Veterans for Peace - August 16, 1997

Political Holism and the Pursuit of Peace

By Betty Jean Craige

University of Georgia

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak with you all. Meeting the Veterans for Peace is a very great honor.

I would like to begin this evening with an account of an historical event, an important event in our recent past that not many folks know about.

On January 16, 1991, hours before the United States attacked Iraq, Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas did not make history. In fact he did not make news at all when he introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for the impeachment of President Bush "for high crimes and misdemeanors." It was House Resolution 34. Congressman Gonzalez did not make history because his action went almost entirely unreported.

In his speech on the House floor, Congressman Gonzalez said that when he took the oath of office he had pledged an oath of allegiance not to the President of the United States but to the Constitution, which "provides for removal of the President when he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, including violation of the principles of the Constitution."

In the four articles of the resolution, Congressman Gonzalez accused the President of the following violations:

I. President Bush violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution in "calling on the poor and minorities to fight a war for oil to preserve the lifestyles of the wealthy";

II. President Bush violated the United Nations Charter in bribing member nations of the U.N. Security Council to support belligerent acts against Iraq;

III. President Bush made plans for a massive war against Iraq that would result in the killings of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them children, and in so doing was violating the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights;

IV. President Bush, between August of 1990 and January of 1991, "embarked on a course of action that systematically eliminated every option for peaceful resolution of the Persian Gulf Crisis."

Resolution 34 was quietly referred to the House Judiciary Committee, which took no action upon it.

It is likely that most Americans on January 16, 1991 would have strongly opposed Congressman Gonzalez's resolution. Many Americans would have disagreed with his argument. Some would have condemned his action as unpatriotic in that it challenged our Commander-in-Chief's authority to lead the nation to war. In fact, some of you may find his action inappropriate.

However, most Americans, with the exception of the members of Congress, never found out about Resolution 34. Resolution 34 received almost no attention in the mainstream media. Neither the Congressional Quarterly nor the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it. Television did not cover it. The Washington Times enumerated the charges, and the Houston Post described death threats to Gonzalez, but neither of these papers had a national readership. Only by reading the Congressional Record that week could most Americans have learned of the impeachment resolution.

A resolution to impeach the President of the United States, introduced in the House of Representatives by a distinguished senior Congressman at a time when Senators were debating the wisdom of sending American soldiers into war, should have commanded some notice on the evening news, in the New York Times, or on National Public Radio.

I would suggest that the resolution received little coverage because journalists believed that it would be regarded by most Americans as unpatriotic and, by extension, that the reporting of it would be regarded as unpatriotic. Reporting it would not help the United States to defeat Iraq. Now was the moment, supposedly, for Americans to unite behind the war effort--to help "us" beat "them."

The reporting of the Persian Gulf War and related events offers us insight into a political dynamic that is probably familiar to us all, in one way or another. It is the tension between what I call political dualism and political holism. I shall argue tonight that political holism is a strategy for peace in our global society.

Since both terms, political dualism and political holism, may be new, let me explain them by contrasting them with each other.

Political dualism is the propensity to think about the world in terms of two sides: "us" and "them." "We" are the good guys; "they" are the bad guys. "We" are like each other; "they" are different from us. "We" need to be united to conquer "them." When newspaper and television editors decided not to report Congressman Gonzalez's resolution to impeach President Bush, they were exhibiting political dualism. They were afraid such news would bring disunity to "us" while "we" were at war.

In times of impending war, political dualists tend to unite behind their military leader. Their priority is national unity, required to beat the enemy. Their model of the world is one in which successful military competition ensures a nation's well-being.

Political holism is based on the recognition that "we" are all members of a single whole. There's no "they," even though "we" are not all alike. Because "we" are all part of the whole, and therefore interdependent, we benefit from cooperating with each other. Political holism is a way of thinking about human cultures and nations as interdependent.

Political holists search for solutions other than war to settle international disagreements. Their model of the world is one in which cooperation and negotiation, even with the enemy, even with the weak, promotes political stability more than warfare. In an overpopulated world with planet-wide environmental problems, the development of weapons of mass destruction has rendered war obsolete as an effective means to resolve disputes. Congressman Gonzalez is a political holist. So am I.

Political dualists consider political holists unpatriotic for questioning the necessity to defeat "them." In times of impending war, political dualists tend to measure patriotism by the intensity of one's hostility to the country's immediate enemy. Naturally, they would view as disloyalty any suggestion that the enemy is not evil, any call for cooperation with the enemy, any criticism of one's own country. To political dualists, cooperation with the enemy means capitulation, relinquishment of the nation's position of dominance.

At its extreme, political dualism is essentially tribalism. Political dualism is beneficial to a group whose well-being requires dominance over other groups. As Charles Darwin wrote,

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members, who, from possessing . . . patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes.

