In
planning an upcoming
conference aimed at challenging the institution of war, to be held at
American University September 22-24, I can’t help but be drawn to the speech a
U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago.
Whether or not you agree with me that this is the best speech ever given by a
U.S. president, there should be little dispute that it is the speech most out
of step with what anyone will say on Capitol Hill or in the White House today.
Here’s a video of the best portion of the speech:
President
John F. Kennedy was speaking at a time when, like now, Russia and the United
States had enough nuclear weapons ready to fire at each other on a moment’s
notice to destroy the earth for human life many times over. At that time,
however, in 1963, there were only three nations, not the current nine, with
nuclear weapons, and many fewer than now with nuclear energy. NATO was far removed
from Russia’s borders. The United States had not just facilitated a coup in
Ukraine. The United States wasn’t organizing military exercises in Poland or
placing missiles in Poland and Romania. Nor was it manufacturing smaller nukes
that it described as “more usable.” Nor was it threatening to use them on North
Korea. The work of managing U.S. nuclear weapons was then deemed prestigious in
the U.S. military, not the dumping ground for drunks and misfits that it has
become. Hostility between Russia and the United States was high in 1963, but
the problem was widely known about in the United States, in contrast to the
current vast ignorance. Some voices of sanity and restraint were permitted in
the U.S. media and even in the White House. Kennedy was using peace activist
Norman Cousins as a messenger to Nikita Khrushchev, whom he never described, as
Hillary Clinton has described Vladimir Putin, as “Hitler.” Even the U.S. and
Soviet militaries were communicating with each other. Not anymore.
Kennedy
framed his speech as a remedy for ignorance, specifically the ignorant view
that war is inevitable. This is the opposite of what President Barack Obama
said in Hiroshima last year and earlier in Prague and Oslo, and what Lindsey
Graham says about war on North Korea.
Kennedy
called peace “the most important topic on earth.” He renounced the idea of a
“Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” precisely
what both big political parties now and most speeches on war by most past U.S.
presidents ever have favored. Kennedy went so far as to profess to care about
100% rather than 4% of humanity:
“… not
merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in
our time but peace for all time.”
Kennedy
explained war and militarism and deterrence as nonsensical:
“Total
war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and
relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort
to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains
almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in
the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons
produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and
seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”
Kennedy
went after the money. Military spending is now over half of federal
discretionary spending, and Trump wants to push it up toward 60%.
“Today,”
said Kennedy in 1963,
“the
expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the
purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the
peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles–which can only
destroy and never create–is not the only, much less the most efficient, means
of assuring peace.”
In 2017
even beauty queens have shifted to advocating war rather than “world peace.”
But in 1963 Kennedy spoke of peace as the serious business of government:
“I speak
of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize
that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war–and
frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more
urgent task. Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law
or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the
Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we
can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as
individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And
every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and
wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own
attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the
course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.”
Can you
imagine any approved speaker on corporate media or Capitol Hill suggesting that
in U.S. relations toward Russia a major part of the problem might be U.S.
attitudes?
Peace,
Kennedy explained in a manner unheard of today, is perfectly possible:
“First:
Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is
impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist
belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable–that mankind is
doomed–that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that
view. Our problems are manmade–therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can
be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable–and we
believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite
concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do
not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and
incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. Let us focus instead on
a more practical, more attainable peace– based not on a sudden revolution in
human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions–on a series of
concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all
concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace–no grand or magic
formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product
of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing
to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process–a way of
solving problems.”
Kennedy
debunked some of the usual straw men:
“With
such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there
are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not
require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live
together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful
settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between
individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem,
the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the
relations between nations and neighbors. So let us persevere. Peace need not be
impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more
clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all
peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.”
Kennedy
then laments what he considers, or claims to consider, baseless Soviet paranoia
regarding U.S. imperialism, Soviet criticism not unlike his own more private
criticism of the CIA. But he follows this by flipping it around on the U.S.
public:
“Yet it
is sad to read these Soviet statements–to realize the extent of the gulf
between us. But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to
fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and
desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable,
accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange
of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be
considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly
repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail
the Russian people for their many achievements–in science and space, in
economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage. Among the
many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger
than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers,
we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of
battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the
Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of
homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory,
including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a
wasteland–a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of
Chicago.”
Imagine
today trying to get Americans to see a designated enemy’s point of view and
ever being invited back on CNN or MSNBC afterward. Imagine hinting at who
actually did the vast majority of winning World War II or why Russia might have
good reason to fear aggression from its west!
Kennedy
returned to the nonsensical nature of the cold war, then and now:
“Today,
should total war ever break out again–no matter how–our two countries would
become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two
strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have
built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And
even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many nations,
including this Nation’s closest allies–our two countries bear the heaviest
burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could
be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both
caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side
breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons. In short,
both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies,
have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the
arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as
well as ours–and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and
keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in
their own interest.”
Kennedy
then urges, outrageously by the standards of some, that the United States
tolerate other nations pursuing their own visions:
“So, let
us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our
common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And
if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe
for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that
we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish
our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Kennedy
reframes the cold war, rather than the Russians, as the enemy:
“Let us
reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged
in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing
blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is,
and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been
different. We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope
that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach
solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way
that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above
all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those
confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating
retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would
be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish
for the world.”
By
Kennedy’s definition, the U.S. government is pursuing a death-wish for the
world, just as by Martin Luther King’s definition four years later, the U.S.
government is now “spiritually dead.” Which is not to say that nothing came of
Kennedy’s speech and the work that followed it in the five months before he was
murdered by U.S. militarists. Kennedy proposed in the speech the creation of a
hotline between the two governments, which was created. He proposed a ban on
nuclear weapons testing and announced the unilateral U.S. cessation of nuclear
testing in the atmosphere. This led to a treaty banning nuclear testing except
underground. And that led, as Kennedy intended, to greater cooperation and
larger disarmament treaties.
This
speech also led by degrees difficult to measure to greater U.S. resistance to
launching new wars. May it serve to inspire a movement to bring the abolition of
war to reality.
Speakers this coming weekend
at American University will include: Medea Benjamin, Nadine
Bloch, Max Blumenthal, Natalia Cardona, Terry Crawford-Browne, Alice Day,
Lincoln Day, Tim DeChristopher, Dale Dewar, Thomas Drake, Pat Elder,
Dan Ellsberg, Bruce Gagnon, Kathy Gannett, Will Griffin, Seymour
Hersh, Tony Jenkins, Larry Johnson, Kathy Kelly, Jonathan
King, Lindsay Koshgarian, James Marc Leas, Annie Machon, Ray
McGovern, Rev Lukata Mjumbe, Bill Moyer, Elizabeth Murray, Emanuel
Pastreich, Anthony Rogers-Wright, Alice Slater, Gar Smith,
Edward Snowden (by video), Susi Snyder, Mike Stagg, Jill Stein, David
Swanson, Robin Taubenfeld, Brian Terrell, Brian Trautman, Richard Tucker, Donnal
Walter, Larry Wilkerson, Ann Wright, Emily Wurth, Kevin Zeese. Read speakers’ bios.
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