Mike Gravel Told Americans What Was Being Done In Their Name Without Their Consent
Fifty years ago this week, the senator read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. He never stopped battling war and secrecy. Gravel died on Saturday.
By John Nichols

Mike Gravel was a two-term United States senator from Alaska who refused to play by the rules of the club, a two-time presidential contender who refused to accept the narrow limits of his Democratic Party's debate, and a champion of the public's right to know who refused to be intimidated by lawless commanders in chief.

That is not usually a recipe for success in American politics, and Gravel certainly experienced his ups and downs. So it was that obituaries for Gravel, who died Saturday at age 91, identified the former senator as a "gadfly" with a "flair for the theatrical." He was, to be sure, a frequently controversial figure, who stirred up more than his share of outrage. But his flair for the theatrical served Gravel well, especially when he was striking blows against empire and executive impunity.

That is what Gravel did in the summer of 1971 when he became one of the most significant participants in the Pentagon Papers saga.

Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst turned whistleblower, provoked a national uproar when he provided The New York Times with classified documents that detailed how deliberate manipulations of intelligence and outright lies by successive US administrations had created the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. The Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, and all hell broke loose in the corridors of power.

President Richard Nixon's Justice Department moved to block further publication of the Pentagon Papers. In this moment of uncertainty about what would be revealed, Ellsberg contacted Gravel's Senate office.

Gravel, a 41-year-old war critic who had joined the Senate two years earlier, had been filibustering against extension of the military draft, and Ellsberg told one of the senator's staffers, "I've got some material that could keep him reading until the end of the year." Gravel came to share Ellsberg's view that the Speech or Debate Clause of the US Constitution gave members of Congress immunity from prosecution for revealing the details of classified documents during official proceedings. After obtaining a portion of the Pentagon Papers from Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian, Gravel planned to read the document into the Congressional Record on the evening of June 29, 1971.

"But he was thwarted when, between 6 P.M. and 9 P.M., a quorum of 51 Senators could not be mustered, and the Senate was forced to adjourn," reported the Times. "Senator Gravel then went across the street to the New Senate Office Building, to the hearing room of the Buildings and Grounds subcommittee of the Public Works Committee. There he convened a session of the subcommittee-of which he is chairman-and began the reading."

Gravel was joined by two other anti-war senators, Democrats Harold Hughes of Iowa and Alan Cranston of California, as well as one of the House's most militant war critics, Representative John Dow (D–N.Y.). Members of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War were present, along with reporters who had been alerted that something big was about to go down on Capitol Hill.

"I did not seek these papers," announced Gravel. "When they were offered, I accepted them. I have reviewed the papers in my possession and read much of the material. It is a remarkable work."

"In no way am I impairing the security of the United States," declared Gravel, who had spent days reviewing the documents with aides. "It is my constitutional obligation to protect the security of the people by fostering the free flow of information absolutely essential to their democratic decision-making."

The senator proceeded to read from the documents until around 1 am. At that point, a physically exhausted Gravel said he could go on no more. But before he finished, Gravel read from an address he had hoped to deliver on the Senate floor that night.

"People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you tonight. Killed as a direct result of policy decisions that we as a body have made," Gravel said, as he wept and wiped away tears. "Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies because of a public policy this government-" He broke off, overcome with emotion. "One may respond that we made such a sacrifice to preserve freedom and liberty in Southeast Asia. One may respond that we sacrifice ourselves on the continent of Asia so that we will not have to fight a similar war on the shores of America. One can make these arguments only if he has failed to read the Pentagon Papers. That is the terrible truth of it all. The papers do not support our public statements. The papers do not support our best intentions."

Gravel moved to insert more than 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the official record of his subcommittee hearing-establishing what Ellsberg referred to Sunday in a tribute to Gravel, as a "precedent that no one else has taken advantage of in 50 years."

Hours after Gravel's dramatic actions on the night of June 29-30, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times and the newspaper resumed publication of excerpts from the documents.

