If we can end, let us say... slavery—the legal “ownership” of other human beings—can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?

As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.

But it was worth it, right?

Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.

When we grow accustomed to the dehumanization of others—the refusal to listen, to acknowledge they have a point of view, let alone a soul—we simplify and diminish ourselves, essentially turning ourselves into our imagined enemy.

The topic of this column is the abolition of war—the urgent necessity of doing so—so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong... or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement 100 years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)

In any case, the Civil War—or at least its reduction to the simplicity of good vs. evil—is the manifestation of war’s staying power and principal talking point: War is always necessary, damnit! Both sides think so, and the winner is the one who gets to write the history. At least that’s the way it used to work.

In my lifetime, things have changed significantly, at least from the point of view of the United States, the world’s primary military power (at least for now). While war is bloodier and more devastating than it’s ever been, it no longer has much to do with winning and losing—at least from the U.S. point of view, which has basically “lost” (whatever that means) every war it has started since the Vietnam era. And that hasn’t seemed to matter. Winning isn’t really the point anymore, at least from the point of view of the moneyed interests of war. What matters is waging it—that is to say, what matters is keeping the profits flowing.

Or to put it more politely: What matters is keeping the sanctity of war alive and well.

Indeed, I’m reminded of George H.W. Bush’s comment in 1991, after the success of the first U.S. Gulf War. “It’s a proud day for America,” Bush declared. “And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

That is to say, the American public’s antiwar cynicism........

© Common Dreams