The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

McCord, though he is understandably tense, does not seem to be completely  unnerved by the trauma. Instead, it forced him to wake up from the lies that had put him in a uniform to kill other people’s children halfway across the globe, and he took it upon himself to try waking up others. Among people who have lost loved ones to gun violence—like, for example, Azim Khamisa, who now works to dissuade school children from joining gangs after his son was mindlessly killed by one—some have discovered that turning grief and guilt to reconstructive work can be psychologically restorative. But their number is not legion. Many, many more have gone, and are now going, the way of Suzy from In Our Name. According to a covered-up story that is about to be released by Project Censored, a Northern California-based media watchdog service, the number of active-duty soldiers or veterans who have committed suicide has just surpassed the number of those killed in combat.

We are facing a social problem of massive proportions, as our already-grim experience with returning veterans from Vietnam should have warned us. Psychologist Rachel McNair developed the concept of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) to bring home to us the fact—now dramatically supported by neuroscientists—that you cannot send people out to kill and maim without expecting them to suffer enduring torments themselves, no matter how thoroughly you try to desensitize them beforehand. Thank God! Where would we be if this capacity to respond to the joys and sufferings of others could really be squelched?

There have been admirable attempts to get needed help to these spiritually wounded men and women; but the real answer, the only sane and compassionate answer, is prevention. And that means only one thing: to stop glorifying violence in our social culture and national policy—in other words, renounce war. It won’t be easy. Colonel Harry Holloway, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, told journalist Dan Baum recently, “As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing … if we get into this business of talking about killing people we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.”

But what is the alternative? Those children who opened Ethan McCord’s eyes were killed by a machine in the sky a mile and a half away with 30mm cannon rounds—ordinance tipped with depleted uranium and meant for penetrating armor, not tearing apart human beings. If truth is the first victim in war, humanity is a close second. Thus, if we do not “pathologize” what is truly sick, we end up pathologizing what isn’t: peace. (Remember the “Vietnam syndrome?”) If we do not fear our own bestiality we end up producing a climate that, as none other than General Douglas MacArthur said, “renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.”

Perhaps those who still believe that war is an “absolutely necessary experience” would reflect with us on the following story. It was Poland, in 1942. The Gestapo was raiding the apartment of the Kshenskys, who had participated in the Jewish underground. Finding the “incriminating” evidence, they were about to take the mother, who was home alone with their two-year-old son, out to the courtyard and shoot her when she saw, with horror, that her toddler was playing with the shiny buttons on the Gestapo captain’s uniform. He, too, noticed, and stared down at the child.  After what must have seemed an eternity he looked up, his face totally changed, and said,“I have a son at home just his age, and I miss him very much.” Then he added, “Your son has saved your life,” and ordered his men out of the apartment. The child did not survive the war, but the Kshenskys miraculously did; their daughter, Lili Kshensky Baxter, is a former Chair of the National Council of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature. We have international courts now; we have nonviolent intervention teams. There is, as there has always been, the possibility of conversation among civilized people—provided we elect them. And there are the arts of nonviolence, of which a Kurdish gentleman in Kirkuk said recently, “It may be slow, but you don’t lose your humanity.” Journalist Marshall Frady has given a beautiful description of how this kind of struggle not only preserves, instead of surrenders, our humanity but makes it into a spreading force:

In the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, … an oppressor can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice.

Adam Hochschild is a National Book Award-nominated author and co-founder of Mother Jones. His work has brought alive the plight of history’s victims, from the Belgian Congo to Stalin’s Russia. In his new book, To End All Wars, Hochschild, an American, turns to the British experience of the First World War.

While the horrors that faced the ordinary soldier on the Western Front occupy a central place in the popular history of modern war, Hochschild focuses on a less-well known group of losers—those British citizens who passionately resisted the war, from socialist agitators to radical suffragettes to embittered enlisted men. In a montage of personal portraits and family dramas, Hochschild shows us how a relatively few, outspoken women and men from every class of society sought to prevent, and then to end quickly and fairly, what they saw as a hopeless conflict organized by out-of-touch men of privilege.