The senator was not done with the fight just yet, however. Gravel arranged to publish the papers in book form, as The Senator Gravel Edition (Beacon Press), with annotations from academics Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, two of the most prominent anti-war figures of the era. When the Justice Department went after the senator and his publisher, Gravel fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. While lower courts expressed sympathy for Gravel's stance, the high court's 1972 ruling in the case of Gravel v. United States was a mixed bag. The court majority accepted that the Constitution granted immunity to Gravel for his reading of the papers into the Congressional Record. But it rejected the notion that he had immunity to publish the documents in book form.

By the time the court ruled, Gravel was a national figure who appeared frequently at anti-war rallies and bid briefly for the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nomination. Threats to censure and possibly expel him from the Senate were withdrawn.

Gravel continued to make the case that the people had a right to know what was being done in their name but without their informed consent-in the Senate until his defeat in 1980, and eventually as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination who made opposition to war and militarism central tenets of his 2008 and 2020 bids.

Gravel never apologized for speaking truth to power. If anything, he became more ardent in his critique of official secrecy.

In the introduction he wrote 50 years ago this summer to the edition of the Pentagon Papers that was published in his name, Gravel summed up his democratic faith, declaring:

The people do not want, nor should they any longer be subjected to, the paternalistic protection of an Executive which believes that it alone has the right answers. For too long both the people and Congress have been denied access to the needed data with which they can judge national policy. For too long they have been spoon-fed information designed to sustain predetermined decisions and denied information which questioned those decisions. For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of half-truths or deliberate deceit, by executives who consider the people and the Congress as adversaries.

But now there is a great awakening in our land. There is a yearning for peace, and a realization that we need never have gone to war. There is a yearning for a more free and open society, and the emerging recognition of repression of people's lives, of their right to know, and of their right to determine their nation's future. And there is a yearning for the kind of mutual trust between those who govern and those who are governed that has been so lacking in the past.

Spiritual Highways In American Mythology
By James Donahue

We noted an odd story about a number of Christians who think US Interstate 35, heading north from Texas through six states into Minnesota, is a "Highway of Holiness" mentioned in the Bible. The Old Testament verse, Isiah 35:8, offers the passage: "A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness." That the verse is found in Chapter 35, has caused the group to link it with the name of the Interstate, which is 35.

With no more of a link than that vague thought, churchgoers in all six states once devoted 35 days of praying alongside I-35. There was a strange belief that to fulfill a "prophecy" of making that ribbon of pavement a Highway of Holiness, there had to be some intense prayer. We guess the idea was to purify and bless the road, somewhat like a Roman Catholic priest sprinkling holy water on it.

We find some humor in the vision, penned by one reporter who observed the rituals, of Christian believers chanting "loudly and vibrantly, making many people in the neighborhood wonder what was going on. They prayed that adult businesses along the corridor would 'see the light' and perhaps close down."

They also prayed for safety from crime for people who traveled and lived along the interstate.

Taking the highway numbers to yet the opposite extreme, we remember traveling Highway 666 that ran north from Gallup, New Mexico, through Colorado and Utah and passing through the heart of the Navajo Nation. The highway connected at the south end with that historic Route 66. By the time we arrived in Arizona, remnants of Route 66 could still be found, but the road had been replaced by Interstate 40.

US 666 was an oddity in its day. The US Highway system has historically assigned odd numbers to north-south to roads, and even numbers to east-west roads. Yet US 666 was always a north-south route. The story was that the number was picked because the highway connected with two other east-west routes and no appropriate odd number was available.

Naturally, with a number like that, US 666 was nicknamed The Devil's Highway, and the Road of the Beast. There was a successful movement among Christian groups to have the highway re-named, so it now is known as US 491.

As far as we know, Highway 666 was never known as a deadly or dangerous route, any more than Interstate 35 is proving to be a holy road into Heaven. The only positive effect of changing the name of Route 666 is that people have stopped stealing the road signs.

(c) 2021 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.

