On Fighting Without Fighting

And the limits of Non-Violent Communication

Charles Eisenstein

has posted a very powerful example for those of us who are gearing up to fight mask mandates, etc. that may be coming our way. And the way she lays out her thinking process is profoundly helpful, I think. It’s well worth the (short) read.

If the victor had fought, she wouldn't have won

Where I disagree with Charles, is in his attempt to apply this approach to the war between Israel and Hamas. Or any war. An honest, open-hearted approach like this will not have the same effect there.

I don't say that because the people who make war are not decent people (although that is often true too). I say it because the incentives for warmakers are different.

The dance teacher, in this example, has reasons to care about what his student thinks. Practical, tangible, reasons, but also less tangible ones.

The people who make war, including the ones tasked with "defending" their countries, are not subject to the same incentives, nor the same limitations, as the rest of us are. I wrote a little about that here:

My point in this piece, is that war doesn’t happen because people don’t understand each other, or because they “just hate each other”, or because we are not spiritually evolved enough. All of these may apply to much of what constitutes interpersonal violence, but war is a different animal, and it continues for its own reasons.

Specifically: War happens because we have carved out a special place in our societies for the warmakers. We have created entities called “governments”, to which the normal rules and laws of human behavior do not apply. The people who make war, and indeed, politicians who may not make “war”, but who enact legislation that ends up destroying people’s lives and even killing people, do not generally face real-world consequences for their actions.

Yes, there are exceptions. There are occasional Nuremberg-type trials that make examples of some of the worst (or maybe not the worst) evil-doers. But such trials are always and only for those on the losing side. As former US secretary of state Robert McNamara has famously said,

"(General Curtis) LeMay said: ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’"

My point is that the war-makers get away with making war, over and over again, not because they haven’t heard the right moral arguments against what they do. They get away with it because our society provides no genuine restraint against them doing it.

Nor does it provide genuine restraint against the financing of their wars. Indeed, our systems of fiat money and fractional-reserve banking have created a streamlined mechanism for siphoning society’s wealth away from private, peaceful, people, and into the hands of the warmakers, their military-industrial cronies, and the folks who arrange the financing.

If we want to end war, we need to take away their money machine, and start holding them accountable for their crimes. These two things. Anything else is just noise.