Since serving as press secretary in Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, Swanson has fought against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to alert Americans to the fact that U.S. military spending is the source of most of our economic problems. In his book Perang adalah kebohongan, Swanson mengemukakan alasan untuk penghapusan perang sebagai instrumen kebijakan nasional. Saat Perang Dunia Dilarang memberikan contoh sejarah betapa kuatnya penghapusan perang.
Levina: Pada kuliah baru-baru ini, Anda bertanya apakah ada yang percaya perang itu ilegal dan apakah mereka pernah mendengar tentang Pakta Kellogg-Briand. Hanya 2 atau 3 persen dari kelompok besar yang mengangkat tangan. Saat Anda bertanya apakah perang seharusnya ilegal, hanya 5 persen yang berpendapat bahwa perang seharusnya ilegal.
Swanson: Both responses bothered me somewhat. I knew people in the United States did not believe war was illegal. I knew that only the most serious peace activists had heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and that even they didn’t recognize its value, including the degree to which it is stronger than the UN Charter in its prohibition of all wars, not just certain kinds of wars.
But why wouldn’t people want war to be made illegal? To my ear that sounds like not wanting slavery or rape or torture to be illegal. At the end of the 19th century, when the United States snatched up Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, etc., there was a popular love for war in the air. By the end of World War I, war was widely viewed as an evil disease to be eradicated. From World War II forward there has been an ever-increasing tendency to view war as ordinary, necessary, and patriotic—if not a war in Vietnam or Iraq, then certainly some other war.
Bagi mereka yang mengetahui perang hanya melalui televisi, gagasan mengkriminalisasinya terdengar seperti mengusulkan untuk mengkriminalisasi pemerintah. Keadaan tersebut menurut saya meresahkan, kesadaran betapa normalnya menganggap pemerintah bertanggung jawab atas pembunuhan skala besar. Hal ini sangat jauh dari kembalinya Warren Harding ke “keadaan normal” setelah Perang Dunia I. Sejak Perang Dunia II, kita tidak pernah kembali ke keadaan normal.
Saat ini, masyarakat mengalami masa-masa sulit untuk percaya bahwa mereka mempunyai kekuatan yang cukup untuk menghentikan satu perang yang tidak masuk akal. Apakah gerakan perdamaian pada tahun 1920an benar-benar yakin bahwa mereka dapat menghapuskan perang?
Pada tahun 1920-an, seperti yang Anda tunjukkan, perdamaian sebenarnya bersifat “patriotik” dan gerakan perdamaian tidak akan bertentangan dengan kompleks industri militer yang kita miliki saat ini. Saat meneliti sejarah, apakah Anda merasa bahwa orang Amerika saat ini—walaupun mayoritas mereka menentang perang yang sedang berlangsung—menjadi semakin tidak berdaya, putus asa, dan kalah dalam upaya mencapai negara yang damai?
Back then, war could be seen as something that backward Europeans had dragged the United States into, albeit with help from greatly resented propaganda that had been produced by President Wilson’s PR team. If you ask someone in the United States if they are for peace today, they may tell you that they like peace, but wouldn’t want to oppose war. Even in the 1920s, the United States was making war in Nicaragua and threatening it in Mexico, but peace was still considered the norm. Then wars were imperialistic or humanitarian or racist and, conceivably, avoidable. Now wars are necessary to protect us from evil. In other words, they are defensive.
Pro-war attitudes today are not insurmountable. Popular opinion turned against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars fairly quickly and never got behind the Libyan War or our various drone wars. But there is a more important difference between the 1920s and today.
Kebangkitan kompleks industri militer telah ada sejak Perang Saudara. Angkatan Laut sedang dibangun pada saat yang sama ketika Senat AS meratifikasi Kellogg-Briand. Namun perusahaan-perusahaan senjata tidak mengikuti kebijakan Kongres pada tahun 1920-an. Para petani, yang menginginkan orang-orang Eropa membeli lebih banyak jagung dan mengurangi persenjataan, mempunyai pengaruh yang lebih besar dibandingkan pedagang senjata. Selain itu, distrik kongres lebih kecil, penyuapan merupakan tindakan ilegal, surat kabar cukup beragam dan kredibel, televisi belum ada, persekongkolan belum sempurna, dan merupakan hal yang lumrah bagi anggota DPR dan Senat untuk menentang posisi partai politik mereka. . Para baron perampok tidak menjalankan keseluruhan pertunjukan—beberapa dari mereka banyak berinvestasi dalam aktivisme perdamaian.