Guided Missiles, Misguided Policies, And Changing Direction Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love WWIII
By David Swanson

Remarks for Peace and Justice Works, June 24, 2021

Thank you for inviting me. I'd like to speak briefly and spend a good deal of time on Q&A. I'd like to start by considering this question: If it's true that madness is more common in societies than individuals, and if the society we live in is aggressively hastening (as I think is well-established) climate collapse, ecosystem devastation, wealth inequality, and institutional corruption (in other words, processes that are clearly counter to conscious, stated desires) is this society perhaps no exception to the rule? Is it perhaps insane? And are there perhaps other interconnected madnesses that we don't see entirely clearly, precisely because we are members of this society?

What about locking huge numbers of people in cages at an expense much greater than giving them good lives? What about devoting land, energy, and resources to feeding animals to feed people, using food that could have fed ten times as many people without the environmental destruction and animal cruelty? What about employing armed and trained killers to tell people they're driving too fast and shouldn't bicycle on the sidewalk? Could it be that lots of stuff a saner culture would call loony looks as normal to us as burning witches, bleeding patients, and exhibiting eugenically awesome infants looked to others in the past?

In particular, what if it just isn't permanently and universally normal and rational to be taking all the steps being taken to hasten nuclear apocalypse? We've got scientists saying the catastrophe is more likely now than ever, and that the nature of it would be worse than ever previously understood. We've got historians saying the near misses are more numerous than ever before known. And yet we've got media outlets informing everyone that the problem vanished 30 years ago. We've got a U.S. government dumping vast treasure into building more nuclear weapons, refusing to foreswear using them first, and talking about them as "usable." One of the key reasons for the danger having supposedly passed is that the number of times the existing stockpiles of nukes could eliminate all life on earth has been reduced - if you can dignify that with the term "reason." Much of the world is clamoring for the elimination of nukes, while another chunk of the world is defending their manufacture, distribution, and routine threats of using them. Clearly, somebody is right, and somebody is crazy. By somebody I mean a whole society, not its individuals, and despite the exceptions.

What about the whole idea of killing people? Killing prisoners to teach them not to kill people? Killing people who look, from the perspective of a distant video camera, like they might be an adult male in the wrong place and near a cell phone suspected of belonging to someone unliked, plus any men and women and children who happen to be nearby? Killing people who cross a border and run from armed fighters? Killing people who get in the way of police and look like their skin has a bit too much pigment? What if the whole practice of killing all of these people has something wrong with it? What if it's as deranged as the doctors who bled George Washington to death, or Phil Collins' belief that he died at the Alamo, or Joe Biden's idea that the U.S. government doesn't interfere in other nations' elections?

What if killing people is certifiably bonkers even in an imaginary scenario in which the United Nations has authorized a good humanitarian war and the people being killed are all wearing uniforms, and nobody's tortured or raped or looted, and every murder is super respectful and free of hatred or animosity? What if the problem is the careful avoidance of peace that gets each war started, not the details of the atrocities? What if "war crimes" as a phrase to say a lot in public so that nobody thinks you're a fascist or a Republican is actually as nonsensical as "slavery crimes" or "mass-rape crimes" because war is a crime in its entirety? What if every war for decades has actually killed disproportionately the so-called wrong people, the elderly, the very young, the civilian? What if there's nothing worse than war that can be used to justify war? What if wars are principally generated by wars and by preparations for wars? If this were true - and I'm willing to debate every claim that it isn't - would there not be something a little bit shy of playing with a full deck to be found in the practice of investing trillions of dollars in the machinery of war?

The case made on the World BEYOND War website is, of course, that the diversion of money into war preparations that make people less safe, not more safe, itself kills vastly more people than have been killed in all the wars thus far. It does this by depriving us of those things we could have spent the money on, things like food, water, medicine, shelter, clothing, etc. If this is true, and if it's additionally the case that war fuels hatred and bigotry and racism, that war and preparations for it devastate the natural earth, that war is the one and only excuse for government secrecy, that the war bases and weapons sales and free training and funding prop up horribly oppressive governments, that the war business erodes civil liberties in the name of some mysterious substance called "freedom," and that war coarsens a culture while militarizing police and minds - if all of this is true, the offense of war that those infected by the madness call "the defense industry" might just be the most coocoo confabulation ever concocted.

