by Chris Williams (1999)
Biography:
Chris Williams lives in Leicester, and works as a historian. He was educated at the universities of Oxford, Leicester and Sheffield, and currently holds a research fellowship at the Open University. His political odyssey has taken him through CND, anti-fascism, the Labour Party, and the Independent Labour Network, to dressing up as a fat cat in order to make obscure situationist points, all the while espousing some vague kind of libertarian socialism. His interests include criminal justice and public order, the nature of the state and power, alternative economics, and writing fiction.
"For thirty-three years, I was a racketeer for capitalism" - General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corps, 1933.
Summary:
1. No sir, I won't: introduction
2. "These Afghans Don't Mind Being Killed": the UK's past strategy
3. IMF off: neo-colonialism
4. War Through The Looking Glass: military re-tooling
5. Amnesty International With Rockets: the justification
6. Time For A Peace Movement: conclusions
7. Further Reading
Dedicated to my mate
Hafid, who knows about imperialism.
This piece of work ttempts to give an introduction to militarism, and to the response that we should make to it. It discusses the peace movement's current state - often failing to respond to the end of the Cold War. It reminds us that nevertheless, there is a great potential for it. It discusses the past history of the United Kingdom's military and imperial stance, and suggests that this history is disturbingly similar to the present day. It examines the nature of the 'new world order', which is characterised by the increasing assumption of power by unaccountable organisations, all committed to imposing a vicious neo-liberalism on the planet. It then shows how the nature of the 'new world order' is being reflected by the changing appearance of the world's militaries. Nowadays, wars can be fought by the rich against the poor in the expectation that casualties (among the rich) will be very light. This does not bode well. It looks at the politics of war and interventionism in an effort to understand what we are up against in the form of the ideologically 'progressive' trappings of militarism. To conclude, it proposes what we might like to do about all this, via a number of suggestions for political activity. Finally, it points to some further reading, containing handy information, useful insights, or both.
It is without question a personal view, and no doubt owes a lot to my own prejudices and preoccupations. Many of my ancestors spent the nineteenth century being paid crap wages to travel the world and shooting people on behalf of the British state. I became politically active through CND in the mid 1980s. Also, while attempting to be internationalist in outlook, this pamphlet, like me, is located in the experience of the UK, and mainly written for people living in that state.
The role for a rejuvenated peace movement
Victories against militarism are possible. The last few decades have shown that an effective peace movement in the imperialist states can have a material effect. Vietnamese independence from the US was a direct result of the successful campaign at home placing limits on the force the Americans could apply. The campaign against the vicious wars of colonial repression helped lead to Portugal's 1975 revolution. In the 1980s, the US peace movement did not totally succour the people of Central America, but they achieved enough to stop that war from becoming another Vietnam.
In addition to their global impact, exposing the far-off crimes of the capitalist system helps to serve the purpose of those who wish to radically alter it here. To a large extent, the relatively benign face of life in the advanced nations is paid for by the suppression of human rights, super-exploitation, and lax environmental regulation elsewhere. If we want to replace or seriously modify capitalism, we have to challenge its legitimacy as an organising concept, and one of the best ways to do this is to take every opportunity to remind people that it is not a national system, but a world system.
While this has remained one of the motives behind the UK peace movement, the main impulse within it has generally been moral revulsion at the immediate harm done by war itself. This has taken a number of different paths. In the mid-1970s trade union shop stewards at several arms plants drew up a plan to convert their workplace from mainly military to mainly civilian production. During the 1980s, with the Reagan/Thatcher sabre-rattling (begun by Carter/Healey), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took off once more.
