Professor David Barash

University of Washington

(comments in Bold)

David Barash has been a professor of psychology at the University of Washington (Seattle) since 1973. He currently teaches three psychology courses: "Comparative Animal Behavior"; "Ideas of Human Nature"; and "Psychology of Peace."

"Since the early 1980s," writes Professor Barash "I have been active in researching, promoting, and practicing the field of Peace Studies." Professor Barash, who has "a long-standing interest in … Buddhism and existentialism," believes that "animal behavior, evolutionary psychology and Peace Studies are fundamentally linked, especially since they all involve questions of how biology affects behavior, including male-female difference, reproductive strategies, and the troubling problem of violence in living things generally."

Professor Barash is the co-author, along with Berkeley Professor Charles Webel, of Peace and Conflict Studies (Sage Publications, 2002), a text that is widely used in peace studies classes in American universities.

In the preface to their book, Professors Barash and Webel write: "The field [of Peace Studies] differs from most other human sciences in that it is value-oriented, and unabashedly so. Accordingly we wish to be up front about our own values, which are frankly anti-war, anti-violence, anti-nuclear, anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-social justice, pro-peace and politically progressive."

Peace and Conflict Studies makes no pretension to being an academic exploration of the complex issues of war and peace. It does not explore the many possible views of world problems that might lead to conflict, or the various assessments that might be made of the history of peace movements.

It is, in fact, a left wing screed whose clear purpose is to indoctrinate students in the radical view of the world shared by "progressives" like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore.

No indication is provided to the uninformed student that these might be extreme views, nor is there any indication that there are other possible ways to view these issues.

None of this is surprising since Professor Barash is not a trained historian, economist, or sociologist but a psychologist, while his co-author Professor Webel is a philosopher. Consequently, the text they have written is not only ideologically one-sided, it is professionally incompetent. This has not prevented its widespread use in "Peace Studies" programs across the country.

Peace and Conflict Studies discusses the problems of poverty and hunger as causes of human conflict exclusively through the eyes of Marxist writers such as Andre Gunder Frank and Frances Moore Lappe. The text’s view of these problems is socialist: "To a very large extent, the problem of world hunger is not so much a production problem, so much as it is a distribution problem."

What the authors mean by this is that poverty is caused by the private property system and free market capitalism which results in economic inequality and that its cure is socialism which redistributes income. This would be news to people in socialist North Korea, where recent famine caused by their government’s economic redistribution policies has killed more than a million people. It would be equally surprising to citizens of the former Soviet Union, whose Marxist leaders attempted to make economic equality the center of their economic policy with the result that a country that had been the breadbasket of Europe was transformed into a nation of chronic food shortages until the general economic breakdown caused the system to collapse.

The Peace and Conflict Studies text relentlessly condemns the economic inequalities that characterize market systems, even though these systems are responsible for prodigious agricultural surpluses and for raising billions of people out of poverty, facts the authors systematically ignore. The authors also ignore the question of whether providing economic incentives to the creative and the productive, which results in this inequality isn’t therefore worth the cost. Instead, the authors identify the culprits responsible for world poverty (and thus for the conflicts this suffering causes) in terms that would have pleased Marx and Lenin: "The greed of agribusiness shippers and brokers, plus control of land by a small elite leaves hundreds of millions of people hungry every day." No wonder terrorists hate rich countries like the United States.

Since the authors believe that the greed of the ruling class is solely responsible for world hunger, Peace and Conflict Studies does actually endorse one kind of violence, and one kind alone. Not surprisingly this is revolutionary violence. Here is Professor Barash and Professor Webel’s example of revolutionary violence that has led to good results:

This is an extraordinary statement from authors who claimed to be peace activists and it is also the entire portrait provided by the text of Cuba’s Communist dictatorship. No mention is made of the fact that Cuba is a totalitarian dictatorship in which every citizen is a prisoner in his own country, spied on by the ruler’s secret police. No indication is given that Castro is the longest surviving dictator in the world with a legendary record of sadism against his own supporters. Cuba’s wretched medical system is not evaluated; nor is the fact that while literacy is impressive Cubans can now read only materials approved by government censors. In 1959, when Castro seized power, Cuba was the second richest nation per capita in Latin America. After nearly fifty years of socialism it ranks near the bottom of Latin America’s 22 nations, above Haiti, but below Honduras and Belize. When the authors feel compelled to mention a deficiency in Cuba’s achievement—whether political or economic—it is invariably blamed on the United States and its embargo, even though Cuba trades with every other nation in the world and its economic woes are attributable to the crackpot economic policies of its dictator. This one-sided promotion of a Communist dictatorship is typical of the text and an accurate sampling of the authors’ ideological point of view.

Throughout Peace and Conflict Studies, the authors justify Communist policies and actions and put those of America and Western democracies in a negative light. This one-sided tilting to America’s totalitarian enemies is evident in its treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. In 1962, the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev precipitated an international crisis and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war by secretly placing nuclear missiles in Cuba and lying to President Kennedy when confronted over them. In Peace and Conflict Studies, however, the Cuban Missile Crisis is discussed without the authors ever mentioning the cause of the crisis—the Soviet missiles. Instead, the crisis is described as having been caused by the American president’s alleged psychological insecurity and his consequent desire to act tough. This created a dilemma from which the world was rescued by the Soviet dictator. Here is the entire account of the Missile Crisis in this college text:

Nor is this positioning of the Soviet Union on the side of peace when it is the aggressor unique. In its account of the Cold War generally, Peace and Conflict Studies treats the Soviet Union as a sponsor of peace movements and the United States as the militaristic and imperialist power that peace movements—and thus the students of peace in the Peace Studies program—are supposed to keep in check.

A brief section of Peace and Conflict Studies is devoted to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. It provides troubling insight into the impact courses like this may be having on American college students as their country faces the terrorist threat. The authors begin by telling students that, "Terrorism is a vexing term." From the "peace studies" perspective, the moral aspects of the term are purely relative: "Any actual or threatened attack against civilian noncombatants may be considered an act of ‘terrorism.’ In this sense, terrorism is as old as human history."

Far from being criminal or evil, terror (according to Barash and Webel) is a last resort of the weak as a means of self-defense: "Terrorists’ are people who may feel militarily unable to confront their perceived enemies directly and who accordingly use violence, or the threat of violence, against noncombatants to achieve their political aims." If you’re weak, then apparently it’s all right to murder women and children if it advances your cause. Terrorism, according to the authors, is also "a contemporary variant of what has been described as guerrilla warfare, dating back at least to the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation conducted in North America and Western Europe during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries against the British and French Empires." In other words, the American Founders were terrorists, and the terrorists in Iraq can be viewed as patriots (as radicals like Michael Moore have actually described them).

So that no one will miss the point, the progressive authors of Peace and Conflict Studies explain: "Placing ‘terrorist’ in quotation marks may be jarring for some readers, who consider the designation self-evident. We do so, however, not to minimize the horror of such acts but to emphasize the value of qualifying righteous indignation by the recognition that often one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter.’" The terrorists who killed 3,000 innocent civilians from eighty countries in the heinous attacks of 9/11 can thus be viewed as "freedom fighters" striking the oppressor.

Peace and Conflict Studies continues: "After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., many Americans evidently agreed with pronouncements by many senior politicians that the United States was ‘at war’ with ‘terrorism.’ Yet, to many disemboweled [sic] people in other regions, ‘Americans are the worst terrorists in the world’ (according to a 1998 TV interview with the American Broadcasting Company). Following the attacks, President George W. Bush announced that the United States ‘would make no distinction between terrorists and the countries that harbor them.’ For many frustrated, impoverished, infuriated people—who view the United States as a terrorist country—attacks on American civilians were justified in precisely this way: making no distinction between a ‘terrorist state’ and the citizens who aid and abet the state." In other words, America is a terrorist state and the terrorists are liberators of the world’s oppressed.