This much I've said a billion times. And a billion and five times I've replied to the World War II delusion that you all will ask about as soon as I shut my mouth. No, WWII did not have anything to do with saving anyone from any death camp. The U.S. and allied governments explicitly refused to accept the Jews out of Germany, and for openly antisemitic reasons. No step was ever taken to halt the murders of the camps. The war killed several times what the camps did. The war came about after years of Western arms race with Japan and support for Nazi Germany. U.S. corporations critically supported the Nazis right through the war, for profit reasons and ideological ones. The Nordic race nonsense and the segregation laws and much of the extermination inspiration and technology came from the United States. The nuclear bombs were not needed for anything. Nothing about WWII proves that violence is needed for anything. And if it were needed for opposing Nazism, hiring lots of top Nazis into the U.S. military wouldn't have made much sense. See my book Leaving World War II Behind for the long version.

Now, I want to say something even crazier. Or, if I'm right, I want to say quite sanely that something is even crazier than war. I have in mind the advancement of the risk of World War III, of the first war waged directly between big rich countries since WWII, of a war likely to involve nuclear apocalypse. I don't think most of the people moving the world toward WWIII think of themselves as doing that. But I don't think even the CEO of ExxonMobil thinks of himself as advancing the cause of climate collapse either. If the U.S. president wanted to start WWIII and be aware of doing so, he would simply launch the nukes. But here's what I really want us to think about: if a society wanted to start WWIII without being aware of doing so, what would it do? I know Freud took a lot of flack for saying people had some mysterious death wish even though they would deny it. But I think at this point the burden of proof is on those who would try to prove him wrong, because I don't think an effort to accidentally start WWIII and blame it on somebody or something else would look particularly different from what U.S. society is doing right now.

The U.S. military has plans for war on China, and talks about a war on China being perhaps a few years off. They call it a war with China, of course, and can count on Congress Members to saturate us with the idea that China has aggressively threatened U.S. prestige by growing wealthier, or aggressively moved into the waters just off the coast of China. But the fact is that, despite major increases in its military spending as the U.S. has moved bases, troops, missiles, and ships (including what the U.S. Navy ridiculously calls the Big Stick carrier strike group) near China, China still spends about 14% of what the U.S. and its allies and weapons customers spend on militarism each year. Russia is at about 8% of just U.S. military spending and falling. If there were a credible enemy for the U.S. military on this planet you'd be hearing a lot less about UFOs right now. We'll also hear about Chinese violations of human rights, but bombs don't actually improve human rights, and if human rights violations justified bombs, then the U.S. would have to bomb itself and many of its dearest allies as well as China. Also how do you threaten war against someone for how they manufacture products that you buy? Well, maybe making sense isn't the goal. Maybe war is the goal.

If you wanted to bring WWIII closer, what would you have to do? One step would be to make war normal and unquestionable. Go ahead and check that one off. Done. Accomplished. Flags and pledges to them are ubiquitous. Thank yous for a supposed service are everywhere. Military advertisements and paid-for pre-game ceremonies are so omnipresent that if the military forgets to pay for one, people will create one for free. The ACLU is arguing that young women should be added to young men in being forced to register for a draft to be compelled against their will to go to war as a matter of civil liberties, the civil liberty to be completely stripped of all liberty.

When President Joe Biden went off to meet with President Vladimir Putin, both major political parties generally encouraged hostility. The Hill newspaper sent out an email with a video of the movie Rocky, demanding that Biden be Rocky in the ring with Putin. When, despite everything, Biden and Putin behaved almost civilly and issued a tiny little statement suggesting they might possibly pursue some unspecified disarmament, and Biden stopped calling Putin a soulless killer, the two presidents then held a pair of separate press conferences. There were no Russian media questions allowed at Biden's, but U.S. media brought the craziness to both. They hurled nutty accusations. They demanded red lines. They wanted a commitment to war as a response to so-called cyber-war. They wanted declarations of distrust and enmity. They wanted self-righteous revenge for the supposed stealing of the 2016 election and enslavement of President Donald Trump. They would have appeared, I'm convinced, to a disinterested observer from one of the UFOs they're always going on about, to have wanted WWIII.

