Radio astronomer Frank Drake, collaborator of Carl Sagan, devised an equation in 1961 to estimate the number of civilizations that our galaxy could host. The Drake equation takes into account many factors, such as the number of planets or their physical conditions, but also another term: the degree of technological development. A civilization is more likely to self-destruct the more advanced its technology is. For example, victim of a nuclear apocalypse. There is an aberrant number of 12,512 nuclear weapons on planet Earth, according to the Stockholm International Peace Studies Institute (SIPRI). Pacifism has traditionally fought for conflict resolution without violent confrontations, also for disarmament that preserves the human species. Lately, it’s not in fashion.
Since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, Russian President Vladimir Putin frequently exhibits the rhetoric of nuclear conflict and generates a sense of civilizational absurdity. After the end of the Cold War, citizens had forgotten the possibility of an apocalypse, but for some time now the atomic threat has resurfaced, accompanied by war-mongering discourse, and even on midday television talk shows it has been commented, with a certain lightness, the forms and consequences of a hypothetical nuclear conflict. If the pandemic, which seemed like science fiction, ended up happening, why not that nuclear winter that is so recreated in the movies? The terrifying possibility has not generated much popular reaction either: perhaps, from seeing it so much on Netflix or Amazon (as in the movie Leave the world behind or in the series fallout), continues to be perceived as an implausible fiction.
Off screen, Germany is rearming and considering returning to compulsory military service, with 52% of the population in favor, according to a Forsa survey. European leaders such as Emmanuel Macron or Donald Tusk warn of the possibility of a new war involving all of Europe, something striking within a political entity, the European Union, which has not been very involved in the military (delegate to NATO ) and whose greatest achievement has been a peace for decades between countries that have warred for centuries.
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Thus, an increase in defense spending is required, even in countries that have traditionally been reluctant to do so: global military spending has increased for the ninth consecutive year, reaching the all-time high of 2.27 trillion euros, according to SIPRI. And two nearby conflicts are still ongoing, in Ukraine and Gaza, always at risk of escalating, with no negotiated solution appearing to be achieved. The recent movie Civil War, by Alex Garland, fantasizes about a hypothetical civil war in the United States, which 41% of Americans see as possible in the next five years, according to Rasmussen Reports. The French Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar has gone so far as to declare that “pacifism is not an option.” What happened to the pacifist message?
Bad times for peace
Pacifism has a history full of milestones. The protests against the Vietnam War that emerged from the countercultural breeding ground of the 1960s. The European antinuclear movement in the Cold War, which generated the symbol of peace: a circle with three lines that took root strongly in popular culture. Or, more recently, the massive protests against the Iraq war. In Spain, the history of pacifist ideas can be traced back at least to the time of the War of Independence, with the “down with the villas”, to the anti-NATO movement, at the beginning of democracy, or the wave of insubordination to the service. military. Of course, the sound Not to the war, in the aforementioned case of Iraq, which brought together millions of people in the streets against the Government of José María Aznar. All of this is collected in Pacifism in Spain from 1808 to the “No to the war” in Iraq (Akal), written by nearly thirty academics and coordinated by Francisco J. Leira.
They were different times. “War is being normalized, as if it were a storm,” says Carmen Magallón, president of the Peace Research Seminar Foundation. She remembers Magallón the anti-militarist protests of the 1980s in Spain, when the movement was aware of the possibility of a nuclear attack, of Mutual Assured Destruction. They were suspicious of the idea of an enemy that was presented to them and tried to differentiate between the leaders and the people, who are the ones who suffer the consequences of armed conflicts. “Now there is no such social mobilization. In pacifism we are paralyzed, shocked: social movements have been transformed,” says the expert. There is a lack of someone who embodies the commitment to peace and non-violence in the public space. There is no strong leadership. “There is a lot of activity on the internet, on social networks, but that conflict does not reach the street,” says the expert.
“War is being normalized, as if it were a storm”
Carmen Magallón, president of the Peace Research Seminar
There is nothing to compare with either. The current generations have not lived through the Second World War, they do not remember its hardships, nor the anxieties of the Cold War (which are portrayed so well in the recent documentary Decisive moments: The bomb and the Cold War (Netflix), which also makes it possible for pacifist thinking to be easily replaced by confrontational ideas. “That is why the ‘duty of memory’ is important: a pedagogy of memory that allows us to find the connections of what happened, its current repercussions. “Present generations must be aware of the horrors of war and the real danger posed by nuclear weapons, an existential threat,” says Ana Barrero Tíscar, president of the Spanish Peace Research Association (AIPAZ) and director of the Foundation. Peace culture. “We live in a deeply militarized world,” continues the expert; a world in which militaristic narratives are becoming imposed that contribute to the spectacularization and normalization of war. And even a militarization is being introduced into the language that makes minds become accustomed to these logics. “At the same time, solutions that deepen the construction of peace are discarded,” she adds.
