A Slight Delay

After reading Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (and Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect, which I’m reading now and will be taking up later this week), I seem to have pacifism on the brain lately. Something occurred to me: Pacifists, like generals, are always ready to fight the last war. Just the same as those who wage war need a degree of creativity and foresight to be effective, so too must the antiwar movement. It isn’t enough to do something because it worked in ‘68; we’re forty years on now, and the same old things aren’t going to be nearly as effective now as they were then.

Worst of all, it seems that so much of the antiwar movement is reactive rather than proactive. We seem to have waited ’til we were already well on the way to mobilization to try to sound the alarm, rather than realizing that the run-up to war, the war itself, and the means by which it’s conducted are all the product of a particular mindset. It seems to me that the odds of a good result would be higher if we’d address that mindset, rather than trying to change the tide this long after the fact.