One of the peace movement's problems was that it failed to move very far beyond the sense of personal danger to which it drew attention in the mid 1980s. The fetishisation of 'nuclear' threats was also a part of this. The upside of the 'nuclear fear' was the fact that CND was able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of people in the UK alone to oppose Reagan's brinkmanship. The downside is that after the end of the immediate threat of World War Three, the constituency willing to actively campaign against war shrank substantially. Weapons of mass destruction have killed hundreds of thousands of people this century. Humble 'conventional' artillery, automatic rifles and mortars have killed tens of millions. Many of CND's theorists never went beyond a 'Little Englander Nationalism'. They still saw the UK as an exceptional nation, this time one that would regain world moral leadership by renouncing nuclear weapons. The parallels with the old Fabians liberal imperialism are obvious, and it is this that might help explain the transformation of so many old CNDers to present-day wagers of 'moral war'. By the time of the 1990/91 Gulf War, the peace movement could not assemble more than about 30,000 people. The continuing war against Iraq has not been opposed by more than 10,000, despite the well-documented level of death caused by sanctions.
When four women from the 'Ploughshares' group were acquitted at Liverpool Crown Court in 1996 after trashing a Hawk fighter-bomber destined for Indonesia, they scored a resounding victory. The civil disobedience campaigners around Menwith Hill are also doing good work. Warfare has never merely been about the people holding the weapons, and this has grown to be more the case in the last 50 years. War is industrialised, with a great number of specialised functions. Communication and spying centres like Menwith Hill are just as integral a part of the global death machine as any cruise missile. Concentration on this site also throws into sharp focus the extent to which the world policeman is not just American. US intelligence gathering is integrated to a high degree with that of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Large sections of the ruling class in each of these and in most other countries consciously and actively support the imperialist system.
Yet these individual actions, important as they are, illustrate that the peace movement has been unable to mobilise mass support since the 1980s. On the one hand there is still a substantial number of people (if opinion polls are to be believed) who - despite all the pro-war propaganda emanating from the media and the various ruling parties - disapprove of military adventurism. On the other, there are very few channels whereby this disapproval can be registered in the public sphere. This must change, and if it does, there is a real chance that we can use a decent peace movement to change the world for the better.
In the long traditions of the Dutch Wars, the Darien Company, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Opium War, the Indian Wars, the Boer Wars, and many many more, our money has always received the best defence that it can buy. 'Traditional imperialism' was hardly ever driven by a desire to extend the red on the map. It was mainly about protecting British capital, in Argentina as much as in Australia. Direct rule - and with it some measure of basic responsibility for the subject peoples - was avoided whenever possible. The Labour Party was always keen on retaining the Empire, or even expanding it, but doing so in the name of civilisation and stewardship rather than of national interest or expansionism. This 'Fabian imperialism' has always had an appeal beyond conservative chauvinism - maybe this is why Kipling used it when he urged Americans to 'take up the white man's burden' and slaughter Filipinos fighting for independence. We were going to protect the uncivilised inferior peoples from themselves. Ring any bells?
Imperialism often meant conflict between rival states, but sometimes it also meant co-operation. The nineteenth century saw several episodes of the colonial rivals ganging together to enforce the repayment of debts from defaulter nations (Mexico, Egypt) or to preserve unequal treaties giving them trade and territory (China). During these episodes, the powers continued to jostle for position, but their rivalry was subsumed for a moment in a common desire to preserve the rights of bullies everywhere against victims who had the temerity to strike back.
Another thing that often
gets forgotten about nineteenth-century imperialism is that it was technologically
very modern. When Hilaire Belloc wrote, of the 'Scramble for Africa':
Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not
he was referring to the super-weapon of the age: a weapon which demands
a high-technology manufacturing base, and one which has killed a hundred times
more people than nuclear weapons ever have. The steamship, the repeating rifle,
and more powerful military institutions were the basis of the power of the colonial
nations. In this period, the UK's armed forces were based on a large and ubiquitous
navy and a small professional army, designed to fight subject peoples from Ireland
to the Punjab. It was never intended to fight other European states. Otto von
Bismarck asked how he would respond if the British Army invaded Prussia in 1864,
replied that he would send for a policeman and have it arrested.