What Darwin understood by patriotism is unquestioning loyalty to the tribe. A tribe can beat other tribes if its members are unified, obedient to its leaders, militarily courageous, and willing to subordinate their own interests to the tribe's. Members of the tribe who lack these tribal virtues hamper the tribe's efforts to wage successful war. They are consequently regarded as unpatriotic, even treacherous.

In presenting a resolution to impeach the President of the United States, when the United States was about to go to war with another country, Congressman Gonzalez demonstrated none of those virtues. He questioned the wisdom of the nation's leader with the intent of arousing dissent among the nation's citizens. He showed an unwillingness to subordinate the interests of his constituency--poor Hispanic-Americans in Texas--to those of the Government. He refused to participate in the demonization of Iraq.

And Congressman Gonzalez disputed, as mightily as he could, the value of being victorious over another tribe, if the means and human costs were inappropriate. He thereby threatened national unity.

On February 21, in the middle of the war, Congressman Gonzalez resubmitted his resolution to impeach President Bush. It was House Resolution 86, and it had a fifth article:

V. President Bush planned, prepared, and conspired to commit crimes against the peace by leading the United States into aggressive war against Iraq in violation of . . . the U.N. Charter, the Nuremberg Charter, other international instruments and treaties, and the U.S. Constitution.

This action certainly was not designed to help "us" defeat "them." It did not make history either.

In the popular mind, during the early months of 1991, American journalists were supposed to help "us" defeat "them." Those who reported events that reflected unfavorably on the United States Government or on the United States Armed Forces were criticized for being unpatriotic. Remember how Senator Alan Simpson denounced CNN correspondent Peter Arnett for reporting on CNN that an Iraqi "baby formula milk factory" had been bombed?

Peter Arnett, by reporting from enemy territory, threatened national unity--while doing what he considered his duty. On the eve of the war, when White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was urging CNN to pull its journalists out of Baghdad, Ted Turner had instructed CNN executives: "We are an international network and we have an obligation to report the story from Baghdad if we can." Part of that story was the Coalition bombing of what Arnett determined was a "baby formula milk factory."

Even when challenged by a Pentagon spokesman, who said that the plant was involved in "biological warfare," Arnett stood by his story. When accused of transmitting "disinformation," Arnett replied, "Nothing I am saying I am being told to report."

Peter Arnett was committed to reporting events as he saw them, even if they undermined the credibility of Pentagon accounts of the war, even if they undermined Americans' confidence in the goodness of "us" and the badness of "them."

CNN journalists were aware that they were reporting to the world--to heads of governments everywhere, to Americans, Iraqis, Germans, and Japanese, both to supporters and to opponents of the U.N. Coalition bombing of Iraq. All of the CNN viewers had something at stake in the war. Good "journalists for the world," such as Peter Arnett, recognized their responsibility to all their diverse viewers, not just to their compatriots. They recognized their obligation to retain a critical distance from all governments, including their own. To the extent that they presented all they learned that they believed significant to the global community they were political holists.

Both Peter Arnett and Congressman Gonzalez were expressing allegiance to laws or principles that transcended tribalist laws. Congressman Gonzalez was accusing President Bush of violating not only the U.S. Constitution but also international agreements. Although his impeachment resolution did not help President Bush's war effort against Iraq, Congressman Gonzalez felt that it served the long-term best interests of Americans. He felt that obedience of international law, developed to serve all nations, serves the United States well--in the long term. If the nations of the world constitute a political whole, then the well-being, or political stability, of the whole affects the well being of all the parts, including the most powerful.

Peter Arnett was adhering to standards of truth-in-reporting to which nationality is irrelevant. He felt that "journalism for the world" is in the long-term best interests of the United States. To report the news in such a way as to give one nation a military advantage over another, or to consolidate public opinion on the basis of false information, would be not only dishonest but also disadvantageous to the United States in the long term, for it would undermine the political stability of the whole system of nations.

What we are witnessing at the end of the twentieth century is an expansion of our ethical community--that is, the community within which we apply our laws and ethics. Globalization, involving transnational systems of communication, transportation, trade, and finance, is making all the inhabitants of the earth into members of a single, global society. Global television shows us all what we are doing and how we live.

On the one hand, globalization is producing alliances among the world's powerful nation-states, multinational corporations, and military forces. This is what President Bush called "the New World Order." On the other hand, globalization is extending our range of sympathy beyond members of our own "tribe" to all the human beings of the world. It is also making us aware of our dependence on the stability of our natural environment.

