“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, said in 1994. Nixon and subsequent administrations championed the cause in order to criminalize Black Americans and hippies, according to a high-level adviser. Nixon’s so-called “drug war” started out largely as a public-health crusade. When United States President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs, rallying Americans around a supposed crisis on American streets and neighbourhoods, the result wasn’t a battle with a drug epidemic. Some would argue it’s an admission of failure. Likewise, it’s easier to impose mandatory sentencing, contract private prisons and fill them with drug addicts and petty criminals than to address the underlying poverty and mental-health issues and develop effective prevention, rehabilitation and recovery programs.ĭeclaring “war” on anything is a dramatic act designed to shock, motivate and sometimes manipulate people on an issue. It is easier, after all, to rely on shelters and soup kitchens, even to build low-cost housing, than to address the fundamental causes of poverty-lack of education, lack of jobs, technological change. They rarely succeed in solving problems, and sometimes serve to perpetuate them. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism, has been credited with first uttering the idiom: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Like real wars, these “wars” are often a last resort that addresses the symptoms of a problem, not the cause, and thus are doomed to fail.
There’s the war on drugs, which evidence suggests was something else altogether the war on crime, which has tended to perpetuate the problem more than solve it the war on poverty, which no government has effectively addressed the war on Christmas, which never existed and endless wars on disease-from cancer to COVID-19. Why, then, is there the constant need to invoke “war” whenever people seek to motivate others on a particular issue? Indeed, author John Steinbeck once said that “all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” More recently, American photojournalist Aaron Huey, who’d seen his share of conflict, described war as “the greatest failure of mankind.” His answer, sung in defiance of those who would challenge him: “Absolutely nothing.” Motown Records More than 50 years ago, with revolution in the air, peace protests sweeping North America and young Americans dying in Vietnam, Motown recording artist Edwin Starr famously posed the question: “War…what is it good for?”
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