Continued from above. I couldn't fit all the quotes in one post.
I believe the reason for this is because there are now larger than ever numbers of people opposing the war. This in turn, I believe, is thanks to improvements in childrearing during the latter half of the 20th century. ‘For years, psychohistorians have observed a steady evolution in childrearing that is now more rapid than ever before. Lloyd de Mause writes:
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Progress in childrearing evolution may be extremely uneven, but the trends are nonetheless unmistakable. The overall direction is from projection to empathy, from discipline to self-regulation, from hitting to explaining, from incest to love, from rejection to over control and then to independence.
…Just the sheer cost of raising a child in dollars has been going up so fast that it now costs a middle-class American family $1.5 million for each child over 22 years, up to 20 percent in the past three decades. The families I know in my section of Manhattan easily devote over half their spare time and half their income to their children. Compare this to the small fraction of parents’ time and money given over to children in earlier centuries with children even spending most of their lives working for adults in various ways and one can begin to comprehend the overall direction of childrearing evolution. (135)
Similarly, in 1998 psychohistorian Robert McFarland wrote: “Improvements in parenting practices can now be measured in decades rather than in centuries. Since Sweden banned hitting children in 1979, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Austria have followed.” (136) And whereas in 1992 over 90 percent of American parents hit their young children, by 1999 this had dropped to 57 percent.
Due to this steady ‘evolution of childhood,’ the average level of childrearing experienced by today’s young adults in developed countries will have been better than that experienced by previous generations. Consequently there are now more and more people in the higher ‘psychoclasses’: individuals who, due to their more loving childhoods, have a higher level of psychological health. J These individuals will be more able to enjoy their increased prosperity and the new technology that has become available over recent years, along with any increased personal freedoms. AS a result, they will have less, if any, desire for war.
This relationship between childhood experience and support for, or opposition to war, has been found, by, amongst others, political psychologist Michael Milburn. Milburn says:
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We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like … support for the use of military force.
…The higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood. It’s not just going to be that they were spanked; there’s a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that. (138)
If a person who experiences a severe and punitive childhood is likely to grow up into the kind of adult who favors the use of military force, w e might logically assume the opposite is also true: Individuals who had better childhoods will be less supportive of wars. Lloyd de Mause confirms this, describing his observations of young adults today who have experienced far more loving childhoods:
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These individuals are far more empathic and therefore more concerned about others than we ever were, and this has made them far more activist in their lives in trying to make a difference and change the world for the better, mostly involving themselves in local activities rather than global political changes. They lack all need for nationalism, wars, and other grandiose projects, and in the organizations they start are genuinely nonauthoritarian. There is no question that if the world could treat children with helping-mode parenting, wars and all the other self-destructive social conditions we still suffer from in the twenty-first century will be cured. (139)
With the gradual improvement in the average level of childrearing over recent decades (in developed countries at least), we would expect a corresponding decrease in support for war. This was clearly evidenced by the unprecedented level of opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion.. In London, for example, on Saturday February 15, 2003, an estimated one to two million people marched in protest against the imminent invasion: the largest public demonstration ever to occur in Britain. The following month, 400,000 marched through London, the biggest protest in Braitain against a war during wartime. (140) Weeks before the war started, Tony Blair suffered the biggest Commons revolt of his premiership when 199 MPs rejected his direction over Iraq. As the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charlest Kennedy, observed: “Despite investing masses of political and parliamentary capital, the government has still failed to persuade a third of the House of Commons.” 141
According to leading political scholar and critic of American foreign policy Noam Chomsky, in an interview around this time:
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There’s never been a time that I can think of when there’s been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started… Even in the United States there is overwhelming opposition to the war and that corresponding decline in trust in the leadership that is driving the war… If you compare it with the Vietnam war, the current stage of the war with Iraq is approximately like that of 1961 – that is before the war was actually launched, as it was in 1962 with the US bombing of South Vietnam and driving millions of people into concentration camps and chemical warfare and so on, but there was no protest. In fact, so little protest that few people even remember. 142
Chomsky points out how even our governments are aware of this new reluctance towards war and have had to modify their actions accordingly:
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When any administration comes into office the first thing it does is have a worldwide intelligence assessment – “What’s the state of the world?” – provided by the inte4lligence services… When the first Bush administration came in 1989 parts of their intelligence assessment were leaked, and they’re very revealing about what happened in the subsequent 10 years about precisely these questions.
