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Introduction to the Justice and War in American History Podcast
70 Plays1 year ago
War is among the most consistent aspects of U.S. history. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it has always been hotly contested. Despite this, it is not often that Americans come together to discuss the history and experience of war. This podcast puts veterans, active service members, citizens, and scholars in conversation about the ways that the experience of war has shaped and been shaped by Americans’ concepts of justice.
In this episode, Jason M. Kelly and Ray Haberski sit down to discuss the Justice and War podcast and what they hope to accomplish this season.
To learn more about the podcast and the broader project, visit the website at justiceandwarseminar.org.
This podcast has been generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, this is Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. And this is the Dialogues on the Experience of War podcast. Ray, tell us about the podcast. Okay, so this is sponsored by the NEH, National Endowment for the Humanities. And for many years, the NEH has tried to encourage academics from all across the United States to convene conversations with different types of communities. And a few years ago, Jason, Kelly and I applied to the NEH.
00:00:37
Speaker
to run a series of conversations on the experience of war, sort of in the context of American history, but to do so with communities of veterans and academics and people from different walks of life. And so this is our attempt to do this for posterity by using the podcast format.
Exploring Morality and Justice in War
00:00:57
Speaker
to frame conversations about war, to think through how Americans over time have dealt with the morality of war, to consider where we're headed in some ways as a country when we think about the experience of war in the past and how we might use that to frame discussions in the future.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, and the podcast was set up, and the entire program for that matter was set up with Justice at the Core, thinking about the ways that we conceptualize war either as an act of injustice or how historically folks in the United States in particular have attempted to justify going to war. And that's gonna be a recurring theme, but that's not the only theme that goes through this,
Series Overview and Accessibility
00:01:47
Speaker
of course.
00:01:47
Speaker
The podcast series, as we're planning it, at least for the first season, is a 10 episode series. We'll be dealing with all kinds of interesting issues on the podcasts, bringing in different guests throughout the podcast. Sometimes we'll have historical recordings that will be in the podcast. Sometimes we'll be talking about primary documents, but everything is accessible through a centralized website. Our website has
00:02:15
Speaker
access to the podcast, all of the primary documents, recordings and lectures, and all kinds of supplementary materials, which we'll be referring you to as you're listening to the podcast.
Just War Theory vs American Just War Thinking
00:02:27
Speaker
And so I'll say this, that one of the inspirations for the podcast was thinking through how Americans over time have used just war theory to evaluate the nation's role in war. Now, I'm going to distinguish between just war theory as a concept and just war thinking, which is mostly how Americans have used the theory. So just war theory is a pretty discreet
00:02:53
Speaker
concept. And it comes out of medieval Catholicism. And it's basically thinking about the morality of war before it begins. So you have to have a just cause to attack somebody. And then the morality of prosecuting war. So who should be off limits during a war? So that's use at Bellum and use in Bello.
00:03:16
Speaker
Just worth thinking, however, is really what most countries have been engaged in, definitely in the 20th century, in the United States, for most of its history. And it's basically, in some ways, how to justify going to war, and then justifying, in some ways, the crimes that are committed during war.
Challenging American War Culture Assumptions
00:03:36
Speaker
Americans do some evaluation of their commitment to war or the nation's involvement in war in different ways and we're going to use historical examples to sort of sift through some of those discussions and debates. But we also wanted a chance to talk to people who've actually been in war or have been charged as soldiers
00:03:59
Speaker
to prosecute some aspect of war so that we have a way to check in and check our own assumptions about what it means to be a warrior in American culture.
00:04:11
Speaker
We were talking about the history of war, but in particular, we're interested in comparing and contrasting two wars throughout. And you'll hear us referring back to these two wars over and over. And in fact, we're going to have special episode podcast episodes devoted to these particular wars. The first one being a war that many Americans don't know much, if anything about, which is.
00:04:31
Speaker
the Spanish-American War as it's become known over time. And the second war is the Vietnam War. And there are actually great wars to compare with each other to some extent because people don't completely understand the full scope and the aspects of these wars.
00:04:50
Speaker
And in part because there's some distance from those wars that allow us to think about contemporary issues in a historical framework. So when we're talking to a lot of the folks that we're going to have on this podcast, we're going to be talking historically, but thinking in the present.
Historical Impacts: Spanish-American vs Vietnam War
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, one of the things about the Spanish American war that makes it historically significant, it is
00:05:13
Speaker
often referred to as sort of the first imperial war that the United States fights, right? I mean, the United States is shaped by the War of Independence and then the Civil War prior to, you know, the late 19th century. The Spanish-American War is initially a war of liberation, sort of liberating Cuba in particular from the Spanish Empire and then the Philippines, but it quickly becomes a very hotly contested war.
00:05:38
Speaker
by the public. I mean, it's really one of the first moments you get a genuine peace movement or pacifist movement emerging in US history. None other than Mark Twain leads part of that movement and we'll definitely get a chance to talk about him. But I think the Spanish American War also sets some of the terms that we still use to describe and evaluate and debate the Vietnam War. And I think that's where the comparative part is really important.
Focus Areas: Morality, Public Humanities, and Veterans
00:06:07
Speaker
But of course, before we start talking about these words, you probably want to know who we are in the first place. So maybe it's a good moment to introduce ourselves, Ray. Do you want to introduce yourself first? Sure. Okay. So one of the reasons that I wanted to be part of the project is that I've spent a good number of years
00:06:24
Speaker
looking at debates about morality in American history. So I started out writing about how Americans debated popular culture in particular movies and censorship and not surprisingly when 9-11 happened.
