be rational. you know if you read -- i always call him a fortune cookie general. but his son serious nature lesson. irrational. think straight. don't be -- don't believe in aleutians. that is what societies learn from war. that is the old cement lesson of warfare. >> host: professor ginsberg people listening to this, their heads may be exploiting saying you are promoting more. >> guest: i don't promote war. war is terrible. it is a state affairs in the state of affairs off then. i don't want anything to do with it. it is horrible. for that very reason we have to understand that and we can't delude ourselves. i know some of you will be a keyword about nonviolent

peaceful forms of resistance. and now the answer is there's no such thing as nonviolence. it's a form of distraction. it is light weight violence and it only works if you're facing folks who are constrained in their use of violence or works best if you can use your enemy's violence against them. take, for example, dr. martin luther king was a tremendous part issue merits of old disobedience. the event from gandhi. he learned from samuel add-ons that disobedience is a mechanism for encoding your opponents into being violent. once they become violent, you can call in your firms to be more violent against them. so dr. king knew that he could go share jim clark into behaving

violently and stupidly and the fbi would defend them. if you don't have friends then you have tina mean square, where nonviolent simply results in death. we always wanted to elude ourselves that war is not the answer. it would be better if that was true, but unfortunately it is. very often the key answer, the only answer, president obama when he came into office war was not the answer. we were going to have peace. peace plan throughout the year. now it is launching dream strikes at everyone. were teaches you you have to be rational. you can delude yourself into thinking a timepiece all everyone will love me and be peaceful to. it's a very interesting book written by psychologist at harvard called the better angels of our care error and tries to show that there's been anticline in violence over the past

millennia. his statistical analysis is a little odd because you have to leave out world wars one and two to make the numbers work. we will chastise them to that. what is interesting is his implicit solution to the problem of war. in history and philosophy, there demands associated with ideas about ending our. there is scant and hobbes. the president idea democratic peace. he noticed democracies usually didn't go to war against one another. every country was a neat and the e-mail war. that sounds good. the problem is a lot of them don't want to be democracies. we had to go to war against it. so democratizing everyone would cause enormous conflict.

hops put forward a different idea. he said that if there was one state that the sovereign leviathan, war would be stamped out. but the problem is that he would have substituted tyranny for war. as we look around the world, a lot of people seem to prefer violence to tierney. so the hubby she and solution doesn't seem to quite work unless you're willing to succumb to tyranny. so pinker is habitation. in his view, violence diminishes more fully than some authoritative regime is able to secure peace territory. well, it is true in the way. what happens then is the violence is kind of in turn allies. when we have less time in a society, we often have more crime in prison.

we move the locus of criminal activity. so you know violence, war these are with us. we are not angels. we have to learn to control and we have to learn what they really do. we have to learn what they mean. >> host: professor ginsberg, could an alternative title for your book, "the worth of war" a politic. >> guest: yes, it is a work on the idea that political realism to another sphere. but my publisher, worker war what can i do. as you know, publishers write titles. authors just write the words. it is an essay in political realism. that's exactly correct. >> host: talking about civil war, what have we learned, what progress have we learned from iraq and afghanistan? >> guest: i didn't know we

made any progress in engineering, but we have learned from the past several decades of wars in the middle east and southeast asia. a number of lessons have emerged from us. one is to think flexibly and rationally. but another lesson we learned on this is perhaps not such a good lesson. governors learned that if they want to be free to go to war they have to factor the citizen reality equation. but the government learned from vietnam was not so long as you depend upon citizen bill payers, citizens get fed up with the casualties. so starting that same sure you know with richard nixon, we created an all volunteer army the purpose being to create a military fo