Early History of the Culture of Peace

When I returned to the States after leaving UNESCO, I needed to understand why the rich member states of UNESCO were so opposed to the culture of peace. I decide to write a world history of the war/peace dialectic. By 2007 I was ready to work on it and by February 2008 I had completed a manuscript. It received a new title, reflecting the conclusion to which the work had driven me: "The State is War: Make Peace without It".

In fact what I found in the course of my study and reflection was that the state had progressively monopolized war and its culture during the course of its 5000 year history and we have arrived at the point that the state has literally BECOME the culture of war. Hence there is no choice if we are to progress to a culture of peace except to replace the state with something new. That something, I had become convinced, was a United Nations that was run by representatives of local governments instead of Member States.

Another conclusion concerned the control of information which has been a second significant development of the culture of war in recent centuries. Never before in history has there been such a concentration of communication power in the hands of a few multi-national corporations allied with the military-industrial complex. And perhaps never before in history has there been so much secrecy in government. By controlling information, the culture of war is able to maintain the support of voters in the elections of bourgeois democracy.

History of the Culture of War
Click on the image to go to the book.

These were such radical ideas that when I sought to find others with the same idea, I could point only to passages in the works of Johan Galtung, and I could find no other precedents.

Just how radical it was became clear when I tried to publish the book. It met nothing but resistance. I sent letters to 50 of the most recognized literary agents in the USA and received nothing but rejections. I sent the manuscript to Syracuse University Press which had already published a series of books with similar topics, including Elise Bouldings book on the culture of peace. It was reviewed by a well-known progressive sociologist who had always supported the work of the Seville Statement on Violence. His review was negative, and the director of the Press explained to me that I would not be able to publish such a book with any university press because it did not conform to any discipline but was inter-disciplinary in scope, so any reviewer would shoot it down from the perspective of his own discipline. Then I sent inquiries to progressive book publishers directly and again receive no encouragement.

In February of 2008, frustrated with the response to The State is War, I decided to write a utopian novella that would imagine that the strategy had worked and we had arrived at a culture of peace with the UN being run by representatives of local governments. As a literary device, I made it the diary of an old man, more or less autobiographical, who was dying somewhat on the model of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I called it "I have seen the promised land."

I Have Seen the Promised Land.
Click on image to go to the book.

In May of 2008, still frustrated and seeking still another way to put forward my ideas, I embarked on an Internet game that would cover the same ground. To do this, I decided PERL would be too difficult, so I immersed myself in XHTML and PHP, learning these techniques in order to make the game interactive. Within a month I had finished it and put it on line at culture-of-peace-game.org.

Now, with a bit more distance from the writing process, I decided to cut the "big book" into two books, "The History of the Culture of War" and "World Peace through the Town Hall." Fed up with negative reviews I self-published them in the spring of 2009 at the Createspace.com division of Amazon books.

I bought copies of my own books and gave them out or sold them to friends and acquaintances, but they did not sell on line. In the first six months, total book sales on line amounted to 24 books, more or less 8 of each. I sent out a dozen sets of review copies, but again, after six months, there was not yet a single review. Especially frustrating were two years worth of frequent email correspondence with Herbert Blumberg of the journal Peace and Conflict, during which time he said he was unable to find anyone willing to review the books. My frustration was expressed during this time in the page poem, "the prophet".

To order the books, click on the following titles:
World Peace through the Town Hall
The History of the Culture of War
I have seen the promised land

To read the books on-line click on the following:
I have seen the promised land
History of the Culture of War
World Peace through the Town Hall

Since 2009, Robert Mercadillo translated the books into Spanish and published them at Herder Editorial with the title Cultura de Paz: Une Utopia Posible. And with the help of Kiki, I have published a French version of "I have seen the promised land."

The books of 2009 remain my most important books, although mention should be made of others that touch directly or indirectly on the culture of peace:

The American Peace Movements (1985 and 2002)
Psychology for Peace Activists (1987 and 1995)
The Seville Statement on Violence: Preparing the Ground for the Constructing of Peace (1991)
Embrace the Fire: Plant the seeds for a culture of peace (2015)

And, of course, this Early History of the Culture of Peace is a book even if it is not published on paper. Similarly, Strategy for Revolution in the 21st Century and my autobiography are important books although not published on paper.