The interests of the arms industry also have their weight. “He lobby weapons works to convey that war narrative. It is an industry whose main or only client is the State, and there is a certain interdependence. The stock price of the arms industry rises a lot, as it did on October 7 in Israel [tras el ataque de Hamás]. And the peace movement is weakened: these narratives are taking hold,” says Chloé Meulewaeter, researcher at the Delàs Center for Peace Studies. The logic of rearmament follows the Latin adage: si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace prepare for war”). The paradox of deterrence: buying weapons so you don’t have to use them. Therefore, from a certain point of view, it is claimed that rearmament is not seen as a warlike posture, as long as it is done to preserve peace. Pacifist thinking prefers to follow another saying: if governments have more and more hammers, they will begin to see more and more problems as nails.
We remember the arms escalation at the beginning of the 20th century that ended up leading to the First World War. In that climate of war and exacerbated nationalism, many young people went to war singing and then ran aground in eternal trenches. In other cases, such as the Cold War, the arms race did not end in conflict; but for very little. Furthermore, the pacifist movement not only criticizes economic spending, but also the opportunity cost: everything that is dedicated to weapons is not dedicated to social issues. This is what they call peace dividends.
The atomized protest
The division of public opinion, atomized into different niches that are radicalized by digital communication, makes a coordinated proposal difficult. “Before, the classic lines of left and right, or religions, could be differentiated; now those divisions have multiplied by several orders of magnitude. They are different microcauses that make it difficult to crystallize serious opposition to anything…, including a nuclear threat,” says Pablo de Greiff, professor of Law at New York University and member of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. from the ONU. It is not difficult to imagine that, if a nuclear war were proposed, a visceral discussion would be generated on social network X between supporters and opponents of the conflict. Furthermore, it is easier to adhere to pacifist positions when it comes to a distant conflict or an abstract circumstance (the entry of a country into NATO), than when a real threat from another power is perceived.
Strong protests against the massacre in Gaza have emerged precisely in American universities, spreading to students from other countries, including Spain. They call for an end to hostilities in a society strongly committed to supporting Israel from all sides of the political spectrum, and, although they have been repeatedly compared to the anti-Vietnam movement of the 1960s (which also caught fire at Columbia University) , there are differences: “Students do not agree with the disproportionate use of force or with their universities’ investments in Israel, but, at the same time, pacifist rhetoric is not very present in these movements,” says De Greiff. .
Other factors could be counted that facilitate the resurgence of war, rhetorical or real, and the scarcity of pacifist positions: internal polarization in countries that filters into the international panorama, economic inequality within and between countries, converted migration in a political workhorse or the lack of counterweights to the executive powers that causes strong leaders to emerge, following De Greiff’s enumeration. “Guarantee entities are suffering attacks and being weakened globally,” explains the expert, “there is distrust in national control institutions.”
Dilemmas of pacifism
Pacifism has often been seen as a danger by governments, and has even been accused of being on the side of the enemy. For example, the few pacifist positions regarding the war in Ukraine, which propose a diplomatic solution to the conflict, have been accused of being loyal to Putin. It is not uncommon for those who call for a ceasefire in Gaza and criticize the Israeli response to be accused of being anti-Semites or supporters of Hamas. Another of the symbols of pacifism is that of naivety: critics of violence are candid souls who do not understand the real and violent functioning of the world, nor the sad human condition.
“They sell us what is called realpolitik: This must be done because it is a lesser evil. They do not realize that what the peace movement defends is nothing more than seeking a negotiated solution in which, sadly, everyone has to give in. That should be the realpolitik”, explains historian Francisco J. Leira. The naive idea, for pacifists, is to think that one can live in peace without reaching agreements and without giving up one’s ambitions: wars rarely end in victories or inconclusive defeats. In this sense, it would also be a sign of maturity to understand that, sometimes, a small injustice or a great oversight is tolerable to avoid the greater horror of war. “We are buying gas from Russia and giving weapons to Ukraine, it is almost a circular economy of war,” explains Leira, “so, although pacifism seems naive, it is the option we have left to defend: the alternative is that people continue dying”.
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