Читать книгу When the World Outlawed War - David Swanson - Страница 8

Morrison’s book argues for Outlawry and against alliances. U.S. Secretaries of State Elihu Root (in office 1905-1909) and William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) had negotiated bilateral treaties of arbitration and nonaggression with various nations. Such treaties became very popular, as the nations of the world created at least 130 of them between November 11, 1918, and November 11, 1928, the bulk of them in the final four years of that period. A 1931 book by Max Habicht called Post-War Treaties for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes reprints all of these treaties.

But many in the United States were averse to the sort of alliances created, for example, in 1925 in Locarno, Switzerland. Under these agreements, if Germany were to attack France, then England and Italy would have to attack Germany, whereas if France were to attack Germany, then England and Italy would have to attack France. Aristide Briand made a name for himself as a peace negotiator in Locarno, but the Outlawrists’ criticism of such arrangements as sheer madness looks wiser through the lens of later history. Another such alliance is of course the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to which the United States would become party in 1949. Another half dozen such “collective defense arrangements” would be joined by the United States during the 1950s.

The Geneva Protocol of 1924 collapsed when Britain rejected it. Lloyd George called it the opposite of a plan to avoid war. It was, he said, “a plan for making war compulsory.” Morrison agreed that uniting forces against an aggressor was a way to strengthen, not eliminate, the institution of war.

So, what was the Outlawrists’ alternative? World government might work, Morrison wrote, but even if it were truly desirable, it was undoubtedly very far off in the future. Preferable, in the relatively near term, wrote Morrison, would be a world court. This would be a court of law, with the laws written down, known, and agreed to. Rather than alliances and unpredictable adjudications, the Outlawrists favored the rule of the written word.

The most popular criticism of Outlawry was that it intended to simply wish war away by banning it. The most popular criticism of international alliances was that they would create wars to end wars. While NATO and even the United Nations have indeed been used to launch wars (although the European Union has rendered wars within Western Europe unimaginable), the Kellogg Briand-Pact and the United Nations Charter have banned war, and wars have proceeded merrily on their way not noticing. But all of this criticism is overly simplistic. The United Nations is a corrupt approximation of an ideal never yet realized. And Outlawry, despite passage of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, has never been fully tried.

Outlawry, in Morrison’s outline of it, requires that a world court ruling on a body of world law be substituted for war as a means of settling disputes. The international code of law (never produced by the Outlawrists) would, wrote Morrison, need to stipulate which disputes were international and under its jurisdiction and which types of disputes were domestic. The International Criminal Court (ICC), finally created in 2002 and having taken jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in 2010, begins to approach this idea, but the United States is not a member, and yet the court is under the thumb of the United States and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. As things stand, the ICC will not prosecute aggression until 2017 at the earliest, and even then not against non-members such as the United States or in cases opposed by the U.N. Security Council. In fact, any war approved by the United Nations will, by the ICC’s definition, not be aggression at all. The critics of the World Court as a creature of the League of Nations would, if brought forward in time, no doubt have a similar critique of the ICC as a creature of the United Nations.

Where the argument for Outlawry gets a little hairy is in its refusal to consider any distinction between aggressive and defensive war, while nonetheless countenancing armaments and self-defense. Morrison argues that distinguishing aggressors from defenders is a fool’s errand, as every nation always claims to be fighting in defense, and an initial attack may have been provoked by the other side. (In 2001 and 2003 the United States attacked the distant, unarmed, impoverished nations of Afghanistan and Iraq and claimed to be acting in self-defense.) Morrison believes that self-defense will almost certainly not be needed, in the future of outlawed war, because war just won’t happen. But were it to happen, self-defense clearly must be envisioned in Morrison’s scheme as something that does not resemble war. For, otherwise, how can the world court of Outlawry determine which nation(s)’ leaders to put on trial?

Ultimately, outlawing war is a process of moral development. Changing the law and establishing a court to enforce it are means toward changing people’s conceptions of what is morally acceptable. Viewed in this way, the work of the 1920s that brought about the Kellogg-Briand Pact can be seen as a partial success to be built upon, whether or not any court will ever be able to both prosecute war making and avoid the distinction between aggression and defense.