Situasi saat ini sedang melawan kita dan kita mengetahuinya. Para pelanggar hukum percaya bahwa kesuksesan mungkin akan datang pada generasi mendatang, selangkah demi selangkah, sehingga mereka dengan senang hati bekerja demi apa yang mereka yakini sebagai tujuan yang adil, demi apa yang disebut William James sebagai “moral yang setara dengan perang.”
Menurut saya, hal ini terjadi seiring dengan keyakinan mereka terhadap demokrasi. Frank Kellogg, Menteri Luar Negeri Partai Republik yang pemarah dan dikenal sebagai aktivis perdamaian yang dibenci dan dikutuk oleh Pakta Kellogg-Briand. Pada tahun 1928, dia bekerja siang dan malam untuk menjawab tuntutan mereka. Mengapa? Salah satu penyebabnya adalah para aktivis perdamaian tidak mendukung para pemimpin politik, presiden, partai, atau Kellogg. Mereka menggerakkan seluruh budaya, semua partai dan politisi, ke arah mereka. Kellogg berbaris di belakang mereka.
Pakta tersebut dengan jelas mengutuk perang sebagai instrumen kebijakan nasional dan memutuskan bahwa semua perselisihan harus diselesaikan dengan cara damai. Namun apakah dikatakan bahwa perang itu ilegal?
No reservations were made to the treaty, but the Senate did pass an interpretive statement. Kellogg had also published his interpretations of the treaty and communicated them to the other national signatories prior to the treaty’s creation. The negotiations were very public, having begun with a statement to the Associated Press from Aristide Briand, the Foreign Minister of France, a statement illegally drafted for him by an American peace activist lobbying France to lobby the United States for peace. The public discussion of the treaty and the U.S. Senate’s view of its meaning suggest that the answer to your first question is yes.
The big looming question for people today is, of course, “What about self-defense?” Levinson’s response was to point to the example of dueling. No nation had banned “aggressive dueling” and yet people could still defend themselves. They did so without making use of “defensive dueling.” It takes two to tango, to duel, or to make war. Nazi Germany did not attack the United States before the United States put its economic muscle into a war against Germany and, indeed, its assistance into attacking German submarines. Japan attacked a U.S. territory stolen from the people of Hawaii, but only after long and deliberate provocation, including U.S. support for and participation in a war against Japan on behalf of China.
More than self-defense, the big concern in 1928-1929 was to make clear—as Kellogg and the Senate made very clear—that the Peace Pact would not place on the United States any obligation to go to war against another nation that violated the pact, or any obligation to join an international alliance to “keep the peace” through the use of war. The League of Nations was voted down in the Senate and the Kellogg-Briand Pact up, not purely out of irrational “isolationism,” but also because the idea of making alliances of war did not seem a wise way to eliminate war. In fact, it looked to many people in the United States all too similar to how World War I had begun. We now have further examples, of course, of the United Nations and NATO launching wars.
Sebagian besar sejarawan mengatakan bahwa alasan utama kegagalan Pakta Kellogg-Briand dalam mencegah perang adalah karena perjanjian tersebut tidak menyediakan sarana penegakan hukum atau sanksi terhadap pihak-pihak yang melanggar ketentuan-ketentuannya dan tidak secara efektif menutup celah mengenai kapan pembelaan diri dapat dilakukan. diklaim secara sah. Apakah itu pendapat Anda tentang kegagalan Kellog-Briand?
The UN Charter leaves a giant loophole for defensive war, as well as one for any war authorized by the UN. The Kellogg-Briand Pact does not. This is why Kellogg-Briand is stronger. A court to resolve disputes by pacific means and to prosecute war makers was never established and still needs to be. The World Court of the League of Nations, like today’s International Criminal Court of the United Nations, did not fit the bill. Joining the League of Nations without transforming it radically would have brought the United States into World War II more quickly, but would not have prevented it. What might have prevented it would have been punishing war makers after World War I instead of punishing the entire nation of Germany, promoting and funding peaceful parties in Germany rather than Nazis, negotiating arms reductions rather than launching an arms race, and investing in the study of nonviolent dispute resolution instead of in eugenics and chemical warfare.
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Bruce E. Levine adalah seorang psikolog klinis dan penulis Bangun, Berdiri: Menyatukan Populis, Memberi Energi pada Yang Terkalahkan, dan Melawan Elit Korporasi (Chelsea Green, 2011). Artikel ini pertama kali diterbitkan oleh Alternet.org.
Foto Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, dan Frank Kellogg.
