Observation #1: A war is never about what the combatants say it’s about.

War is more than people shooting at each other. It is a symptom of an underlying conflict that is usually complex and has political, social, and economic facets. The causes often boil down to real or perceived disparities in power and/or economics. However, they are often expressed in religious or political terms that mask the true nature of the issues.

There are good reasons for this: People are rarely willing to die for an idea. But they will die to feed their families. In any conflict, it is necessary to create a sense of imminent threat. Most Americans didn’t care whether an indigenous communist group took over a faraway country, but if they could be made to believe that the Commies were coming to America to take away their Buicks and force them to wait in bread lines, that created a sense of urgency that might convince them to join the Army and support the war. Likewise if someone can be made to believe that there is a threat to their religion, for example that the Muslim Infidels want to persecute Christians and take away their daughters, they may be convinced to risk their lives to fight the invaders.

Because combatants tailor their message to create this sense of urgency, it is often difficult to identify what the underlying conflict is. To take one example, the Sri Lanka conflict appears to be about independence for the Tamil minority, which the Sinhalese majority opposes. But the underlying conflict is quite different: it is about a power struggle within the Sinhala community that has little to do with the Tamils, and the resulting effort of the Tamils to live outside this intra-Sinhala struggle. There are, of course, many other complicating factors, including caste, class, and economic disparity. But the point is, it’s not simply an ethnic conflict.

Without identifying the true underlying conflict, peace efforts are unlikely to be successful. It would be like working on a vehicle’s carbuerator when the defect is in the ignition system— no matter how hard you try, the car still won’t run. And identifying the underlying conflict can require a great deal of study.

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“[M]any of our intellectual weapons for peacemaking are hopelessly out of date… the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war.” –Alvin & Heidi Toffler (1993)

As John Robb observes, we have entered into a time of “Brave New War.” Here on Polizeros, there’s been a good deal of discussion of the new nature of it.  Yet Toffler observed almost 15 years ago that new ways of making war require new ways of making peace.  In a time of “brave new war,” we need to find a “brave new peace.”

For me, peacework starts with an axiom: an assumption that cannot be proved, but on which logical propositions are based.  Most of peace work is based on assumptions, because there is no proven formula for ending a war.  Indeed, the only way to prove a war can be ended is to end it. 

My axiom of peacework is based on the Buddhist concept of anicca, or impermanence: Everything that has a beginning has an end. Paraphrasing the Buddha’s words when he stated the Four Noble Truths, where there is war, there must be a cause, and where there is a cause, there must be a solution.  Simply put, the axiom is this: A war can be ended if its underlying cause can be understood and addressed.

The cause of a war may be difficult to identify, but it is always there.  It can usually be found by studying the history leading up to armed conflict.  Too often, war did not have to happen: there were clear opportunities along the way for avoidance.  In Sri Lanka, one Sinhalese commentator observed that all parties had missed every possible opening that could have prevented an outbreak of hostilities.

Much like trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, once violence breaks out, war can be exceedingly difficult to end. This suggests another axiom: it is easier to prevent a war than to end it once it begins.

I’ve been invited to explore, in a series of posts, what I’ve learned in my own peacework. In turn, I’d like to invite your comments and discussion, since I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have all the answers.  And in the process, perhaps some insight can be reached in the practical application of trying to end a war.

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The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a coalition member of the ANSWER Coalition, now has a newspaper, Liberation. You can download the pdf, read it online, or in print.

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Hamas, it appears, is crumbling.

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“Hundreds of millions” of people may be compelled to relocate, says Scientific American. Low-lying coastal areas could be the worst hit - and that’s precisely where large population centers are too. May their predictions be wrong because if they are only partly correct, countless millions will be refugees. Not only does global warming mean flooding of those coastal areas, it means less water for crops in areas where water comes from glacier and snowmelt runoff, as well as more powerful storms and increased drought.

Dave Riley asks

So the core question I think is this:How many ways is there to go green? We know that there is the socialist way — as we can see is happening in Cuba and Venezuela. But what others are on offer that work? And I mean that they have to work for millions of people to attain the sort of emission levels we know we must reach in the narrow time frame we have left.

And if we are to be asked to wait while other options pan out — how long are we supposed to wait while they are supposed to kick in?

That indeed is the question. We do not have the luxury of time. Solutions are needed now.

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Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy presented the Ecosocialist Manifesto in 2001 as a socialist response to the environmental degradation of the planet.

We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation—an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!

Among their key points is that environmental problems such as global warming are inextricably linked to imperialism, with its constant invasions of other countries (and inevitable blowback via terrorism.) It’s the same amoral grow-or-die ethos, a continual need for more resources, markets, and cheap labor to exploit. A capitalist does it with businesses, an imperialist with armies. They are simply different facets of the same omnivorous system that is not capable of managed growth, yet such limits are precisely what is needed to stop global warming.

[Ecosocialism respects' "limits on growth" essential for the sustainability of society. These are embraced, not however, in the sense of imposing scarcity, hardship and repression. The goal, rather, is a transformation of needs, and a profound shift toward the qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative.

Instead of Ford making trucks and SUVs that get terrible mileage because doing so temporarily benefits their profit margin, in a socialist world that respected limits, they’d be making EVs and hybrids exclusively. And power companies would be producing power primarily from renewable resources. That Ford (and GM) have effectively bankrupted themselves by short-sighted capitalist greed simply demonstrates yet another ‘contradiction of capitalism.’

In a socialist world, with a more managed economy, such changes would be encouraged and quite possibly mandated by the government. No, you can’t build Hummers or produce power from coal. Period.

The Ecosocialism Manifesto is aware of failures of socialism in the twentieth century but says the ideas still stand, and should be used.

However beaten down and unrealized, the notion of socialism still stands for the supersession of capital. If capital is to be overcome, a task now given the urgency of the survival of civilization itself, the outcome will perforce be “socialist, for that is the term which signifies the breakthrough into a post-capitalist society.

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