The parts that were leaked said that it was about military confontations with much weaker enemies, recognizing they were the only kind we were going to be willing to face, or even exist. So in confrontationw with much weaker enemies the United States must win “decisively and rapidly” because otherwise popular support will erode, because it’s understood to be very thin. Not like in the 1960s when the government could fight a long, brutal war for years and years practically destroying a country without any protest. Not now. 143
Although the peace movement failed to prevent the Iraq invasion when the war began it seemed they had made a significant difference. As Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian:
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The campaign began not with “shock and awe” but a subtler knife, aimed at the surgical decapitation of Saddam Hussein and his regime. One night’s bombing of Baghdad lasted no more than an hour. There could be a stack of explanations for that initial deployment of the short, sharp blow… But there may be another motive for the initial preference for short-and-sweet over shock-and-awe. The US might have wanted to avoid a wave of worldwide revultion. A series of tight, well-aimed strikes at the regime would have confounded the global fear of colossal Iraqi civilian casualties. It’s as if Washington had heard the peace movement’s objection to this war – that too many innocents would die – and was attempting to heed it. 144
Freeedland continues:
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Perhaps the clearest proof of the anti-war camp’s efforts came from our own prime minister: “I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country,” he said, just seconds into his own TV message to the nation. No leader wants to go into a war admitting such a thing. But Blair had no choice. AS with much else, the peace movement has changed the landscape for this conflict – and the men of war are having to deal with it. 145
What peace activists may well have achieved is the prevention of further invasions of ‘axis of evil’ countries. AS Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition said: “does anyone think Tony Blair can ever stand up in parliament again and say the words ‘trust me’? AS they talk up targeting Iran and Syria, do you think anyone will ever believe this government when they say we’ve got the intelligence to prove it?” 146
Maybe the improvements in childrearing over recent decades that account for this unprecedented opposition to war, will also mean there are now enough people less afraid to challenge authority and face unpleasant truths, so as to help bring about a 9/11 scandal. Compare this to, say, the truth about the attack on Pearl harbor in December 1941. We now know that President Franklin Roosevelt and his top military advisers knew in advance that Japan was planning a ‘surprise attack’ on America. Japanese radio messages had been intercepted and it was known when and where they would attack the US . Despite this foreknowledge, Roosevelt allowed the attack to go ahead so as to create a pretext for America to join World War II. Yet these facts only became more widely known in 2000, with the release of Robert B. Stinnett’s book
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. 147 Robert McFarland points out: “While it was 58 years before Stinnet’s book made the facts about Pearl Harbor widely known, two important books about 9/11 came out within a year… Since these books came out quickly, we are apparently more willing to look at bad news than we were in 1941.” 148
While a 9/11 scandal would be a sufficiently large public crisis to help ease the particularly high level of public anxiety (‘growth panic’) among the lower psychoclasses, unlike a massive war it ought also to be acceptable to the more peaceful higher psychoclass individuals. If we do have such a scandal, the emotional effect will undoubtedly be intense. Consider how the general public would feel if people start openly accusing some within the Bush administration of complicity in the 9/11 attacks. How would Americans feel who had voted for these men, trusted and respected them? I can imagine many people finding such events devastating. What if security camera footage of the attack on the Pentagon had to be made public at some point and is showed something other than a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon? Surely millions of people would feel horrified. The full implications of a 9/11 scandal would be colossal. It would be the emotional equivalent of a massive war. So maybe instead of the war “of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before,” that Donald Rumsfeld promised back in 2003, there is going to be a scandal of ‘a scope and scale’ that is ‘beyond what has been seen before.’