The U.S. military and NATO have indeed said that war can be a response to cyberwar. At Putin's press conference, he discussed various actual laws, existing and potential. Russia and China and other nations have long sought treaties to ban weaponizing space, and to ban cyberwar. At Biden's press conference, I don't think a single law was mentioned once by anyone. Yet the constant theme was imposing the "rule based order" on others in the name of stability. But nothing boosts instability more than replacing the very idea of written laws with arbitrary decrees from might-makes-right officials who believe in their own goodness - believe it so much that they announce, as Biden did, that were the U.S. government to interfere in anyone else's election, and were the world to find out about it, the whole international order would crumble. We know of 85 foreign elections the United States has blatantly interfered in during the past 75 years, not to mention assassination attempts on over 50 foreign leaders, and we know that in poll after poll the world says it fears the U.S. government above all others as a threat to peace and democracy. Yet the international order does not collapse because it does not exist, not as a set of moral standards based on respect.

If you wanted to move the world closer to WWIII without realizing you were doing it, you could convince yourself that you were simply imposing a Pax Americana for the world's own good, whether the world liked it or not, even while knowing in some back corner of your mind that sooner or later the world would not stand for it, and that when that moment came, some Americans would die, and that when those Americans died, the U.S. media and public would scream for blood and vengeance as if the past many millennia had taught them nothing, and BOOM you'd have what you never even knew you wanted, just like you have the day after browsing amazon.com.

But how to make sure to get those Americans killed? Well, nobody else has ever done this, but one idea would be to station them - and here's a real stroke of genius - with their families along, on bases all over the world. The bases would prop up and control some horrible governments, enraging local populations. The bases would cause environmental damage as well as plagues of drunkenness, rape, and lawless privilege. They'd be sort of giant gated Apartheid communities that the locals could enter to work menial jobs if they got out by sundown. Maybe 800 of these bases in 80 nations or so ought to do the trick. They wouldn't strictly speaking be justifiable in terms of unavoidable future wars, given what can be moved where how quickly by airplane, but they might just make future wars unavoidable. Check that off the list. Done. And almost unnoticed.

OK, what else? Well, you can't very well have a war against enemies without weapons, can you? The United States is now the leading weapons supplier to the world, to rich countries, to poor countries, to so-called democracies, to dictatorships, to oppressive royal despots, and to most of its own designated enemies. The U.S. government allows weapons sales, and/or gives free money with which to buy weapons, and/or provides training for 48 out of 50 of the most oppressive governments in the world according to a ranking funded by the U.S. government - plus plenty of nasty governments left out of that ranking. Few if any wars happen without U.S. weapons. Most wars today happen in places that manufacture few if any weapons. Few if any wars happen in the handful of countries that manufacture most of the weapons. You may think China is coming to get you. Your Congress Member almost certainly thinks China is keenly focused on eliminating his or her right to send free mail and appear on television at will. But the U.S. government funds and arms China, and invests in a bio-weapons lab in China whatever may or may not have come out of it. The weapons dealers do not imagine, of course, that they are bringing on WWIII. They're just doing business, and it's been gospel in Western madness for centuries that business causes peace. Those who work for weapons dealers mostly don't think they're causing war or peace; they think they're serving their U.S. flag and so-called service members. They do this by pretending that most of the weapons companies' customers do not exist, that their only customer is the U.S. military.

All right, the weapons bit is well covered. What else is needed? Well, if you wanted to roll a society into WWIII over a period of years or decades, you'd need to avoid the vicissitudes of elections or popular mood swings. You'd want to increase corruption to the point that shifting power from one big political party to another didn't change anything terribly important. People could have a bit of emergency funding or a new holiday. The rhetoric could vary dramatically. But let's say you gave the White House and the Congress to the Democrats in 2020, what would have to happen for the death train to remain on the tracks? Well, you'd want no actual wars to end. Nothing makes wars more likely than other wars. With both houses having voted repeatedly in the previous Congress to end the war on Yemen, vetoed by Trump, you'd need those votes to cease immediately. You'd want Biden to pretend to sort-of partially end the war on Yemen, and Congress to go mute. Same with Afghanistan. Keep forces there and on surrounding bases quietly, and make sure Congress does nothing in the way of actually forbidding the continuation of the war.

