The Death of the Anti-War Movement

A few weird things happened this week. The “Doomsday Clock” was moved closer to “midnight” than ever before (this is a warning system that The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists uses to tell the world when they’re most at risk of atomic war). So in their view, atomic apocalypse is closer than ever. The day after that, the war in Ukraine escalated even more—with NATO/Germany sending tanks into Ukraine.

Those are the first two weird things. The third is that nobody seems to care. We were warned that we are closer to a world-ending war than ever, and the next day it escalated much more. It seems like this should have triggered some kind of massive anti-war protest, a march, or something. But it didn’t. Crickets.

This seems weird to me. It’s often said of people today that we don’t care about anything—and that is certainly true. But the events of this week make it clear that this inability to care about anything also extends to the fate of the world itself. It’s gotten to the point where people literally can’t even be bothered to care about a world-ending nuclear war. What do we do with that information?

It might be worth pointing out that it wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t all that long ago that there was an anti-war movement. It was in the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq War in 2003. The whole world saw clearly that the war was unnecessary, immoral, and would be catastrophic. It was the biggest anti-war movement in history. There was an anti-war march in Rome with 3 million people, the all-time record for an anti-war march. On the weekend of February 15-16, 2003, between six and ten million people took part in protests in sixty countries. According to a scholar who studied it, in the first four months of 2003, 36 million people took part in anti-war rallies and marches around the world. All of them united against George W. Bush’s Iraq War. There had never been anything like this, before or since.

And what was the result? The war went ahead as planned, lasted for eight years (its official span is 2003-2011, but we have had soldiers and drones over there for much longer). Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for no reason, the region was destabilized, leading to endless chaos, and thousands of American soldiers died, trillions of dollars were wasted. The world got more dangerous and Americans got a lot poorer. And that’s just skimming the surface. Again—everyone knew this would happen, and said so, but it didn’t matter at all.

To recap: George W. Bush announced he was going to invade Iraq. The world erupted in protest against this, like never before. It wasn’t just the world, it was America too. And none of it meant anything. It’s like it never even happened.

Indeed, unless you make an active effort to look into this history, you wouldn’t even believe it happened. (Even if you lived through it, it’s easy to forget just how real the anti-war movement was back then). We still hear a lot of talk about the anti-war movement of the 1960s, but hardly anything at all about the anti-war movement in 2002-2003. It’s like it has been erased.

There hasn’t really been any anti-war movement since then. America has just done whatever it wanted, and the American people have never even pretended to care. We all know that our military is used by business interests to boost profits—we all know that American soldiers are little more than gangsters for capitalism. We all said this—by the millions—in 2003, and it didn’t matter.

Now it’s 20 years later, and we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever, and we don’t care. The war in Ukraine got massively escalated the day after this was announced, and we don’t care. We tried caring once, and it didn’t matter.

Will there be an anti-war movement again? I have an easier time imagining the end of the world than a movement that wants to stop the end of the world.

Even now, when an anti-war movement is more needed than ever before in human history, it is as far removed from the realm of possibility as anything.

So many unbelievable things are possible now—there’s artificial intelligence that can write essays better than humans can! Aging is being reversed! And that’s just off the top of my head. The list of impossible things becoming real goes on and on.

And yet the simplest thing—people joining together to say that a world-ending nuclear war is bad—is totally outside the realm of possibility. It is much easier to imagine artificial intelligence achieving consciousness, or aging being reversed, or humans exploring Mars, than this.

There has been no shortage of war rhetoric in recent years, but none of it has been applied to, you know, actual war. Whenever we hear the political and media class talk about climate change, or the pandemic, it’s always war language that gets used. We have to win the war against Covid, and against climate change…but not the war against war. The war against war has been lost. War has won. Everyone has acknowledged this. So we’ve moved on to fighting wars against greenhouse gases and viruses.

What conclusion can we draw from all this? That we as a species have lost the ability to care about existing anymore. There are pockets that still care—indeed, the elites who fund AI and anti-aging science care a lot! They want to stay alive for as long as possible, and they want their happiness to be maximized (they think that AI will help this happen).

But in terms of a big collectivity called human beings who want to keep living in organized societies for a long period of time—that is all over. And the fact that we have all agreed to let war win has destroyed our attempts at fighting other wars. We can’t really be serious about fighting a war against climate change or against viruses (or against obesity or racism or poverty or anything else!) if we aren’t serious about fighting a war against war itself. If we accept that war has won, and that opposing war is useless, then nothing else matters. We can do a lot of performative stuff about fighting other, lesser wars—but nobody will really believe in them.

Have a nice weekend everybody!