"...[A]s long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding.... We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise." -- Randolph Bourne, A War Diary, September 1917

The deadly engine of war is painfully difficult, once revved up, to throw into reverse. The cycle of revenge tends to impel support for ever-increasing carnage. The grievous losses of war are invoked as a moral bludgeon necessitating further losses and justifying the infliction of greater suffering. Meanwhile, political leaders use wars as excuses for the aggrandizement of executive power and the violation of democracy, civil liberties, and human rights both at home and abroad. As Randolph Bourne also said, in his most famous locution, "War is the health of the state." In an age when wars are being sold as the incubators of democracy, we need to remember that militarism is antithetical to democratic principles; that militarism destroys democracy.

The health of the state is in turn destructive of the health of the people, as typified by wounded veterans, cast aside, as Ron Kovic describes, as unneeded detritus of the war effort. The betrayal of US veterans is egregious (and follows a pattern going back at least to the veterans of the Revolutionary War). Yet veterans are not the only ones suffering the wounds of war. Increasingly, civilians are incurring an ever greater percentage of war casualties, despite the best efforts of activists to ban or limit the worst kinds of weapons, including, currently, cluster bombs.

As Bourne observed about World War I, even ardent supporters of the US war in Iraq have run out of enthusiasm, conviction, and hope, but the war effort is invoked, both in an attempt to justify itself, and to justify the attempted destruction of Constitutional freedoms at home. As Geoffrey Stone documents in his book, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, wars and the threat of wars have cloaked the worst forms of political repression in US history, including the Bush administration's ongoing assault on the Constitution.

As Robert Parry describes, the Military Commissions Act is the latest threat to constitutional democracy, but the Democrats, instead of running to save democracy, uttered hardly a word about the Bush administration's threat to the Republic during the campaign, so now have little claim of a mandate to reverse the damage. John Walsh's article helps provide one explanation: much of the Democratic leadership shares Bush's assumptions, and spreads the money from corporate fund-raising to candidates who toe the line. However, US voters in the fall election resonated with the peace movement's messages, and issued a grassroots repudiation of both the Republican administration's and Democratic leadership's repressive militarism.

The way conscientious objectors to militarism are treated in a given country is a benchmark of democratization. War Resisters International warns of the democratic backsliding in Russia, and provides a global round-up of trends in the conscientious objector movement worldwide. One way in which objections to repressive militarism can be heard is through the arts, and our activist forum this month features films that foment resistance. These films highlight individual and collective struggles against violence, militarism, and repression, and are eloquent appeals for human rights.

For Human Rights Day on December 10, and Martin Luther King Day, on January 15, A. J. Heschel and Martin Luther King together remind us, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." By focusing on people suffering under repressive militaristic rule in North Korea and Central Asia, and women confronting male violence in Iraq, Haiti, the US, and around the world, we remind ourselves that human rights are indivisible.

The engine of violence and war, to sustain itself, needs the population's complicity. We dissent.