Swanson -- Abolition Is the Way

Abolition Is the Way

Leave a Comment / October 24, 2025

Opening remarks of #NoWar2025

Good morning, afternoon, and evening. Thank you to everyone who is here and to all of the wonderful speakers and participants we are about to hear from over the next three days and to all of our staff and volunteers, especially Greta Zarro our Organizing Director, who have planned this conference. We expect over 500 registrants from at least 42 countries to hear from at least 33 speakers. We have 22 endorsers and 10 sponsors. Those sponsors include our top or War Abolisher sponsors Dr. Michael D. Knox and the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation, and our Peace Champion sponsors, Community Peacemaker Teams, Conscience Canada, RootsAction Education Fund, and the War Prevention Initiative, and our Peacemaker sponsors, Just Peace Advocates, Monterey Peace and Justice Center, Movement for the Abolition of War, and Womens International League for Peace and Freedom U.S. I know everyone is muted, but if you’re inclined to applaud, just go ahead and then explain to anyone near you what you’re applauding.

This will be an unusual NoWar conference in that it will address both war and other topics, through examination of various abolition movements. Whether or not we all agree with each abolition project we discuss, I expect we will all learn from it. Abolition is a tricky thing that we are all continuously learning about.

World BEYOND War is not just a peace movement. It’s not focused on developing a peaceful individual or community. If you want to find peace in your heart, I hope you do and I’ll help if I can, but if outrage or excitement in your heart gives you greater energy for working toward the abolition of war, then I’d prefer you to have outrage or excitement in your heart.

We’re also not focused on opposing one side of one war. Which ever side of which ever current war someone is against, we’re with them 100% — we’re just against the other side of the same war as well. We work to stop warmaking by both Russia and Ukraine, for example, not because the two sides are identical or equivalent or any such silliness, but because the case we make on the evils of war and the available alternatives to war applies to every side of every war. We want warmaking abolished in Ukraine, in Palestine, in the Congo, in Sudan, and everywhere there is a war, but also in Venezuela and all the places where war is threatened or might ever be threatened.

The endless struggle of trying to help each other understand this bizarre concept of opposing both sides may seem unique to the war abolition movement. But it may have lessons for other abolition movements as well. Abolishing police, for example, may be advanced by communicating opposition to both police and crime — while laying out the case for the policies that best reduce crime, which have nothing to do with police. In fact, crime and policing sometimes have some characteristics in common, such as reliance on violence, that we’d be better off without. Similarly, one can be against both fossil fuel mining and difficult lives for coal miners — and the greed that drives both, or against both the so-called war on drugs and the pushing of dangerous drugs on people — and the cruelty that drives both. And, of course, a police abolition movement is against a particular police murder, and a capitalist abolition movement is against a particular theft and concentration of wealth, but such movements — as abolition movements — are also against the structures that will allow infinite repetition of those incidents if not undone.

This means that when we oppose a particular bombing of a city, or a particular death sentence, or a particular oil pipeline — if we are working to abolish all bombings and all death sentences and all pipelines — we don’t oppose the bombing because it wasn’t authorized by the proper branch of government; we don’t oppose the death sentence because chemicals would be used; we don’t oppose the pipeline because there’s a less destructive route it could take. Or at least we don’t use only such arguments, or we don’t allow such arguments to erase the argument that the entire institution of war or state killing or fossil fuel use is evil. We use each step toward abolition to educate and communicate that it is nothing more or less than a step toward abolition.

I’d like to rid the world of a great many things: artificial intelligence, corporate television news, movies about how fun revenge is, calling weapons companies “the defense industry,” people on Zoom calls saying “David, you’re muted.” But cultural practices, and practices that individuals or small groups can do, are sometimes only strengthened if you ban them, and technologies cannot practically be uninvented, and some unpleasant things are needed.

Many unpleasant things are NOT needed. The sort of things we can most strategically work to abolish may be institutions or practices that are established structurally and ideologically on a large scale, things like dueling, slavery, serfdom, human sacrifice, trial by ordeal, cannibalism, child labor, or other evils that were understood as beyond reform. These things were abolished. Some of them still exist in the margins, very dramatically reduced from what they were. Most people do not want to restore them. Most people do not mock the idea of abolishing them. Most people do not demand to know what they could possibly be replaced with. There are not thousands of websites demanding to know what we could do instead of dueling, or accusing anyone of wanting to defund dueling, or glorifying the righteous preparation for humanitarian dueling. Someday we’ll be able to say the same about war, or police, or prison, or anything else, if we abolish it and if we were right to do so. There are open advocates for bringing back slavery and child labor, but they are the ones most people think are crazy, not those of us who honor the successful abolitions.