World War I famously inaugurated the modern age of total war, but Hochschild’s protagonists believed in an alternative modernity, one characterized by transnationalism, sexual and racial equality, and economic justice. To End All Wars takes us back to a time when such an enlightened world could seem less a utopia than a reasonable alternative to the ruling class’s livid fantasies of imperial and colonial dominion.

You approach the totality of the war through miniature, through partiality. When taking up the project, did you say, “I want to tell a new story about World War I, how do I do it?” Or did you have the idea of doing a character-driven study of World War I first?

For years, I’ve been fascinated by World War I: the destructiveness, the foolish expectations, the way it changed everything, the nobility of those who resisted taking part. I wanted to evoke what it was like to live through that period, and to live through it, on the part of the resisters, feeling faced with a difficult moral choice.

I like to tell history through assembling a group of characters, and so I went about assembling a cast for this story. The casting calls took years! I was a year and a half into the research before it occurred to me I should center it around some divided families, and make most of the other characters connect to them in one way or another. From then on it became easier to see the book’s shape.

I found To End All Wars rather subtle from an ideological point of view. It is clearly an anti-war book—whatever that means—but there’s something hard-to-define about its politics. On the one hand, someone could read the book and say: “This is a poignant story about the tragedy of war, one that drives home how insane and terrible the Great War was.” And that’s true. But it also has a more basic kind of anti-war sensibility.

I do think of the book, and myself, as having an anti-war sensibility. I find much to admire in the spirit of the pre-WWI socialists, people like Jaurès and Hardie. But today we would have to say they were naïve in their expectation that class loyalties would prove stronger than national ones. I still like their spirit, however.

Is To End All Wars a book that tries to recover a neglected socialist political tradition in the West? Should contemporary anti-war movements look to socialism as a necessary part of their project?

As for socialism itself, I certainly think it’s possible to imagine a society that is far more democratic and egalitarian economically than is our increasingly stratified society today. But I don’t think the recipe that socialists of that era were working from is sufficient. I would love to see a society that had far lesser disparities of wealth than we have today, but that still harnessed the entrepreneurial spirit. Just how we get there, I don’t know.

Nor do I think creating the good society of this sort would necessarily be a guarantee against war. Every conceivable kind of society in history has waged war at one time or another.

Your narrative vividly captures the significance of the Russian Revolution for the Western anti-war movement. I think this reality has been very much lost in popular understandings of the war today. From several of your protagonists’ points of view, the revolution was an anti-war revolution, because it marked the exit of Russia from the war. Were you struck by this part of the story? 

You’re right, both 1917 revolutions in Russia were seen in the West, and by some who took part in Russia, as anti-war revolutions. It’s easy to see why they generated so much enthusiasm among Western anti-war types. I’ve long had an interest in Russian history, something I indulged at book-length in my 1994 book, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. One thing that has always fascinated me is how many otherwise intelligent Westerners were besotted with enthusiasm for the early Soviet Union. Certainly the revulsion against World War I was a part of that, although there were many other motives as well.

As you show, prior to the war hundreds of thousands socialists and labor-types really believed that workers would never fight one another. Were they foolish to think this way?

Yes, they were naively idealistic. I think they far underestimated the appeal of tribalism among nations, and the ability of governments to manipulate that feeling to get the populace to support unconscionable wars. That problem is still with us today.

In many ways, your book is a story of bold social experiment. Many of the protagonists are dedicated to novel visions—from women’s suffrage, to workers’ rights, to free love, to collectivism. Yet when it comes to military strategy, your story is mainly one of stultification, of failure of vision, of a kind of worship of the past. Do you think that there is a relationship between the failures of strategic vision that you identify in the English commanders and their political and social conservatism?

Yes, I think there is probably some connection between conservatism in military strategy and in politics. However, in most societies at most times, people in power are loath to give up or devalue the pathways by which they got there. Despite novel weaponry, the same thing exists today. Putting aside for the moment the question about whether we ought to be fighting our current wars at all, and just looking at things tactically, drones have made fighter planes obsolete. But what Air Force officer wants to junk all our fighter planes? None. This is the pathway through which the leading Air Force generals rose. I think that’s rather analogous to generals being attached to the similarly obsolete horse in World War I.

