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The Seville Statement on Violence
In August 1991, Lindsay and I took a vacation on Frye island in Maine. At the time I was trying to develop a general theory of the history of war, and so I took along the classic book on war written in 1939 by Quincy Wright (brother of the great geneticist Sewell Wright) and entitled simply, The Study of War. As described in my Green Notebook VII, the more I read in the book, the more I came to the conclusion that the classic studies were missing the point:
No wonder the shelf of books about militarism and war in the library are so useless. They are filled with descriptions of hundreds of wars and their causes and yet none of them mention the basic function of militarism ... the domestic suppression of the working class and its predecessors, slaves and serfs. Take, for example the United States. The military has been called out for a few dozen foreign wars and a civil war. But it has been called out far more frequently to put down strikes and workers rebellions both here at home and in Latin America; These are left out entirely or called "military interventions" in the case of Latin America.
Of course, more or less the same point had been made by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the 19th Century, although the topic had been neglected by Marxist scholars of the 20th Century, presumably because revolutionary socialist countries, no less than capitalist countries, maintained their power by the internal culture of war.
Quickly I went to work searching for records of the National Guard and the US Army on their internal military interventions. I had witnessed one such intervention in 1970 when a battallion of the army was sent along with local National Guard to occupy New Haven during the May 1 Panther rally.
The task of searching for records was not easy. In certain years the government published records of the National Guard, but in others there were no published data available. For example, the Annual Report of the Chief of the National Guard did not list internal interventions in the years prior to 1943 except for 1921-1927. Some unofficial sources were available for periods earlier than that, but as for the Indian Wars and the militias in the South prior to the Civil War, I was never able to find any records.
Nevertheless, I was able to construct a picture from the partial data that were available. Over the period from 1886 until the present there have been about 18 interventions and 12,000 troops per year used internally in the United States.
I finished the paper on another vacation that we spent in the panhandle of Florida in January 1992 and sent the paper to the Journal of Peace Research.
The title I gave the paper when I submitted it was "The Relation of Internal Intervention to War and Militarism." But the referees of the Journal objected that I had not proven that there was a relationship between the two. As a result I ended up giving the paper a new title, "Internal Military Interventions in the United States." The paper is available on the Internet at http://www.culture-of-peace.info/intervention/title-page.html .
The situation in the academic literature that I described in 1991 seems to remain unchanged. There is still no study of the internal culture of war. My paper, which was published in 1995, had been referred to only 3 times in the ensuing decade according to the Science Citation Index and none of those references add substantially to the topic. As for the culture of peace resolutions at the United Nations, needless to say they are not allowed to go into the internal culture of war; in fact, they are not even allowed to broach the subject of the culture of war in general.
The taboo stands. It doesn't mean that history stops, but it does mean that academics and intellectuals are not able to understand history.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme