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.

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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.

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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.

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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.