The Second World War is—at least and especially in the United States—held up as the “Good War,” in sharp distinction to the Great War, the “Bad War,” the unjust war. Would you write a book about WWII? Would it be an anti-war book in the same vein as To End all Wars?

No, a book I did about World War II would be somewhat different in spirit. I don’t think of it quite as the Good War, though, because so much bad came from it. It did stop the Nazi conquest of Europe and the Japanese one of Asia, and that was a good thing, but it didn’t stop the Holocaust, it led to oppressive Soviet domination of all of Eastern Europe, and it killed some 60 million people. Still worth fighting? Probably, because I think Hitler and the Japanese might well have killed still more—see Timothy Snyder’s recent book Bloodlands, and what he says about Hitler’s quite explicit plans to let some 30 million Slavs starve.

Relatedly, did you read Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke? 

I didn’t, unfortunately.

Amid numerous differences, I see certain similarities between Baker’s book and To End All Wars—the careful and dramatic presentation of rather shocking facts about the conduct of the war.

There are indeed a lot of shocking facts about World War II that could be presented, although on balance, had I been alive at the time, I think I would have fought in it—and in retrospect today still think that would have been the right decision, though not without having some doubts.

Why did you write this book now?

I would have written it 20 or 30 years ago if I could have figured out the right way then! It’s been at least that long that I’ve been fascinated with the subject. I wrote it now only because it was now—or, rather, when I started writing it half a dozen years ago—that I finally figured out how to tell the story. That being said, I hope the book does have particular relevance to the senseless and unnecessary wars we’re in today.

International relations scholar Andrew Bacevich has been one of the most important critics of American warmaking in recent years, not least because of the convergence of three aspects of his biography: he is a self-described conservative, a retired Army officer, and the father of a soldier killed in action in Iraq. If it is true that only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a Bacevich can make the American center see the error of its unchecked militarism.

In a new essay in The Nation, a review of Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen’s The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities, Bacevich takes on the dynamics of American political culture that allow us to enter war after war, considering two very good reasons not to: (1) war’s casualties are now disproportionately among the poor, and (2) with debt and unemployment mounting, war is more expensive than ever.

Kriner and Shen provide data to show that (1) was not always as it is now:

Only in the case of the war against Germany and Japan did “the nation’s long-held norm of equal sacrifice in war” prevail. Given the reliance on conscription to raise the very large forces required for that conflict along with the military’s refusal to induct anyone who didn’t meet strict, if arbitrary, health and literacy standards, “the poorest and most undereducated counties actually suffered lower than average casualty rates.” In 1941–45, there was no casualty gap. During the cold war, fairness vanished. With the US intervention in Korea, Kriner and Shen write, “the data show a dramatic change: strong, significant, socio-economic casualty gaps begin to emerge.” The evidence they amass strongly suggests that this gap widened further during Vietnam and became greater still when the Bush administration invaded Iraq.

Bacevich goes on to take the consequences of their conclusions further than do the authors:

For Kriner and Shen, the policy implications are clear: citizen awareness of the casualty gap can serve as a “democratic brake,” helping to avert ill-advised or unnecessary wars. The key to activating this brake, they believe, is to “encourage an open discussion of how the burden of wartime sacrifice … is borne differently across the country.” Open discussion will raise public consciousness, constraining warmongering policy-makers as a result. Would that such expectations were even remotely plausible. The authors’ faith in the power of “open discussion” is touching but profoundly naïve.

[…]

Although Americans more generally might bemoan the casualty gap, they won’t exert themselves to close it. The reason seems quite clear. Casualties affect public perceptions of policy when they hit close to home, when the sense of loss is direct, immediate and palpable. Yet the communities on whom the burden of sacrifice falls most heavily are precisely those that wield the least clout. Not having much money, they are easily ignored. “Citizens from low-income, low-education communities,” Kriner and Shen write, “are disproportionately less engaged in politics than their fellow citizens from socio-economically advantaged communities.” “Less engaged” is, to put it mildly, an odd formulation. The plain fact is that in Washington the less affluent are less likely to get a hearing. “The populations with the most to lose in war become those communities with the least to say to their elected officials.” That’s one way to put it. Another is that these communities are most easily blown off.

He insists that, for us to stop making war so indiscriminately, the cost of war has to hit us where it hurts. (Bacevich, of course, knows this far too well.) He turns to issue (2):

Consider the following back-of-the-envelope calculations. Since 9/11, the Pentagon budget has more than doubled to approximately $700 billion per year. Let’s peg current war costs at $400 billion annually (almost certainly a lowball estimate). There are approximately 150 million single or jointly filing taxpayers in this country. Reduce that number by the 30 million veterans who have already given at the office, as it were, and the per capita cost of ongoing US wars comes to more than $3,300 per annum. Add that as a surcharge to every American’s tax bill (or subtract that amount from the annual payout to Social Security recipients), and the “democratic brake” will bring American wars to a screeching halt.

As often-incoherent assaults on government spending and out-for-number-one slogans like “don’t tread on me” become the prevailing substance of American political discourse lately—and it’s a shame to say it—Bacevich could be right. If we can’t get one another to care about innocent people being killed by our weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, or about the human cost of our “wars of choice” being suffered by poor Americans, or even about the fiscal irresponsibility of it all, reaching people’s greed may be the only way to convince them to approximate compassion.

It began with the advice of a federal judge in 1949. If you’re not going to follow United States law and register for the draft, he told the group of Alabaman Quaker farmers before him, “get out of this country and stay out.” So they did. In 1951, along with several dozen family members and fellow Friends, they sold what they had in the States and flew down to a remote mountaintop in Costa Rica. Only a few years before, the country had abolished its military, so there was no threat of conscription. They didn’t know the language or how to farm in a tropical climate. The early years weren’t easy, and the community splintered several times; some moved to Canada, and others became Seventh-day Adventists. But when longtime peace activist John Trostle came to visit their town of Monteverde in 1962, he tells me, “I thought I’d discovered Shangri-La.” There was a school, a cheese factory, and an arts scene on the verge of flourishing. By 1974, he and his wife Sue moved to the community themselves.

The Quakers inadvertently gave rise to an ecotourism mecca. From the beginning, they set aside a large portion of rainforest in order to protect their watershed from pollution—a purely practical decision for a town of farmers. But a few decades later, as biologists learned of it and came to study wildlife living there, the community took up the cause of conservation. Wolf Guindon, one of the original settlers who had spent time in federal prison for resisting the draft, led the charge to build their watershed into the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, which keeps a sizeable chunk of Costa Rican rainforest in perpetuity for visitors and researchers.

Meanwhile, their school has brought up generations of local Costa Rican children with perfect English and a knack for North American sensibilities. By the mid-’80s, tourists followed on the heels of the biologists, and a hospitality industry exploded. Today, backpacker hostels and luxury restorts line the road that the Quakers once had to navigate by oxcart. The original settlers are ambivalent about the endless stream of visitors, which brings jobs to their neighborhood but disturbs its quiet.

The Monteverde Quakers’ quiet is one solution to the problem of militarism. They didn’t come to be beacons of anything, and they shy away from attention. “The people who started this community don’t think of themselves as something special,” Sue Trostle explains. Most of their free time gets consumed by the endless supply of committee work that Quaker community life demands. But their children don’t have to fear a draft, and not one colon of their taxes goes to pay for an army. They’ve built the cheese factory into a collective owned by the local dairy farmers who supply it. Martha Moss, who moved down with the Trostles, brought the Alternatives to Violence Project to Costa Rican prisons. The school doesn’t proselytize Quakerism among its students, but it teaches peace. Militarism florishes now more than ever in the United States. They couldn’t prevent that. But they showed that they could build a life apart from it and flourish.

Marcy Lawton is a biologist who studies birds. She began coming to Monteverde in 1974 as a graduate student at the University of Chicago to do her research, and now she owns a home there with her husband. They’re members of the Quaker Meeting. Her work focuses on brown jays, which are famous for their remarkable acts of altruism—”Quaker birds,” she calls them. Most of the time, her jays are peaceful, community-oriented, and remarkably generous with each other. But after years of observation, she began to notice wrinkles in their behavior. When birds grow up without enough apprenticeship from their elders, they behave differently. They hoard, fight, and even commit infanticide. The more years a bird spends in a nourishing community, she has learned, the more a brown jay’s behavior comes to resemble generous, mysterious love.