1-16-06
Have Peace Activists Ever Stopped a War?
By Lawrence S. Wittner
Dr. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany and the author of Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He delivered the following paper on January 7, 2006, at a forum sponsored by Historians Against the War at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.
The role of peace activism in ending U.S. wars has received very little attention from scholars. Despite the fact that historians and social scientists have studied U.S. peace movements extensively in recent decades, we know much more about peace movements' organizational history than we do about their impact upon public policy. Thus, what I have to say today is a preliminary report.
Let me begin by examining the provocative comment by some observers that, rather than peace movements putting an end to wars, wars put an end to peace movements. This is sometimes the case, for--given the strength of nationalism--many people tend to rally `round the flag of their nation once war is declared. Thus, not surprisingly, substantial U.S. peace movements largely collapsed with the entry of the United States into the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. In more recent years, polls indicate that U.S. peace sentiment declined significantly (albeit temporarily) after the entry of the United States into the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. Furthermore, direct government repression in wartime--for example, during World War I--has sometimes dramatically undermined or destroyed peace movements.
Moreover, even when powerful peace movements have persisted in wartime, they have not always been very effective. The War of 1812 might well have been (as Samuel Eliot Morison claimed) the most unpopular war in U.S. history. Certainly it drew a tidal wave of criticism, especially in the Northeast. But the frequent denunciations of the war did not halt its progress. The same phenomenon can be glimpsed in the case of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century "pacification" of the Philippines. Although a powerful Anti-Imperialist League consistently challenged this war (which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and 7,000 U.S. troops), it continued to rage right up to a U.S. military victory.
On the other hand, there are instances in which the peace movement brought an end to U.S. wars. The Mexican War of the 1840s provides us with one example. Condemned from the start as a war of aggression and as a war for slavery, the Mexican War stirred up remarkably strong opposition. Thus, although the war went very well for the United States on a military level and President Polk pressed for the annexation of all of Mexico to the United States, when Nicholas Trist, Polk's diplomatic negotiator, disobeyed his instructions and signed a treaty providing for the annexation of only about a third of Mexico, Polk felt trapped. In the face of fierce public opposition to the conflict, he did not believe it possible to prolong the war to secure his goal of taking all of Mexico. And so Polk reluctantly backed Trist's peace treaty, and the war came to an end.
more . . .
http://hnn.us/articles/20367.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
