Revelations of the War in Ukraine
An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning
October 20, 2022
This week’s special issue of Public Seminar brings together James Carroll’s six-part series on a lifetime of anti-war activism—and how Putin’s war in Ukraine changes everything.
We’ll continue our focus on war, nuclear weapons, and the possibility of peace next week, when scholars and activists respond to Carroll’s revelations.
“In the spring of 2022, in response to Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, together with his shrewdly reckless rekindling of nuclear dread, the tangle of anti-war assumptions that had previously sustained the shape of my adult life suddenly seemed to unravel. As had happened in the 1960s, I was transfixed by the images of slaughter televised nightly. When I was young, the havoc had been in Vietnam, wreaked by forces of my own government: Zippo lighters igniting thatched rooftops; naked children in screeching flight from napalm; bullet-riddled corpses of cone-hatted peasants; leaked reports of berserking American boys.” (September 7, 2022)
“I was no political scientist, no strategist, no expert of any kind. But I was a Catholic raised on the doctrine of Original Sin, a condition embodied in that plea, ‘To Thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.’ That legacy gave me an inbred feel for the universality of fallenness; therefore, on those matters of war, I could criticize my own people without claiming to be superior to them. And, perhaps more to the point, I was a general’s son who’d broken with his father over a war, and while I saw aslant the world that he and his Pentagon partners had created, I always saw it from inside. For better and for worse, I have the eyes of a soldier’s son through which I see everything.” (September 12, 2022)
“Vladimir Putin accompanied the invasion of Ukraine with the threat that ‘whoever tries to hinder us’ will see consequences ‘you have never seen in your history.’ Days later, he announced the movement of Russian nuclear forces to ‘high alert.’ Nuclear dread was back.” (September 19, 2022)
Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End
“Immediately after World War I, in direct response to the unprecedented carnage that had destroyed most of a generation of Europe’s males, a mutation in the conduct of human affairs was attempted with the establishment of a first intergovernmental organization whose purpose was the maintenance of peace throughout the world—the League of Nations.” (September 26, 2022)
“In an unveiling of another order, the progression of the war upended assumptions about any nuclear use being inevitably tied to doomsday, the Balance of Terror that served as the key mechanism of great power reciprocity—and restraint—since early in the Cold War. That is so because the contemporary Russian dogma of ‘escalate to de-escalate’ implies that using theater nuclear weapons need not automatically lead to armageddon. The theory has not been tested, of course, but this possible move to so-called ‘usable nukes,’ implied by Russian rhetoric and by quiet adjustments in Pentagon war planning, must be reckoned as a possible game changer. Whether it will, in fact, mark the civilizational game over after all no one knows.” (October 3, 2022)
“A revived anti-nuke movement will not begin with a debate-ending demand for massive surrenders of national sovereignty, the insistence that has undercut nuclear abolition for decades. Rather, I suggest we should start with the far simpler appeal for ‘shared’ oversight of the globe’s nuclear arsenals, a multilateral cooperation akin to what long defined the successful, if now moribund, arms control regime. In light of the recently laid bare dangers of one man’s radically unshared nuclear domination, such a call today can seem less radical than ever.” (October 10, 2022)