How to End War Now

How To End War Now is a 44-page booklet released in February 2011 by The Free and The Unashamed, an anonymous collective. The authors argue that war is something states do, that states survive on the cooperation of the people they govern, and that war will fade once that cooperation is withdrawn. Their account of who commands a war and who pays for it has real force, while the promise built on top of it depends on a definition of war that settles the question in advance.

The second chapter builds the case from the structure of states. A centralized government, with its command hierarchy and tax apparatus already in place, hands a conqueror a ready-made seat of power: take a dozen buildings in the capital, offer the officials a choice between serving the new ruler and death, and millions of people change hands. A decentralized population forces the invader to seize control house by house and build coercive structures from scratch, at a cost the authors expect to become unbearable unless people comply. Rulers, they add, decide on war while young men fight it, and sovereign immunity spares the decision makers the personal cost. The point about externalized cost is plausible incentive reasoning, and the conquest argument picks out something an aggressor could hope to capture, but the authors present both as permanent laws of history, a status that would require systematic evidence that decentralization always deters or centralization always invites attack. Their picture of rulers beyond the reach of every court is drawn too broadly, and the booklet supports it with a definition quoted from Wikipedia.

The authors define war as entirely a state enterprise and class organized violence by anyone else as crime, so a stateless world is free of war by construction. Renaming large-scale organized harm leaves the harm in place. To close that gap they assert that any mass action becomes a state, because a group of millions must finance itself and, in their view, will come to rely on taxation to keep doing so, a generalization the chapter leaves unproven. A credible promise to end war would have to explain how defense is paid for once taxation stops and who checks the people providing it, and how scattered defenders coordinate against a large attacker. The chapter closes by calling requests for practical answers an evasion by people afraid of the choice they imply, and it declines to give any.

The third chapter makes clear what the authors want in place of the state, and it is private defense. They insist that violent men will keep appearing and must be answered with force, and they ridicule anti-war activism as a wish for magic. Individuals, in their account, must supply training and support for defense themselves, or a government will form to take those things from them by force. The position is consistent with the rest of the booklet, and it widens the gap the second chapter left open, because the text leaves unexplained how protection that people can afford, and that answers to them, would come into being once they stop supporting the state.

The middle chapters turn to persuasion. Selected combat memoirs and the Christmas truce of 1914 strip war of its glamour and loosen the hold of collective identity. Their selection gives them rhetorical force and leaves them too narrow a base for the historical and psychological generalizations the authors build on them. A later chapter supplies an abridged modern English version of Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, with the translator uncredited, the evident source of the booklet's conviction that power dissolves when people stop supporting it.

Parting Words asks readers to stop obeying leaders they recognize as liars and to take full responsibility for their own lives, including their defense, while dismissing elections and consciousness-raising as wasted effort. It promises that war could be gone within a generation, apart from occasional flare-ups, a timetable the preceding pages leave unsupported. The authors also reduce the alternatives to accepting responsibility or accepting war, a choice that stands or falls with their definition of war and their dismissal of the coordination problem.