What should be abolished next? Perhaps war — including elements of war that it may or may not be possible to abolish without abolishing all war, such as nuclear weapons or armed drones or bioweapons labs or perhaps colonialism? There are also policing, incarceration, mass surveillance, the death penalty, and closed borders. What about fossil fuel use, nuclear energy, big agriculture and livestock? Maybe plutocracy, corporate personhood, health insurance corporations, poverty wages, homelessness, the so-called drug war, maybe even capitalism? Or perhaps the U.S. Senate, the U.S. electoral college, gerrymandering, electronic voting machines, royal families? There are quite a few things about which I’m inclined to shout “End it! Don’t mend it!” But some things are at least as well understood flipped upside down. Few passionately defend the institution of homelessness, for example, and would never object “but what would you replace it with?” So we might be just as well off talking about establishing the right to a home, rather than about abolishing homelessness.

If we talk about the right to peace, however, many will support it but resist understanding it as forbidding what they deem to be necessary wars. So we have to talk about eliminating war and all preparations for and equipment or infrastructure for war. If we talk about establishing the right to freedom or gun-free streets, few will understand that those things require abolishing prisons and police, and some will imagine just the opposite. So we have to talk about abolition, although part of that talk will have to address the what-do-you-replace-it-with question.

World BEYOND War is focused on war abolition. Part of the argument we make is that even if you could imagine some particular war as somehow justified — or even some use of a military that you define as something other than a war, something you call “peace keeping” or “flotilla accompaniment” or “natural disaster response” or whatever as being justified — you would have to consider not only whether something other than a military could do that thing better, but also the damage done by giving support to the institution of war.

Supporting the war machine means supporting the single biggest impediment to global cooperation; the single biggest waste of badly needed resources (through which war kills more people than through violence); the single biggest destroyer of the natural environment; the cause of the nuclear threat; the justification for government secrecy and surveillance; a major fueler of bigotry and xenophobia; the major threat to the rule of law; a top cause of death, injury, and destruction; a concentrator of wealth and power; the leading cause of homelessness; the root of the militarization of police; the provider of weapons to many of the world’s worst governments; a huge source of private guns and of mass shooters, and of the troops that invade cities and the bases that prop up dictatorships; and, of course, the source of the many other wars and activities that you agree are not justified.

My kids have enjoyed a game called Would You Rather, which is made up of cards that simply ask would you rather do this super disgusting thing or that other super disgusting thing. In the game, you usually pick the thing that would be over fastest. But the things are not real. In real life, you would choose none of the above.

Would I rather send a military to help in a natural disaster or send nothing? That’s a common sort of question, but those are not the choices. The fact that hundreds of billions of dollars can be immediately pulled out of nowhere whenever those in power want a new war means something important for the war abolition movement and every other abolition movement. It means that we could choose to send to natural disasters people properly trained to address natural disasters, and willing to leave afterwards. It means we could choose to have unarmed traffic experts address bad driving, mental health experts address poor mental health, and addiction experts address addiction — not in some glorious future, but right now. I don’t mean to propose that compromise or transition should never be a gradual process, or that we should never use deeply flawed institutions for which alternatives have not yet been constructed. But if we had the political will, we could do non-military things, not at normal human speed, but at the speed at which governments do warmaking.

Assuming we are right about the need to abolish an institution, such as war, we will need to debunk that institution’s mythology. People believe that war is natural and inevitable even though most of the existence of our species has not known war, societies that have waged war have carefully trained and conditioned a small minority to do it, and many societies have not waged war. People believe that war can be justified and properly conducted to meet nonsensical medieval principles or to address dangers that cannot otherwise be handled. Certain wars are widely held up as model wars, unlike all the other ones, in that they were noble, just, and necessary. So, in U.S. propaganda, for example, the early 20th century arms race and growing confrontation with Japan is turned into a surprise attack out of the blue on an innocent bystander at Pearl Harbor, the subsequent slaughter is justified by death camps in Germany from which the Allies had refused to rescue anyone, and the nuking of cities is depicted as a lifesaving measure.

Each abolition movement, I expect, has to address similar myths and hard cases. The police prevent violent anarchy. You’d never sleep well without prisons. What do you do with the worst criminals? (I mean other than elect them President.) What do you do about an armed robbery? What do you mean you don’t want terrorists to be spied on? Etc. Debunking the myths leads to critiquing the culture and the language of the mass media. Addressing the hardest cases — if you can do it successfully — leads to all the easier cases falling like a house of cards.

Key, of course, to addressing abolition skeptics has to be painting a picture of a world beyond the institution being abolished. Often an easy way to advance this task is to look at other portions of the current world. If you live in a country with brutal police armed for war, you can look to those countries where police go unarmed. If you live in the United States and are told that wars and prisons are human nature, whatever that may be, you can ask whether the other 96 percent of people are also human, since they don’t live with remotely similar investment in wars or prisons.

