by MICHAEL ALBERT
Other than for those gunned, bombed, or starved to death, wartime differs from peacetime mostly psychologically. Injustice and killing accelerate in wartime, though not as much as some analysts think. Meanwhile, peacetime imposes immense suffering and travail in too many places to list, including the global south but also the slums, inner cities, rural counties, sweatshops, classrooms, bars, and bedrooms of even “advanced industrial societies.”
More, wherever elites spread overt war, rapacious peace, and global boiling—they also feast on the indignities and deprivations of wage slavery, racial repression, and sexual objectification. There is not this or that oppression. There is a totality of oppressions. Rapacious peace is genocidal war by another name. Global boiling escalates and diversifies the carnage. Class, race, gender, and power hierarchies curtail freedom and obliterate fulfillment.
Still, even more than other intersecting ills, war aggressively intensifies and localizes the body count. War reveals death and injustice with vengeful clarity. War trumpets loudly. Everyone hears Gaza.
War spreads reasons to resist. War grows activism precisely as slaughter grows body counts. With war, corpses assault eyes everywhere. With war, material devastation lays waste to homes and hospitals. With war, souls flee devastation. So who is war good for? The rich, the powerful, and the sadistic.
A question arises for each person who suffers war, endures rapacious peace, or fears global boiling’s suicidal embrace. Should I resist, and, if so, how?
Should I go to the next available demonstration? Should I resuscitate my activism that has long been mothballed? Should I increase my time or type of involvement? Should I organize others? And if I should do any of these things, what logic should guide my actions?
Wars, like rapacious peace and global boiling, are pursued by elites who have elite reasons for their madness. We may dispute details of what those reasons are, but beneath their contingent contentious details we know elite reasons always seek to enlarge the systems that deliver elite dominance. International law and justice at best weakly watch or at worst cheerlead. Poor suffering humanity becomes at best lamentable collateral damage, at worst a welcome target that elites gleefully bomb and starve.
Then, as battles rage, two additional dynamics emerge. One, the big muddy grabs and holds the war machine. Added dynamic, avoid defeat which would undercut future authority. Two, the dangling putrid prize, more profits to be made, entices new participants. Added dynamic, opportunistically pursue profitable paths that raging battles produce. Finally, of course and as well, larger systemic schemes of imperial domination of a region’s resources or control of its trade routes underpin war. And while details of all such factors can be tirelessly debated—one might for example point out that a region’s resources are already well in hand, or note how to bypass contested trade routes—we should acknowledge that for purposes of answering “why demonstrate?,” efforts to pinpoint disputed details rarely have much consequence.
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