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Why a ‘Season’ of Peace in a Year of Conflict?
Deborah Buffton “Always on a Sunday” Program, Norskedalen
This time of year is considered a “season of peace” in many religious and secular traditions – a time somehow different from the rest of the year, a time when we extend grace and love to those we know well, those we know only vaguely, and even to those we don’t know at all. Why do we choose to set aside a special season for peace rather than promoting it through the whole year? I think the answer to this is connected to how peace and conflict are perceived in our culture and how those perceptions shape the world we live in. All of this connects to what we know—or think we know—about history. A couple months ago, Ron Knowland asked what sounded to me like a rather cryptic and unanswerable question: “What are the lessons of history?” After thinking about this for a while, I’ve decided that the best way to answer that (though perhaps not the most satisfying) is to say that “it depends on what you look at.” By this I mean that the parts of the past that we choose to look at, as well as the parts of the past we choose to ignore, have a lot to do with what lessons we will draw from the past and thus how we view the present. In the novel 1984, George Orwell writes of a society in which the government has taken control both of the people’s memories of the past as well as the ways they define words. On large billboards and over radio waves come the messages that “War is peace” and “Truth is falsehood.” People are regularly told that the present is far better than the past ever was, but that in addition, there is a great threat out there that only the government can protect them from. Thus, they must accept the government’s version of the past and trust that the government will protect them. Because the threat is kept vague and intangible, the people are unable to defend themselves against it. It is all a façade, of course, a system designed simply to keep the population fearful and docile and help the government maintain its power. But the novel offers a striking illustration of why our knowledge of the past matters—whoever controls our memory of the past controls how we see things today. As the title of this talk suggests, this is a time of year when we talk about “peace on earth and goodwill to all”. Despite the sometimes hectic pace of the season, we try to extend kindness to others. We “get into the spirit of the season” by watching movies and reading books that explore this theme—“A Christmas Carol”, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Collectively we are more generous to charities—both with our time and our money—than at any other time of the year. This is not simply because we are thinking of tax deductions, but because we genuinely want to do something nice for someone or to make a positive difference in the world, no matter how small. Such generosity and kindness are extended not only to our family and friends, but also to total strangers, as we have toy drives for children, coat drives for the poor. The Salvation Army and other organizations urge individuals and groups to “adopt a family” for the holidays. There are holiday concerts for which admission is a non-perishable food item for the local food pantry. It is a time when conflicts are supposed to be minimized. Family members that may have little to do with each other during the rest of the year, somehow feel obliged to get together, dine together, and even exchange gifts together—not always an easy task! And then, somewhere around January 3 or 4th, the season is considered over, the holiday decorations are taken down, the Christmas trees are put back in their boxes in the attic or out on the boulevards to be turned into mulch. And we return to “business as usual”. The magical spell of getting along and extending peace and goodwill is somehow broken for another 11 months. And we go back to our old ways of thinking and interacting with each other, based on the assumption that conflict is inevitable and violence is everywhere. And to some degree, we are right. We do live in a terrifically violent society and world. In addition to the wars that are going on all over the world, our own society is one that celebrates violence, even though many would deny this. Even in the midst of all this holiday goodwill, we celebrate violence—violent toys, violent movies, videos, language, sports. Our culture is so full of violence that we often don’t even notice. And the onslaught of violence starts very young. Just a couple days ago I did a Google search for “war toys” and came up with some amazing and scary results—one site listed “Christmas specials” on various “war toys” including “Infantry Shells with Impact Fuse”, toy machine guns and “boxed weapon sets”! What better way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace that to go downstairs on Christmas morning and open up a package that holds a toy machine gun! Another site offers a variety of “Civil War toys” for children, including pistols, muskets and sabers. A toy shotgun “Comes with the obligatory orange cap on the muzzle so everyone will know this is toy. (We would still advise not taking this into the Bank with you.)” Another indicates, “bayonet cannot be used on this model,” suggesting that, apparently, there are some models on which a bayonet can be used! Some of these toys were listed as being appropriate for children as young as 3 years old. This site suggests that these toys are wonderful ways to teach history—what lessons of history does a child learn from a toy bayonet? Although clearly war is not a game, children who play with war toys are taught that it