In fact, it would be ideal to block Congress from ever lifting its grubby little paws again as it pretended to do on Yemen when it could count on Trump vetoes. Perhaps it could be permitted to repeal the AUMF (or authorization for the use of military force) from 2002, but keep the 2001 one around just in case it was ever needed. Or perhaps that one could be replaced by a new one. Also, the Senator Tim Kaine scam could be allowed to advance a bit perhaps - this is where Congress itself repeals the War Powers Resolution that specifies how it can prevent wars, and replaces it with a requirement that presidents consult with Congress before feeling free to ignore Congress. The trick is to market this abandonment of the War Powers Resolution as a strengthening of the War Powers Resolution. OK, that should work. What else?

Well, boost military spending beyond Trump levels. That's key. And invite the so-called progressive members of Congress to lots of meetings, maybe even give them a few rides on presidential airplanes, threaten a few of them with primaries, whatever's needed to keep them from actually trying to block military spending. Five of them in the House could block anything the Republicans oppose, but 100 of them putting out a public letter pretending to oppose what they facilitate will do no harm at all. OK, this part's easy. What else?

Well, avoid peace with Iran. What good would that do? Just stall and prevaricate until we're past the Iranian elections and they've got a new super-hostile government, and then blame the Iranians. That's never failed before. Why would it fail now? Keep funding and arming the attacks of Israel on Palestine. Keep Russiagate going, or at least don't renounce it, even if the journalists start appearing - rather than just being - crazy. A small price to pay, and nobody likes the media anyway, no matter how much they obey it.

What else? Well, a major tool that has increasingly proven its worth is sanctions. The U.S. government is brutally sanctioning numerous populations around the globe, fueling suffering, animosity, and bellicosity, and nobody knows it, or they think of it as law-enforcement rather than law violation. It's brilliant. The U.S. government can even impose sanctions, cause suffering, blame the suffering on the local government's efforts to alleviate suffering, and propose a coup as a solution straight from the Rule Based Order (we rule, so we give the orders).

Also we'd better be sure to keep the climate catastrophe on track, and for a number of reasons. First, if the nuclear apocalypse never comes, the climate one will. Second, the climate disasters can be used to fuel international crises that - with enough prodding and arming - can lead to wars. Third, the military can actually be marketed as a climate protector, because, although it's a major contributor to climate change, it can announce how concerned it is and use natural disasters to excuse invasions and establish new bases. And nothing builds up war spirit better than refugees, no matter who caused the horrors that they're fleeing.

Even disease pandemics can help advance the cause, as long as a reasonable and cooperative response to them is avoided. We'll want to balance blaming China with avoiding blaming bio-weapons labs or their international partners and investors. The U.S. government can completely control through the media what possible explanations for the origin of a pandemic are acceptable and which ones are deemed, ironically enough, crazy. What we'll want to avoid is questioning the priority of maintaining labs that can create new tools for wars, and proposing any global solutions to pandemics that might foster cooperation or understanding rather than profit and division.

OK, isn't this enough? What else could be needed? Well, you can't very well put WWIII straight onto the stage unrehearsed, can you? We'll want to have some full-dress rehearsals, major ones, the sort that could accidentally morph into the real thing - the biggest ones ever in Europe and in the Pacific. And more missiles in place near Russia and China, and more nations invited into NATO - especially some of those right on the border of Russia that Russia says it would never sit still for. War in Ukraine is too obvious. How about a coup in Belarus perhaps? What you want is to risk WWIII without jumping straight in with both feet. After all, the other guys need to start it. Let's think. How did the U.S. get into WWII?

Well there was the Atlantic Charter. Let's make a new one. Check. There was sanctioning and threatening Japan. Make that China. Check. There was supporting Nazis in Germany. Make that Ukraine. Check. There were big new bases and ships and planes and troops in the Pacific. Check. But history doesn't repeat exactly. There are many opportunities. Drone murders and bases and so-called anti-terror operations across Africa and Asia. Coups and destabilizations in Latin America. Plenty of hot spots. Plenty of weapons. Plenty of propaganda. Cyberwars anywhere at anytime and who can say who started them for sure? War is getting easier and easier.

