The fact of the matter is that anti-war protests have been in decline since the end of the Vietnam war with few exceptions along the way, perhaps most notably the nationwide protests against George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Most Democratic politicians, however, backed that war, perhaps most notably Hillary Clinton—a fact that Barack Obama was able to successfully use against her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Obama himself, though, would continue the country’s forever wars, particularly through a drone bombing campaign that involved nearly six hundred airstrikes across three countries—Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
As the Israeli campaign in Gaza threatens to spill over into a larger Middle East war, and fears mount over nuclear escalation in Ukraine, US forever wars—whether through direct or indirect intervention—show no signs of ending. The anti-war movement proves to be in desperate need of revival. And there are signs that it might be experiencing such a revival: the Floyd protest against police violence went global, for example, and student protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza invoked for many the memory of 1968. Yet the anti-war political tradition is one that is hardly taught in political science and history departments. Instead, if one were to survey the classes being offered this fall in schools around the country, one would find ample offerings on rightwing nationalism, violence, fascism, nativism, etc., but few on the anti-war movement.
This is a shame, as the anti-war political tradition has a rich and deep history. It can be traced back to antiquity as represented by the words of the Mahavira, the Buddha, and Jesus; passages in the Hebrew Bible; ancient Greek philosophical texts; and so on. Fast-forwarding to more recent history, the 20th century witnessed powerful anti-war/non-violence movements in India, Russia, throughout Western Europe, the US, South Africa and elsewhere. During the years between the World Wars, anti-war movements gained millions of adherents from around the world.
What makes anti-war thought unique, in other words, is its unusual global scope and representation. Some of the most noted anti-war thinkers, for instance, were women: Bertha von Suttner, Jane Adams, Dorthy Day, Simone Weil, G.E.M. Anscombe. It also is an ecumenical tradition in this sense that it has brought atheists, agnostics and theists together to resist the evils of war: Bertrand Russell, Tolstoy, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day. And of course, some of the leading anti-war thinkers were Indian anti-imperialists, most notably Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.