is. War toys turn war into a contest between a good-guy army (that can do no wrong) and a bad-guy army (that deserves the most horrible destruction imaginable). War toys, including violent video games, teach children that the best way to solve conflicts is to eliminate the people they are having conflicts with. These “entertainments” teach conquest, murder, and contempt—early “training” that makes violence and aggression acceptable and exciting to young people. Moving all of this out of the realm of playtime and uncomfortably close to contemporary reality, the Army spent 8 million tax dollars developing a realistic video game that’s free for downloading and makes war entertaining so youth will want to enlist. The Pentagon tracks who scores well, so it can focus on them for recruitment later. The historical lessons that underlie all of this is that warfare is part of a long and honorable tradition by which men proved themselves by defending their country, their women and their honor. War is necessary because there are evil people who must be destroyed in order to keep us safe. That sometimes force is the only way we can get people to listen to us. That those who call for peace are, at best, misguided; at worst disloyal. That war is the norm in the world and has been at all times and in all places. So that’s one lesson of history. What other lessons might we learn? Well, for one thing, we might learn that peace is much more prevalent than we think. At UW-La Crosse I teach a course on Peace and War and each time I teach it, on the first day of the course, I give a quiz in which I write 15 or 20 names on the board and ask students to identify them. The names include people like Ulysses Grant, Douglas MacArthur, Genghis Khan, Napoléon Boneparte, Julius Caesar, Robert E. Lee, Jane Addams, Barbara Deming, Mairead Corrigan, Jeannette Rankin, Philip Storey, Dagmar Wilson, Dorothy Day, Kathe Kollwitz, Mel Duncan, A.J. Muste, Alfred Love, Bertha Von Suttner, Dave Dellinger, and Ammon Hennecy. All these people are closely associated either with war or with peace. It has been my experience that invariably the students will be able to easily identify all or nearly all the people associated with war. And also invariably, almost none will be able to identify any of those associated with peace. In most cases, they will identify those associated with war solely in that light, so that, for example, Julius Caesar will be known as a Roman general, not a Roman ruler; Genghis Khan will be identified as a Mongol warrior, not a Mongol ruler. On the other hand, on those few occasions where students can identify one of the "peace people," they will know them in some other way, not as a peace activist. So, for example, there's usually at least one person in the class who has heard of Jane Addams, but they know her as a social reformer of the Progressive Era, not as one of the founders and first president of the WILPF, and it will stun them to hear that Henry Ford referred to her as "the most dangerous woman in America," because of her antiwar stance in World War I. The purpose of this quiz, of course, is to get students to think about why it is that we can recognize all the people related to war, but not those associated with peace. And a major reason for this is the way we traditionally have taught history. We have taught it as if everything happened from war to war to war to war, but never from peace to peace to peace. We teach US History courses from the Rev. War to the Civil War, the Civil War to WW II, WW II to the present. European History courses usually begin or end with wars—1648, 1815, 1870, 1918, 1945, etc. It may sound an odd question, but did you ever wonder why we do not learn about the wars that never happened—the conflicts that were averted because of diplomacy or some other nonviolent action? Although every school child spends time hearing about the major battles and generals and strategies of wars, and about those occasions where peace failed, we don't spend a lot of time examining the reasons why, for example, South Africa did not descend into civil war after the collapse of apartheid; nor do we ask why the collapse of communism and attendant transformation of eastern European governments during the "Velvet Revolutions" of the early 1990s was, with a few exceptions, relatively bloodless; nor do we question how it was that Ferdinand Marcos, the military dictator of the Philippines who was armed to the teeth, was unseated nonviolently essentially in a weekend. Nor do we explore in depth the ways the Solidarity movement nonviolently brought about major changes in Poland's government. We all know the heroic stories of violent resistance to the Nazis in WW II, but do we also know about the successful nonviolent resistance that occurred in Denmark, Norway, southern France and elsewhere? The result of learning these lessons of history is that it creates the impression that, as Vince Lombardi once said about winning, war isn't everything; it is the only thing. I have heard many people make the argument that war has been a constant throughout history by citing some dubious statistic that claims that there have been only a couple hundred years of peace in all of world history, while conversely, there have been thousands of years of war. This statistic is true only if you look through a particular prism that says, "any time war is going on anywhere in the world, there is war." Fair enough. But then, why don't we apply that same perspective to peace? Why not say, "any time peace is happening anywhere in the world, then there is peace"? If war is our constant companion, then so too is peace. It depends on where you look. If we look at the world today we find wars between the US and Iraq, the US and Afghanistan, the US and Columbia, a civil war in Iraq. But at the same time, peace is also happening, and in far more places. Canada and the US are at peace; China and Russia are not at war with each other; Ecuador and Angola are at peace; Germany and France are at peace; Australia and New Zealand are at peace. We could be here all night if we listed all the places in the world that are at peace. And yet, because of our mindset, determined in part by what lessons we take from history, we perceive the world to be a war-like place where violence is inevitable, and through this narrow lens, peace vanishes from sight. I’m sure that many of you know the story of the WW I Christmas Eve truce of 1914. How in the days before Christmas in 1914, soldiers on the Western Front began to propose to the enemy side a truce. Gradually, trust overcame suspicion as French and German and British and Austrian soldiers got out of their trenches and entered the No Man’s Land between the enemy lines. There they shared photos of loved ones, packages from home, tobacco and liquor, played British football and sang Christmas carols. What is interesting to me is how we teach this story and what we know (or think we know) about it. We teach it, first of all, as an aberration, an oddity that is noteworthy only because it is strange. Who ever heard of a truce in the middle of a war? And we teach it in the singular, as if it happened only in one place at one time. But in fact, similar truces between enemy combatants occurred all up and down both the Eastern and Western Fronts. They lasted varying amounts of time. And they continued through the war, although, we only hear of the one on the northern-most sector of the Western Front in December 1914. And afterward, the top brass recognized how dangerous these activities were (because they made men reluctant to resume killing each other) and so those who were involved in these truces were punished in various ways. As a result the story was dramatically downplayed and even denied in official news reports. Shades of 1984. But what is also interesting to me is what lesson we learn from these actions. Rather than seeing them as a hopeful example of humanity breaking through the nonsense of propaganda and the barbarism of war, we see it as an example of how fragile and temporary peace is. That image of peace as fragile, temporary and rare is, I think, the prevailing image in our society. Does anyone here know of the peace memorial in Bangor? Five years ago, in May 2002 I joined about 40 people gathered in the village park in Bangor for the dedication of what was called a "permanent peace memorial." The memorial was a flagpole. After brief comments from half a dozen speakers, a world peace flag was raised. It was noteworthy since, while war memorials are ubiquitous, it is uncommon in this society to create memorials to peace. Indeed, at the other end of the park, just at the entrance, is a tank, clearly a war memorial. The juxtaposition of these two memorials seems to be an apt metaphor for the ways we envision peace and war in our society. It was striking that the announcement of the dedication ceremony referred to the peace memorial as "permanent", since one never hears of a "permanent" war memorial—its permanence is assumed. Peace, on the other hand, is seen as temporary. And the tank, an artifact of war, is clearly more permanent and tangible than the rather abstract peace flag. The former is both sturdier and less flexible. While the peace flag can be replaced with a different flag that gives a different message, or the pole can be left empty, little can be done to remove the tank from its spot, nor is there any ambiguity or flexibility about its role and function. The tank, like war itself, is there "for the duration," while peace, by contrast, is as fragile and temporary as a piece of fabric hanging from a flagpole. These images matter because they both create and reflect our assumptions about reality. If the lessons we have drawn from history lead us to think that war is permanent and necessary, then it becomes so. If those lessons further lead us to think that peace is fragile and temporary, that, too, becomes reality. But what about the other visions that are possible? What other lessons might we take from history? A few years ago, one of my students in the Peace and War class wrote me an e-mail in which she said that the class "…has caused me to notice and reevaluate everyday things…that I've taken for granted. Today I ran across one of those 'things.' The University's scholarship [applications] were due and I applied for several, but one made me question what higher education is communicating by offering this scholarship." She then referred to the "World War II Leon Miller Scholarship" which had been established by the UWL faculty and students in the early post-war years in honor of a WW II vet. One of the criteria is that preference is given to a veteran or descendant of a veteran of World War II. My student then went on, "I actually applied for this one, because both my Grandfathers served in this war, but also wondered where the scholarships were for students who are 'descendants' of those who served in the Peace Corps." Where, indeed? Why do we have any number of scholarships for military veterans or ROTC students, but few or none for Peace Corps veterans? It speaks volumes about our values and worldview—which have been shaped by the lessons we’ve chosen to learn from history. Why do we celebrate those who died fighting for their country, but not those who died serving their country in nonviolent ways? Why do TV stations air “Greetings from the troops” but no “Greetings from the Peace