00:06:40
Speaker
I turned to the debate about the morality of war, and so I wrote a book called God and War, and it was about the way that war organized American thoughts about the goodness of the nation and whether or not it was both morally good as well as powerful.
00:06:56
Speaker
in the basically post-1945 era. So it was really an argument that suggested because of World War II, the United States achieved a certain type of presence in the world it never had before. How did it use that presence? How did people debate what American power was supposed to be used for? And when it was used, what were the limits of that power? How could it defend everything from Korea to Cuba to Vietnam?
00:07:24
Speaker
right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then, I've been working on an article, a couple of articles, and then a book-length treatment of just war thinking in American life. And so again, this idea that when Americans try to come to terms with morality of war, what kind of
00:07:48
Speaker
words or concepts do they use. And my argument is that for the most part, they're using the concept of just war. Part of that is because American culture, American politics has been fundamentally shaped by religion and the relationship that people have to churches and their faith. And so using just war theory, again, it's fundamentally a sort of a Catholic construct
00:08:15
Speaker
But it certainly becomes part of the American vernacular. How that influences everything from the way that foreign policy think tanks think about war, foreign policy journals, to presidents, priests, and the general public. So that's where I fit into this discussion about the morality of war and just war thinking.
00:08:39
Speaker
And I come from a very different perspective from Ray. By training, I'm a scholar of the 18th century and not just not even 18th century US, but I'm a historian of 18th century Britain and more recently, historian of the environment. But
00:08:54
Speaker
where I come to this project is the public humanities piece of this. I'm the director of Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis's Arts and Humanities Institute, and we do lots of programming in the city and beyond that deal with deep, important issues, and at the core,
00:09:14
Speaker
of much of the work that we do are the publics in the community. And one of the major publics in Indiana is our veterans population, the veterans, active service members, their families. And that really is kind of the origin of this. We were thinking, Ray and I were thinking about ways that we could address these big issues that Ray just laid out and engage these publics with which we hadn't engaged enough in the past. And
00:09:43
Speaker
We reached out to different veterans organizations and individuals who we knew and came together. And this, this project took off and thank goodness we had funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do all of this. So a few months ago, we had a training program that brought veterans together and we spent three full days together with veterans and scholars and experts on the Spanish American war and the Vietnam war.
00:10:10
Speaker
and had a three day training with each other, learned from each other, talked a lot, read these primary documents that we're going to be talking about. And now this is the podcast. This is the podcast. This is the kind of summative piece of everything we've been looking forward to doing over the past couple of years as we've been working on these projects.
Educational Resources and Engagement
00:10:32
Speaker
Other outcomes from this have been a series of courses that have been taught here at IUPUI.
00:10:38
Speaker
and there's going to be one more course, which is actually an open educational resource course, and that's going to be open to everybody, both to take the course and to adopt the course for their classrooms. And so this is a multifaceted piece, the podcast is the current piece we're working on right now, and I'm very excited to be doing this with you, Ray.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, me too. I think that, you know, again, podcasts these days have become sort of ubiquitous. But what makes them so nice is that we can have discrete conversations, we can have long series of conversations, we can talk to a variety of people, we can dig pretty deeply into issues and documents. As you said, the website is going to be really comprehensive when it comes to providing additional material for people. I mean,
00:11:28
Speaker
There is a lot to talk about in sort of just war thinking in American history, but I think almost as important is how people will respond to the questions that we ask them, right? So, I mean, not everybody's going to come at these issues like I do or like you do.
00:11:49
Speaker
But I think that is part of the gist of what the NEH wants to support. Like, what do conversations look like? What are the outlines? What, where do people end up? Why does it seem to be, you know, maybe we'll create kind of a microcosm of this. Why does it seem to be so difficult to have a discussion about war and US history that leads in the direction that prevents war to some degree?
00:12:15
Speaker
You know, I mean, I think these are these are there are there are issues that I think we know exist and sort of bounce around. And I'm looking forward to having space and time to sort of work through some of these questions with like a really broad spectrum of of discussions.
Encouraging Listener Interaction and Discussion
00:12:37
Speaker
So, we welcome all of you to participate in this podcast, not just by listening, but by interacting with it. So, we encourage you to put your comments onto our website. Send us notes over social media, over email. Please do rate us on Apple Podcasts.
00:13:00
Speaker
Uh, because that's always helpful as well. So we can get the word out to people and, uh, you know, just, uh, feel free to make this your own in your own classrooms, adopt it and have community conversations around it. Because what we want to do is have this as a launching point.
00:13:17
Speaker
for more conversations, because at the end of the day, it's through conversation where we learn about each other, we get to know each other, and we can have more thoughtful conversations about some of the most pressing and challenging issues that we face nationally.
00:13:33
Speaker
This particular podcast series and the grant that we got is sort of midstream. So there have been other NEH funded conversations about war. They just issued a release of new funding for more conversations. So we're part of a much bigger galaxy of this type of experience for the public. So I'm sort of looking forward to connecting with
00:14:00
Speaker
those other groups. And we'll try to do that through our website as well and maybe have somebody on from one of the later groups on the podcast to see how they're doing. Fantastic. Well, we look forward to seeing you at our or hearing you perhaps at the next podcast. And please send us a message if you have any requests or interests. We're still recording this. So we have plenty of place to go in the future. And Ray, we'll talk soon. Sounds good, Jason. Thanks.