Now let's ask a different question. What would U.S. society look like if it wanted to avoid WWIII? Well, it would drop the exceptionalist schtick and join the world, stop being the biggest holdout on human rights treaties, stop being the biggest vetoer at the UN, stop being the biggest opponent of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, start supporting the rule of law instead of the #RuleBasedOrder, start supporting democracy at the United Nations instead of as a word you say in speeches, and prioritize cooperating in global efforts to address environmental and health issues.

In a United States intent on avoiding WWIII, you'd see masses of people demanding the money be moved from militarism to human and environmental needs, you'd see opposition to militarism across the population as well as from movements that are directly impacted by militarism and generally pretend they aren't, such as environmentalism, anti-poverty, immigrants' rights, civil liberties, and transparent government movements. You'd see moves to demilitarize, close foreign bases, close domestic bases, divest funding from weapons, convert war industries to peaceful and sustainable industries. You'd see people who appeared on television and were right about upcoming wars allowed to appear on television again rather than being banished to blogs and the bottom dregs of Facebook algorithms. You'd see lying about wars treated as something other than the top qualification to lie about more wars.

You'd see a lot more basic straightforward reporting on wars, including what's called the humanizing of people. I've never understood what people supposedly are prior to being humanized, but it seems they're decidedly not humans. Take, for example, a seven-year-old boy in Yemen who tells his mother that he wants to go to school. His name is Chakir and he speaks with a bit of difficulty caused by funny teeth and bad habit. But that's not why his mother doesn't want him to go to school. She's afraid of missiles. She teaches Chakir at home. He sits at a little wooden desk next to the dining table, and he pretends to be at school. His mother loves him and finds him adorable and enjoys having him there, although she gets tired, needs a break, and knows school would be better. But then the buzzing grows louder. Chakir crawls under his desk. He smiles. He tries to think it's funny. But the buzzing gets even louder. It's straight overhead. Chakir starts to cry. His mother gets down on her knees and goes to him. When Chakir is finally able to get some words out, he says "It's not safer here than at school. It's not safer here than at school, Mommy!" The drone passes over. They're still there. They've not been obliterated. The next day, Chakir's mother allows him to board a bus to school. The bus is struck by a U.S.-supplied missile via the Saudi military and U.S. targeting. Chakir's mother buries part of one of his arms, which is found in a tree. Now he's humanized. But they're all humans. The victims are all humans, though if the media won't humanize them, people will deny it to themselves. In a society bent on avoiding war, the humanizing would be relentless. And when it wasn't, protests would demand it.

Of course there is a wide gap between driving hard toward WWIII and proceeding to abolish all militaries. Of course it can only be done by stages. But when the stages are not understood as steps away from apocalypse and in the direction of sanity, they tend not to work very well, even to backfire. War has been so reformed and perfected that people imagine guided missiles killing only and exactly those who really need killing. We can't survive much more reforming of war. The United States could radically scale back its militarism, destroy all of its nuclear weapons, and close all of its foreign bases, and you'd see a reverse arms race among other nations as a primary result. The United States could simply stop selling weapons to others and see militarism rolled back significantly. The United States could withdraw from NATO and NATO would vanish. It could stop badgering other nations to buy more weapons, and they'd buy fewer weapons. Each step toward a world beyond war would make such a world appear more reasonable to more people.

So, that's what we're working on at World BEYOND War. We're doing education and activism to build a culture of peace and to advance demilitarization around the globe including through divestment of funding from weapons and through efforts to close bases. We're also working to align more movements and organizations against war by making the connections across divisions, such as by pressuring the conference scheduled for November in Scotland to stop excluding militarism from climate agreements, and working to demilitarize domestic police forces. I'm not sure we shouldn't be also developing alliances with mental health workers, because either war is crazy or I am. I ask only that you take your time in deciding which.

(c) 2021 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.