Corps volunteers”? In addition to ignoring peace, we also tend to either downplay its significance and power, or to consider it evidence of failure. It seems that whenever an international crisis emerges, those who advocate attempting a nonviolent solution are accused of both treason and of weakness. This is certainly true of our current society, where those who call for and end to the Iraq war are often labeled as cowards and traitors, but it is not just a contemporary phenomenon. The 19th century humanist Thomas Mann referred to peace as "an element in civil corruption" while he saw war as a way to revive society. Those who call for peace are accused of falling prey to the seductive lure of "appeasement." The memory of Neville Chamberlain's overly hopeful words that he had achieved "peace in our time" after signing the Munich Pact with Hitler, surrendering the Sudetenland to Germany, immediately spring to mind, and become the watchwords of those who distain nonviolence as ineffective at best and dishonorable at worst. See what happens when you advocate peace? Violence can only be met with violence. An alternative lesson that we might have learned from the experience of Munich is that if you establish a vengeful peace (Versailles, 1919) and then let bitterness simmer too long, nothing will stop that from erupting. Not unrelated to this, peace is also associated with treason. In the past, refusal to fight in war was a crime. In World War I, Conscientious Objectors were sentenced to 10-15 years of hard labor in prison. Many of them were serving their time long after the war had ended. If they had already signed up for the military, they were sometimes executed for dereliction of duty. In the early years of World War II, those who refused to fight, citing moral or religious principles that prevented them from killing another human being, served time in prison. As the war went on, they were sent to work camps, mental institutions and other rather undesirable places. There was a public outcry against them, with many angry people claiming that such draft resisters were neither "men" nor "Americans". Psychologists speculated that those who objected to serving in the military were psychologically off-balance and suffered from "a mother fixation". And in a very interesting book called The Spitting Image, Jerry Lembcke has documented how the image of Vietnam vets as spaced out hippie drug abusers was largely created by the Nixon administration to discredit those veterans who returned from the war to become antiwar activists (e.g., Vietnam Veterans Against the War). This image of the “bad veteran” was juxtaposed to the “good veteran” who returned from the war still supporting it. Even today, one cannot simply claim conscientious objector status, but must provide evidence that this has been a long-standing value throughout one's life. Not wanting to serve in the military is seen as shirking one’s duty to the nation. Part of the reason peace is seen as treasonous is that, as suggested earlier, nations define themselves by war. As a result, war memorials and military celebrations are essential parts of the process by which a society identifies itself and creates its own national narrative. Historically, nation-states have placed their origins in war (the Battle of Hastings [1066] in England, the Franco-Prussian War [1870] in Germany, the revolutions [1776 and 1789] in the US and modern France, for example), and they mark their chronologies with war. Further, their national symbols are often warriors, though, intriguingly, usually women warriors. For example, Britannia is portrayed fully geared out for war with breast-plate, sword and helmet. Similarly, France’s “Marianne” or “Liberty” is most famously portrayed in a painting by Delacroix in which she is leading the people into battle, a flag in one hand, a bayonet in the other. Germania (Germany) and Helvetia (Switzerland) are two other women warriors who represent countries. The memory of wars not only defines the identity of nations, it also marks the physical space of nations, where streets and buildings, ball parks and stadiums are named after battles, battle dates, soldiers and officers. For example, one would be hard-pressed to find a single town in France without a rue de Verdun – the battle that came to represent World War I for all of France. In the US, nearly every town has a "Veterans' Memorial Stadium" (or highway or park), and often numerous ones. In fact, there are so many of these that, ironically, they sometimes become invisible and meaningless. The lesson that is taught is that fighting and dying for one's country become the means through which a society is "cleansed," "purified" and indeed "resurrected." On the eve of World War I, many European countries feared what they saw as the degeneration and degradation of their societies, linked to the loss of "virile, manly" virtues. War was seen as the necessary antidote to this malady. In the US, the period after Vietnam led many to fear that we had lost whatever had made us great as a nation, and that we needed to renew ourselves through war. Thus, we became involved in a number of smallish military invasions in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and finally, in 1991 George Bush, Sr. led us into a war with Iraq that, in his view, helped us “kick the Vietnam syndrome.” We see this same message of war resurrecting society in war memorials. For example, one of the most important and influential sculptors of war memorials in post World War I France, Maxime Réal del Sartre, created monuments such as Terre de France in which we see a peasant woman at the grave of a soldier marked by a cross and a helmet, but sprouting from the