War! Huh! What is it good for?
War! Huh! What is it good for? Apart from ending slavery, stopping Nazism and Japanese militarism and defending civilized people from the ever-present onslaught of Islamofascism, right?
I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as a truly anti-war person, and if they exist, how lonely they must be. When the language of anti-war is invoked today, it is specifically meant as a protest, for the most part, against Israeli military operations in Gaza, the West Bank or Southern Lebanon, or US military operations in the War on Terror. We saw this with the thousands of demonstrations, both before and during the Iraqi War.
The problem with these antiwar movements is that they are, to be blunt, selective. You would hear nothing from them about the numerous conflicts in Africa. During the Cold War, they would not march outside the Soviet embassies against operations in Vietnam or Afghanistan. And now, they do not picket the Iranian embassy, which outsources terror to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, just to start with.
It would be unfair to suggest that they defend these tyrannies on purpose. But they tacitly do so by silence. The great East Timor democrat, José Ramos-Horta, observed that during the demonstrations in 2003, he saw not one marcher holding a sign that criticized Saddam. Amnesty International, who had been pioneering in documenting human rights abuses under the Ba’athist Party, criticized Tony Blair when he cited Amnesty’s data during the debate over whether or not to invade.
That may have been nine years ago. But, alas, people find it hard to break old habits. When Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, many on the Left could produce only weak condemnations of Hamas whilst staunchly calling for Israeli restraint. This is what the Soviet refusenik, Natan Sharansky, wrote of when calling for moral clarity in his book, The Case for Democracy. When the openness of the free society results in more complaints of human rights abuses then the closed tyranny, the result is that people may assume that the democracy is worse than the tyranny!
Returning the titular question, to find someone who is truly anti-war must be a difficult proposition, as it will be difficult to find an ordinary protestor who opposes all wars, something even the most ardent leftist, libertarian or isolationist would be hard pressed to. Indeed, many of the iconic anti-war icons — such as Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky — are not truly anti-war. Moore openly supports the fascists fighting for repression in Iraq, referring to them as the “minutemen” in a desperate attempt for equivalence. Chomsky, on the other hand, has no bad words for Hezbollah or Hamas, to say the least.
Can the term anti-war even be used as a pretext for a slur? To call oneself anti-war could implicitly suggest anyone who opposes them is pro-war, another word which must have no meaning, for no-one is truly pro-war — pro-conflict would perhaps be a better term. To suggest even tacitly that someone is pro-war is an insult, for war is regarded (rightfully) as such an ugly thing that the connotation of the word is, by default, negative.
So perhaps it would be best to do away with the vocabulary in general.
