both groups could have accomplished. On the other hand, enough people, including Love as he aged, were able to get far enough ahead of their preconceptions to lay the groundwork for many of the progressive campaigns and organizations of the 20th century.

This review doesn’t do justice to Curran’s contribution to the untangling of the many threads that led to present-day activist consciousness, or his evidence regarding the practice of war tax refusal.

I don’t want to oversell the book; it probably won’t be much help to activists on the barricades on behalf of one or another immediate campaign. But for those whose street-fighting days are perhaps over, who have the luxury of trying to understand where we come from and where we might be going, it’s a treasure.

Ed Agro is a long-time peace activist whose autobiographical statement was published in Forbes.

Syria: Even fainter hope

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

Map of Syria
Image in public domain

The tragic course of violence in Syria, falling mostly as it usually does on women and children, highlights the limitations of the United Nations as a means of peaceful conflict resolution in the world.

Even at its best, the UN can only do in situations like the Syrian civil war what the Security Council allows, and that body is set to stop action rather than take it.

The best analogy of the Security Council is that of a circuit breaker. It shuts down anything that is too big for the system to handle. The idea is that if any of the five permanent members (P5) really don’t want an action, then taking it would likely cause a more widespread and destructive situation.

Right now China and Russia are both balking at anything more than admonitions to Syria for what the Assad regime is doing to its own people. Neither country, each with its own restive and sometime violent Muslim minorities in Central Asia, wants any kind of precedent-setting UN response that promotes intervention in internal state conflict, however bloody and barbaric.

Russia has the additional motivation of not wishing to be seen as weak because it abandons a decades-long client state.

Who else could intervene? NATO is withdrawing forces from both Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as it can. Trying to set the house in order for another Middle Eastern state is not on any member’s agenda.

The ratio of Arab League rhetoric to action is nearly infinite.

Israel can only watch and hope. Geopolitically speaking, a fractious Syria on its border is a positive thing–but one sunk into chaos is not.

And even if some outside power did step in to stop the massacres, the aftermath of regime change now evident in other Arab states like Libya and Egypt is not at all encouraging.

It is the inevitably depressing commentary on humankind that perhaps only exhaustion of one or both of the combatants will end the killing. Inspired leadership by someone, anyone, could also be the answer but, alas, that is an even fainter hope.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of International Relations, Boston University

The American Civil War and pacifism

Posted on by kathiemm

Before 2011 draws to an end, we want to acknowledge that 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, 11 slave states seceded from the United States in 1861.Soldiers of Peace book by Thomas F. Curran

Most people educated in the U.S. have heard of General Robert E. Lee and General William Tecumseh Sherman and of Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia.

Moreover, most Americans have some notion of how deadly the Civil War was, even if they don’t have the facts and figures.

According to John Huddleston*, 620,000 soldiers died during this conflict—more Americans than in all the other wars combined, up through Vietnam. Huddleston estimates that 10% of all Northern males aged 20-45 and 40% of all Southern white males aged 18-40 died. By one estimate**, there were a total of 1,030,000 casualties–3% of the population.

On the other hand, it is likely that few Americans know that the conscription law for the Union allowed conscientious objectors to buy their way out of fighting. This law followed in the tradition of General George Washington, who excused young men from the Revolutionary War draft if they had a conscientious objection to war.

Moreover, few Americans have heard of the Universal Peace Union (UPU). Led by Alfred H. Love, the UPU was devoted to the idea of nonresistance, the belief that evil must not be met with violence, no matter how noble the cause.*** To learn more about the UPU and the early pacifist movement in the U.S., read the review of Curran’s book by Jeffrey McClurken.

* Huddleston, John.  Killing ground: Photographs of the Civil War and the changing American landscape. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

** Nofi, Al (2001-06-13). “Statistics on the war’s costs”. Louisiana State University. Archived from the original on 2007-07-11.

***Curran, Thomas F. Soldiers of peace: Civil War pacifism and the postwar radical peace movement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology