votes for president as the Socialist Party candidate from his prison cell in 1920. In 1927, Morrison, foreshadowing President Dwight Eisenhower’s critique of the military industrial complex in 1961, also cautioned that war possessed a profession that promoted its own ongoing existence, growth, and prestige, while threatening the rights of others.
I included in my book War Is A Lie a chapter called “Wars Are Not Legal” in which I pointed to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and other treaties and laws. I blog at a site called WarIsACrime.org. The uphill struggle these days is to convince anyone that war is illegal. But the pre-Kellogg-Briand Outlawrists struggled to make people aware that war was, at that time, legal and therefore needed to be outlawed. Levinson himself, to take the doctrine straight from the Socrates of Outlawry rather than from his Plato, wrote,
The principle underlying the outlawry of war is this: The law should always be on the moral side of every question. But the law of nations has always been on the wrong side of the war question. . . . For, what with laws of conscription, martial laws and espionage acts, everyone who impedes in the slightest degree the operations of war is a criminal. The dire effect of our present situation is plainly seen, for example, on our ministers of religion. They are all morally against war, but because it is legal multitudes of ministers find no way to oppose it. . . . The law which should condemn and stigmatize evil, actually embraces and nurtures it, and thereby thwarts the moral will of civilization. . . . [W]ar cannot be regulated or controlled, for it makes its own ruthless laws . . . ; therefore war must not be compromised with, but its entire system, with its warp of force and its woof of death, must be uprooted, overthrown, outlawed — abolished.
The key word in all of this, I think, is ‘stigmatize.’ This is a moral objection from a lawyer to the status of war under the law. He wants the law to rid itself of war in hopes that all of society will follow. This is a campaign subtly different from one aimed at immediately eliminating all war in an instant by the act of placing a criminal court system in its way. This is a campaign, in other words, which was destined to move as slowly as culture, and which we are obliged to advance as far as our own generation can advance it. Like slavery and duelling had, war had in the 1920s and still has in the twenty-first century a legal code dealing with how, not whether, to engage. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and the International Criminal Court’s pending jurisdiction over the crime of aggressive war have added the beginnings of a legal code on whether to have war. Yet the code addressing how to have war still exists. Particular atrocities are lamented and prosecuted, while wars themselves are tolerated if not celebrated. But there has yet to be a war not replete with the most hideous atrocities. And there has yet to be a time when many or most of the earth’s nations were not at peace. An atrocity-free war is far less likely than the establishment of permanent world peace.
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