Morrison argued that Outlawry was so clear and so popular that no statesman would dare oppose it. He urged popularizing the peace movement, taking it out of the hands of experts. And he was right about that. He was right about the United States and about the entire world. Nobody opposed banning war. Though we still have wars, most people do not want them. Wars may be Tyrannical Ruler Nature, or Corporate Profiteer Nature, but they are the furthest thing from Human Nature.

Morrison’s book includes a draft treaty by Levinson. Although Morrison points out its simplicity relative to other attempts at peace, the draft is longwinded and repetitive in comparison with the final Kellogg-Briand Pact. This draft includes roughly the same language that ended up in the Pact, but it also includes language regarding the creation of a court.

It is the Outlawrists’ analysis of what such a treaty would do that provides the real moral education, an education that has clearly reached only some of those it needs to reach. By banning war as an institution, Outlawrists hoped, first of all, to open the world’s eyes to war’s status as an institution. There was a dispute over whether war was legal or extralegal: Was it legally sanctioned or merely accepted like the weather? In either case, it was something that could be outlawed, but the evidence favored considering war to have been legal. “Society is not organized for peace,” wrote Morrison; “it is actively organized for war.”

The war system has a recognized and protected status in the social order, and there exists no peace system or institution which society recognizes and protects. This fact constitutes an awful moral abyss in our civilization for the modern conscience to contemplate. Peace talk when war is impending is hazardous for the talker, and in war time it is criminal. War talk in peace time, which is infinitely more wicked, runs no risk at all.

Among those prosecuted for peace talk in 1917 was Eugene Debs, whose 10-year-sentence was never commuted by President Wilson, but was commuted in 1921 by President Warren G. Harding. Debs picked up 913,664 write-in votes for president as the Socialist Party candidate from his prison cell in 1920. In 1927, Morrison, foreshadowing President Dwight Eisenhower’s critique of the military industrial complex in 1961, also cautioned that war possessed a profession that promoted its own ongoing existence, growth, and prestige, while threatening the rights of others.

I included in my book War Is A Lie a chapter called “Wars Are Not Legal” in which I pointed to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and other treaties and laws. I blog at a site called WarIsACrime.org. The uphill struggle these days is to convince anyone that war is illegal. But the pre-Kellogg-Briand Outlawrists struggled to make people aware that war was, at that time, legal and therefore needed to be outlawed. Levinson himself, to take the doctrine straight from the Socrates of Outlawry rather than from his Plato, wrote,

The principle underlying the outlawry of war is this: The law should always be on the moral side of every question. But the law of nations has always been on the wrong side of the war question. . . . For, what with laws of conscription, martial laws and espionage acts, everyone who impedes in the slightest degree the operations of war is a criminal. The dire effect of our present situation is plainly seen, for example, on our ministers of religion. They are all morally against war, but because it is legal multitudes of ministers find no way to oppose it. . . . The law which should condemn and stigmatize evil, actually embraces and nurtures it, and thereby thwarts the moral will of civilization. . . . [W]ar cannot be regulated or controlled, for it makes its own ruthless laws . . . ; therefore war must not be compromised with, but its entire system, with its warp of force and its woof of death, must be uprooted, overthrown, outlawed — abolished.

The key word in all of this, I think, is ‘stigmatize.’ This is a moral objection from a lawyer to the status of war under the law. He wants the law to rid itself of war in hopes that all of society will follow. This is a campaign subtly different from one aimed at immediately eliminating all war in an instant by the act of placing a criminal court system in its way. This is a campaign, in other words, which was destined to move as slowly as culture, and which we are obliged to advance as far as our own generation can advance it. Like slavery and duelling had, war had in the 1920s and still has in the twenty-first century a legal code dealing with how, not whether, to engage. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and the International Criminal Court’s pending jurisdiction over the crime of aggressive war have added the beginnings of a legal code on whether to have war. Yet the code addressing how to have war still exists. Particular atrocities are lamented and prosecuted, while wars themselves are tolerated if not celebrated. But there has yet to be a war not replete with the most hideous atrocities. And there has yet to be a time when many or most of the earth’s nations were not at peace. An atrocity-free war is far less likely than the establishment of permanent world peace.