Over fifty years ago, a wildlife ecologist named Aldo Leopold wrote an essay that has become a classic in environmentalist literature. It was titled "The Land Ethic." In it Leopold described the history of Western ethics as a continuous expansion of one's "community." A community, he said, consists of individuals whose relationships of interdependence produce cooperation. These individuals willingly accept limitations on their freedom of action in the struggle for existence in order that their community may thrive. In the course of three thousand years, the idea of one's ethical community has evolved from one's small tribe to one's nation to the whole of the human species. Eventually, Leopold predicted, our ethical community will include the "land" itself.

According to Leopold's theory, when individuals think of the tribe as their ethical community, they voluntarily accept certain limitations on their freedom in order to enhance the tribe's well-being. They cooperate with other tribal members for their own long-term benefit--for example, to preserve a place in the tribe. When they think of their nation as their community, they likewise accept certain limitations on their freedom to enhance the nation's well-being. One form of such self sacrifice on behalf of the nation is serving in the nation's military forces.

When, in the coming decades, we think of the whole global system of cultures and nations as our community, we will accept certain limitations on our nation's freedom of action to enhance the global society's well being. Actually, we are already doing this.

Most Americans have already accepted the concept of "universal human rights." Most Americans, with the exception of right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the ones with which Timothy McVeigh was associated, have accepted the participation of the United States in the United Nations. The United States is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the militarization of the moon and of outer space; and the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits the use of biological weapons.

And most Americans accept limitations on our nation's freedom of action in order to maintain a habitable environment. The United States is a signatory to the Montreal Protocol, which restricts the production of the chlorofluorocarbons that deplete the earth's protective ozone layer. This is as Leopold predicted: When we humans recognize our dependence on the "land," we will develop a "cooperative" relationship with it, to protect it from destruction and thereby to protect ourselves from extinction.

The holistic model of reality emerging out of environmentalism is the same model emerging out of globalization: that of a single evolving system of interdependent diverse individuals and populations. It is this vision that peace organizations and environmentalist organizations share, in their appreciation of human and biological diversity and their advocacy of cooperation and negotiation among the system's unlike constituents. War, the destruction of one component of the system by another, is traumatic to the whole and therefore to be avoided.

I believe that modern warfare has made political dualism actually disadvantageous for any country--even for the most powerful country in the world, the United States. Although winning a war has in the past always benefitted a country, now the use of weapons of mass destruction may cause harm to loser and winner alike.

For political holists, the aftermath of the Gulf War provided an environmentalist lesson in interconnectedness--in the interdependence of human beings and the natural environment, which is, as ecologist Eugene Odum says, "our life support system." The smoke from Kuwait's oil fires blocked the sunlight in Kuwait and much of Iraq, causing daytime temperatures to fall by as much as 15 degrees Centigrade. Smoke particles absorbed water and turned into black rain, which fell as far away as the Himalayas, Russia, Eastern Europe, East Africa, and China. Climatologists believe that the smoke may have caused the unusual weather occurring around the world later that year--a cyclone in Bangladesh, catastrophic floods in central and eastern China, record-setting snow and rain in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Gases formed acid rain, which fell upon a region stretching from Romania to Afghanistan. By late 1991, black rain had ruined half of Iran's crops. And wind speed levels were elevated during the months after the war, intensifying dust storms that buried huge quantities of ammunition, land mines, and "lawn darts." The influence the war had elsewhere on the planet's weather will never be known.

What remained after the fighting was an environment hazardous to the health of humans and all other forms of life. The oil slick on the Persian Gulf damaged the marine food chain, the seagrass beds, and the algal mats of photosynthetic bacteria. It killed over 30,000 seabirds in the year after the war. Radioactive debris poisoned the desert of northern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. The desert was covered with black oily soot, which formed an asphalt in places throughout northern Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and its surface was destroyed by the movement of tanks and other military vehicles. Unexploded Iraqi land mines and the remnants of Coalition cluster bombs will make some areas of Iraq and Kuwait unsafe for decades.

For one group to wage war upon another with weapons of mass destruction thus produces not only a change in the relationship of the two groups to each other and possibly a change in the dominance order of the community of nations; it also produces a change in the earth's biosphere. If one group should employ nuclear weapons to prevail over the other, the consequent nuclear winter would imperil all the inhabitants of the earth. To recognize our sociobiotic interdependence is to look at the world as a system--that is, as a whole.

The political dualist's understanding of warfare, as combat between humans in which one group wins, has obviously become inadequate. When the biosphere is affected, more than two parties are involved.

Military competition is harmful to human civilization in many regards. Besides being preparation for war, military competition diverts a significant portion of the world's wealth--approximately one trillion dollars annually--from the production of goods and services that promote people's health to the maintenance of equipment and personnel that destroy people's health. International peace activists and environmentalists--citizens of the world--see war holistically as self-inflicted destruction.