grave come abundant sheaves of wheat. The message is that the blood of the dead soldiers brings forth new life to reinvigorate the country. Death in battle became a metaphor for the process by which seeds are buried in the ground and must "die" to produce new crops. The lesson we take from all this is that we must have war or we, as a society, will die. Ironically though, if we look at the historical record we will find that it is war itself that causes societies to die. For example in the 20th century, the percentage of civilians killed in wars went from 10% of casualties in WW I to 50% of casualties in WW II. By the end of the 20th century, 90% of those killed in war were civilians—today it is actually statistically safer to be a soldier than to be a civilian in war. So much for the idea that wars are fought to defend us and keep us safe! Moreover, wars destroy the infrastructure of the society in which they take place as homes and roads and water systems are bombed and often contaminated with radioactive substances. Wars often also destroy the infrastructure of other societies that participate in them because the huge amounts of money spent on the war are diverted from domestic programs that would fix roads and bridges, improve education and health care, etc. It is also true that every war in the 20th century has reduced the rights of individuals in the societies involved by curtailing civil, political and human rights. And yet, we continue believe and teach the lessons that war protects us and our freedoms. Within this context a brief consideration of the evolution of holidays related to war is also instructive. The holidays most closely associated with war in our society are Memorial Day and November 11. Memorial Day began in 1868 as "Decoration Day" – a day to remember the Civil War dead and to "decorate" their graves. Initially, it was a solemn day of reflection and mourning of the dead. Today it is a holiday to celebrate and glorify the military. Full of parades, picnics, flags, tanks, and soldiers it is a day to reinforce the "need" for a strong military and to celebrate extraordinary acts of courage in war, but never to question war itself. On Memorial Day, death in war is never meaningless. It is always a heroic and glorious sacrifice for an ideal of freedom, liberty, democracy, or justice. A similar transformation has occurred with November 11. Initially called "Armistice Day," the first observations of November 11 were billed as "festivals of peace" celebrating the day World War I ended. Ceremonies primarily included simply the veterans or their loved ones, who took a direct interest in the proceedings. As time went on and veterans died off, governments took steps to keep the ceremonies going, and they became important ways of promoting war. Now, November 11—renamed "Veterans' Day"—has become a holiday to celebrate the military of all wars, not the peace that followed—a subtle, but very important shift. That the date marks the end of World War I has become almost an afterthought. July 4th, too, has acquired a markedly militaristic flavor, though that was not its original intent. While the celebration of national independence might take any number of forms, it is almost impossible to conceive of any town in the US today not having a 4th of July Parade complete with soldiers carrying weapons and a fireworks display that calls to mind the "rockets' red glare" of the national anthem, which was inspired of course by the fighting in the War of 1812. I think it would be a wonderful thing if we were to be really creative in thinking about how we might celebrate independence. There is some lovely irony in the military's central role in our Independence Day celebrations, since they are not usually noted for encouraging independent thought, creativity or challenges to authority, all of which are what July 4, 1776 was all about initially. Finally, we see a different, though equally significant kind of transformation in Mothers' Day. This holiday was originally envisioned by Julia Ward Howe as an anti-war celebration. It was day to encourage women to stand up against war, vowing not to send their sons, husbands, fathers, and sweethearts to be killed; it has turned into a completely nonpolitical (and harmless) holiday for the flower and greeting card industry; one which largely celebrates a traditional view of women as homemakers far removed from the male preserve of combat. In the metamorphoses of these four holidays we find the lessons of militarism reinforced and those of peacemaking and independence forgotten. The eminent US historian, Howard Zinn writes about how his experiences early in life, growing up in a working class community that was scarred by racism, shaped his view that history mattered—it was not just an interesting intellectual exercise or a reliable job option. For him, “history could only be a way to understand and…help to change what was wrong in the world.” (“The Use and Abuse of History” in Passionate Declarations, p. 48) The lessons of history we learn will be determined by how we view the purpose of history in the first place. If we look to the past to justify the status quo, we will learn certain lessons. We will learn that war is necessary and glorious and inevitable. We will learn that peace is fragile, rare and dangerous. If we look to the past to help create a vision for a better world, then perhaps we will begin to seek out the examples (and there are so many) of peaceful action. Which path we take will determine in the end whether we continue to celebrate a season of peace in a year of conflict or whether we will create a new culture in which peace becomes the dominant expectation and war, merely an aberration. |