Swanson -- We Need a Culture of Peace

We Need a Culture of Peace

Leave a Comment / June 6, 2026

Remarks from a webinar about the Peace Manifesto.

Hi. This is David Swanson and I’m speaking as Executive Director of World BEYOND War. I’m honored to be a part of celebrating one year of the peace manifesto that people can find and promote at activatingpeace.org.

Maybe celebrating is the wrong word and recommitting is the right one. I am still sick and tired of the culture of war and supportive of a culture of peace. If it’s OK, I’ll tell you a bit about what I mean by that. I live in the United States where last Monday every single elected official in the country published a message thanking countless young men and women for supposedly having “given” their lives as a so-called “service”. This was a holiday called Memorial Day. Like many war holidays this one has a history of good intentions related to reuniting after a civil war and mourning those slaughtered in war. But the United States now has war holidays for virtually every day of the year, and they have all been shaped into pro-war propaganda.

Pretending that a tiny fraction of those killed in distant U.S. massacres are the only ones worth mourning, and pretending that by destroying and mass-murdering in some distant land those U.S. troops killed in the process have done you some sort of service, and pretending that they did so as a voluntary gift rather than because they had few decent prospects in life and had been heavily brainwashed and had then been locked into a form of slavery in which the choices were to obey or be imprisoned — these are not neutral or inevitable pretenses. And yet I’m not aware of a single U.S. Congress Member, for example, who didn’t push this propaganda on Monday. That’s what it means to live within a war culture. It’s a place in which you cannot speak of the epidemics of violence and crime created by veterans of U.S. wars because that would be disrespectful to the god of war, but lying to young men and women, sending them into hell, and then abandoning them to poverty and addiction when they struggle to transform themselves into nonviolent members of society –what they are not thanked and rewarded for having been — that’s just freedom and liberty or somehow acceptable as just the way it is.

In the United States you can conduct polls of people and find that most of them oppose a war. Some of them may oppose the senseless killing, wounding, and traumatizing of human beings. Most oppose something like the price of gas increasing. Many oppose a war because they’d prefer a different war. A great many oppose a war because the U.S. president belongs to a political party and they cheer for the other pro-war political party. A few may oppose the deadly diversion of resources or the environmental destruction of the degradation of culture and promotion of bigotry, the shredding of the rule of law, the restriction of liberties, and so forth. But those who approve of wars don’t even pretend to believe humanitarian lies anymore. And most who oppose a war love and adore the military, are eager to thank participants in the war they oppose, will stand and perform fascist rituals prior to any sports event on command, and have never heard of a peace holiday, couldn’t name a peace monument, and couldn’t tell you what the phrase “culture of peace” means. Some even support warmaking by the other side of the war. This is a pattern in various forms across the globe.

What DOES “a culture of peace” mean? To most who use it, this phrase unfortunately does not mean a society shaped by a worldview that honors war prevention or disarmament or the replacement of war with the rule of law, diplomacy, unarmed civilian defense, cooperation, aid, and global citizenship. Instead it means decreasing bullying in children’s schools, speaking out against racism, expanding acceptance of minority groups, denouncing all forms of bigotry, defunding police and prisons, making friends with neighbors, having amicable conversations with those we disagree with, celebrating identity politics, and so forth. There are connections between all of these things and abolishing war, just as there are connections between promoting war and a thousand other evils. But no matter how many times a day we all tell each other how much we love the wise saying that peace is more than merely the absence of war, if we can’t get the concept of peace to include in it, at the very least, the absence of war, we’re off the rails.

At World BEYOND War we support all kinds of great causes, but we maintain a focus on ridding the world of all wars and all preparations for wars. We have a Declaration of Peace that you and everyone you know can sign at worldbeyondwar.org/individual  It says “I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources from life-affirming activities. I commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace.”

This declaration has been signed in almost every corner of the world. There are just a few spots where we have yet to find some signers. When you sign it, you

• Join the growing global World BEYOND War network, with members from over 200 countries worldwide. By growing the number of signers on the peace pledge, we demonstrate our people power, showing the world that there is massive global support for war abolition.
• Check the boxes on the page that appears after you sign the pledge to indicate your interest areas, such as divestment or closing military bases. We’ll follow up with opportunities for taking action on these campaigns!
• Opt in to our global email list to receive biweekly newsletters and other important updates with the latest anti-war news from around the world, upcoming anti-war/pro-peace events, petitions, campaigns, and action alerts.
• Connect with other activists in our global network working on similar campaigns around the world to share stories of activism and learn from each other.
• Get access to our resources to help you organize and promote your anti-war/pro-peace events and campaigns to a global audience. We can assist with event organizing, graphic design, website design, webinar hosting, strategic campaign planning, and more.
• After you sign, add a short quotable statement on why you want to end war, which gives us great material for social media and other outlets.

I look forward to living together with all of you in a culture of peace. 

https://davidswanson.org/we-need-a-culture-of-peace/