As Congressman Gonzalez recognized, a society's militarism does not impact all segments of its population in the same way. For example, in 1990, African-Americans constituted 21 percent of active-duty forces, but only 12 percent of the population of the United States and 11 percent of the civilian labor force; they also constituted 22 percent of the unemployed. Without a military draft enlisting a cross-section of the nation's population of young men and women, the United States draws into its armed forces many people for whom the military offers more opportunities for socio-economic advancement and security than does civilian life, a fact to which Representative Gonzalez alluded in his first article of impeachment. These are the people who risk their lives to preserve the lifestyles of the rest of the nation's citizens.

The majority of Americans have yet to see militarism as an ideology strategically disadvantageous to the United States. To political dualists, cooperating with less powerful and ideologically different nations means curtailing our own nation's opportunities to improve our standard of living. So does obedience of international laws.

The consciousness that one's ethical community includes all the earth's peoples is expressed in political holism. Representative Gonzalez appealed to international law in his resolution to impeach President Bush. He appealed to the United Nations Charter and to the Geneva Conventions. Peter Arnett appealed to transnational standards of truth in his "journalism for the world."

In observing principles that transcend national interests, Gonzalez and Arnett were not betraying their own nation. They were not unpatriotic. Actually, they were exhibiting the kind of patriotism that may serve our country best in the global society. It is the patriotism that Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, defined when he responded to a question posed by Nation Magazine in the summer of 1991. Patriotism, Ramsey Clark said, is "a personal commitment to make one's country honest and just in all its acts" and "to motivate the whole country to be as good a neighbor in the community of nations as the conscience of individuals motivates them to be in the communities where they live."

In other words, in a global society, whose many separate nations are economically interdependent, one serves one's own country best by trying to make it a good country, "honest and just in all its acts." If a country is a good neighbor, it will contribute to the stability of the "community of nations."

If we regard our global society as an interdependent system of nations and peoples, then we see how exploitation and oppression of some of the components by others destabilizes the whole system and thereby endangers even the oppressors. It is to the advantage of the powerful components of the system to cooperate with the relatively powerless to enable them too to be productive, healthy members of the global society. The extension of our ethical system beyond our culture, beyond our nation, is as much a strategy for survival as it is an expression of conscience.

Political holism--the vision of an evolving system of diverse, interdependent individuals, cultures, and nations--is thus a strategy for peace. To political holists, for whom the health of any single group potentially affects the health of all the others, cooperation is necessary for the health of the whole. Political holists give cooperation priority over military competition wherever feasible, because military competition destroys the health of the whole.

As our planet becomes increasingly crowded, and our resources more obviously limited, international restrictions on the freedom of nations to exploit one another and the land ultimately benefit everybody. Just as in the natural world, where overcrowding in an ecosystem increases symbiosis, overcrowding on our planet demands cooperation. Cooperation enhances an individual's or a species's survivability.

On our armed, overcrowded planet, the virtues of political dualism, such as unquestioning loyalty to the tribe's leader and unmitigated hostility to the tribe's enemies, are no longer beneficial to any group. In fact, they are impulses that individuals must overcome--in any society that will survive and prosper.

Those individuals with the foresight to recognize the benefits to our own nation of cooperation--of being a good neighbor in the community of nations--may be perceived by future Americans as patriots.

I believe that the advocacy of cooperative relationships among nations, instead of military competition, is to serve the long-term best interests of the United States in a global society. Peacemaking, in this model, is the effort to bring about a new way of thinking that is of strategic importance to the well-being of both Americans and other inhabitants of our planet.

The veterans here in this room, having given some of your most productive years, risked your personal safety, and perhaps lost your health to our country's quest for military superiority, are in a stronger position than any other group of American citizens to advance peacemaking. You cannot be accused of cowardice. You cannot be accused of selfishness. You cannot be accused of weakness. You have already proven that you love your country and that you are willing to make an enormous sacrifice to preserve it.

Veterans for Peace is already doing much to advance the cause of peace in this country. What I have tried to do tonight is to show how your efforts to convince our national leaders to abandon warfare as an instrument of state policy and to establish a moratorium on arms sales belong to a new way of thinking in our global society. The list of VFP initiated or endorsed projects, which includes Conflict Resolution programs in the schools, the Alliance for Our Common Future, and the Anti-War Toys Project, indicates that you all recognize the relationships between peacemaking on a global scale, harmonious interaction on a local scale, environmentalism, and social justice.

All of these initiatives are driven by the ideology of political holism. As parts of the whole, none of us stands alone, none of us survives alone. No man is an island; no country is either. We are all connected to one another, and we are all better off if we do our best to help each other.

I applaud what you are doing, and I am honored that you have given me the opportunity to speak to you about peace.

Thank you.

Betty Jean Craige is University Professor and Interim Head of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia.

---

The content and opinions expressed on this Web page do not necessarily reflect the views of nor are they endorsed by the University of Georgia or the University System of Georgia.

---