It also helps to look to current and past indigenous and other societies apart from major nation states. We have a variety of, not just speculative but real, cases of people living as well as we do or better without use of an institution we’re trying to abolish. A variety of abolition campaigns are advanced by a similar sort of knowledge. It helps to learn that our current society is not a veneer hiding vicious barbarism, to learn that societies have existed where a clip of a Hollywood movie depicting a run-of-the-mill murder could traumatize people who had had no prior concept of killing, to learn that we might have different movies if not for the role of militaries and governments in shaping them, to learn that the chaos and brutal anarchy that follows major disasters in movies are nowhere to be found in the real world where people unite and cooperate better in times of crisis and oddly look back later at such times with a degree of fondness, to learn that the so-called collapse of empires over the centuries has tended to mean a shift to more egalitarian, healthy, and happy lives for most people, and to learn that for most of our species’ existence our ancestors led lives that were leisurely, playful, and full of friendship and cooperation. The Neanderthals are gone because they weren’t social enough and lived in excessively isolated groups, not because they were second-best at genocide. We’re here because we’re so social that most of us are horrible liars, not because we’ve rigged things to empower the worst among us — though we sure have done that.

We would need an entire conference to cover everything Steven Pinker got wrong about early humans.

People can be brought to do horrible things, especially if structures reward greed and cruelty with prestige and honor. But when those people turn around and tell you that you are all just like them, and therefore a better world is not possible, don’t you believe it.

The murders and rapes and free-for-all violent chaos in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn’t actually happen. The pattern during major disasters is for people to go out of their way to help each other, for the news media to falsely report murder and mayhem, and for authorities who imagine most people are like themselves to send in armed troops to create a second disaster. The famous Lord of the Flies is a fictional story made up by a disturbed Nazi afficionado that depicts the opposite of various real-world cases in which isolated groups of kids have treated each other with great kindness. The Stanford prison experiment — which supposedly created cruelty just by assigning some people the role of prison guard –was a complete fraud. The earlier Robbers’ Cave experiment was equally fraudulent and followed an even earlier attempt in which subjects had been insufficiently manipulated and had insisted on being kind to each other — as the good people also were in a later attempt to recreate the Stanford experiment without scripting and directing cruelty.  The Milgram experiment in which volunteers were supposedly willing to inflict painful electric shocks showed nothing of the sort since only 56% believed the shocks were real, and the majority of those quit and refused to administer the shocks. Our culture is saturated with false claims that horrible behaviors are widespread or inevitable or lurking just beneath the surface. Institutions that we accept as normal: industrialized murder, locking people in cages, treating every man, woman, and child as a mass murder suspect before they can get on an airplane . . . all of this is called law and order, and all of this flows from a misguided view of the world.

We can outline a vision of what could replace an institution in our time and place, should we abolish it. We can describe a world of self-governance, economic justice, the rule of law, disarmament, nonviolent conflict resolution, unarmed civilian defense, and global cooperation. And we can make a persuasive case for the possibility. But the number of our supporters will grow only as we take concrete steps down that path, showing not only that we can succeed in shaping policy but also that our ideas can work.

We’ll be asked why we don’t just work on one reform at a time and call it reform instead of abolition. Each abolition movement may have its own answers. A common one is that we’ll never reach final success unless we talk about it. Another is that an institution will work to tighten its grip when reformed, structurally and by communicating the idea that it is progressing. Another answer that makes sense for abolishing war and possibly other things as well is that reducing war preparations makes less sense if you still believe in military defense. I think unilaterally disarming — especially of weapons that would end all life on Earth and which you supposedly possess precisely in order to never use — would make sense even if you still believed in the war machine. I think unilateral disarmament of all weapons can make sense too while still believing in war, if done in stages and the rest of the world joins in the reverse arms race, as history suggests it would, at least up to a point. But disarmament makes even more sense if you are replacing your war machine with diplomacy, aid, cooperation, unarmed defense, the rule of law, unarmed disaster response, etc. — that is, if you are working toward replacement and abolition.

I hope in the coming days to learn a great deal about what works best for various abolition movements, and about whether abolition movements might be greater than the sum of their parts if they join their efforts together.

Following reports from WBW chapters, a break, and a musical performance, we are going to be privileged just a short time from now to watch a panel on the case for abolition with experts on a variety of abolition movements, after which we will go to breakout groups to discuss what we all think about abolition. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Tomorrow, we will go deeper into particular movements and into the question of how movements intersect. We will also have a workshop on what to do if you are exercising your right to speak out and are arrested for it. Remember, the last step before you win is the one where they attack you. And closing out tomorrow’s events, we will go by live video to a realworld event in Toronto, Canada, to hear from people working intersectionally on abolition.

We will also have more artistic performances tomorrow and the day after.

The third day we’ll have a workshop on de-escalating conflicts, and we’ll have a panel in both Spanish and English on Indigenous knowledge and abolition. We’ll hear remarks from World BEYOND War’s President Kathy Kelly. And we’ll go into breakout rooms again to discuss what we think about the task of creating a world beyond war. I can’t wait. Glad you are here! Thanks for listening! 

https://davidswanson.org/abolition-is-the-way-2/