From around 1904, this policy was changed to a less strong world-wide force alongside an army and navy designed to fight Germany in Europe. After the First World War, it reverted to type. One innovation that has many parallels with the present was the use of the RAF to control parts of the Empire. In 1921, Winston Churchill decided that Iraq and the Horn of Africa could be cheaply controlled by 'air policing'. This situation allowed the UK to retain control over Iraqi oil, and to maintain an independent air force - a major component in their military strategy. Another key ingredient was an increase in subsidies to local rulers who could be expected to maintain the status quo. The UK utilised a technologically advanced military because it could be relied upon to enforce internal security at home and abroad, and it held out the possibly of winning wars without incurring casualties like those of the Great War.
In essence, history repeated itself from 1933, as the UK partially pulled back out of some imperial commitments to rearm against Germany. But from 1950 onwards, the aftermath of this war diverged from the earlier pattern. Like Stalinism or loathe it, there was one thing you couldn't ignore about it: it had rockets. The advanced capitalist countries were forced to create and maintain an expensive 'defence' establishment, designed either to protect themselves against the Russians or to intimidate them: opinion is divided on this point. It certainly altered the defence posture of most of the capitalist world, in NATO or out of it. Some countries, such as West Germany, devoted their entire military effort to defence against the USSR: others, like France after the 1960s, left that function to a nuclear deterrent, and optimised for fighting colonial wars. The UK and the US tried to do both: only the US was large enough to do so successfully. The UK was able to retain some elements of its dominance by the old method of relying on indirect control through friendly client states, often 'independent' ex-colonies. Since the ending of the direct threat from the Soviet Union, however, the UK has begun to repeat the process of reversion to a wholly imperial mission, with the same kind of armed forces that it had in the 1920s. The nature of these changes is examined below.
The military-industrial complex
Above and beyond the 'rational' demands of capital - for a military force to enforce its will - lies the lobbying power of the military industrial complex, and the 'baroque arsenal' that it tends to develop. The phrase 'military-industrial complex' (MIC) was first used in 1960 by the great revolutionary theorist Dwight D Eisenhower. He warned - to no avail - that the normal process of decision-making in a liberal democracy could become fatally (we would probably say 'further') distorted by the combined power of the arms manufacturing sector and the military, each commanding massive resources, able to mobilise great political support, and egging the other on.
The UK arms industry employs around 150,000 people. The UK is the world's second largest exporter of weapons. Exports of complex weapon systems are a way of keeping client states under control, since the exporter can always threaten to dry up the supply of training and spares that keeps them operational. In certain cases - notably in Brunei and the Gulf States - the UK supplies virtually the entire armed forces, via supply and maintenance deals, and the provision of 'instructors'. Yet the UK MIC is not profitable. It sustains itself through massive subsidies by the Export Credit Guarantee Department. Between 1990/1 and 1996/7 credits for military exports accounted for 27% of the guarantees for capital goods and projects underwritten by the ECGD. Arms exports were less than 3% of the total in the same period. In a sense, it is an arm of the state: each has some degree of control over the other. It's great to see Jonathan Aitken in prison, but his case merely scratches the surface of the corruption and criminality of the Al-Yamannah arms deal. The demands placed by the MIC have always been treated as paramount. Concerns of historic or individual liberty have always been sacrificed to it. It destroys the environment. Each nation that has acquired nuclear weapons has done so by poisoning one or more places: Harwell, Maralinga, Sellafield, Chelyabinsk, Tahiti - the list goes on. The existence of the MIC, combined with its influence and its voracious appetite for resources, stunts domestic policies and politics.
The old colonial powers are still protecting their financial interests by any means necessary. Political control is now exercised through puppet regimes and the global economic superstructure of the IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), UN agencies and 'aid programmes' constitute the carrot. But the stick of military force is still a key part of the equation - and it is being re-fashioned to make it bigger and nastier than ever. States (Chile, Nicaragua, Libya, Iraq) that step out of line for whatever reason - some good, some less so - are met by coup, embargo, and subversion. Today's imperialist system features a double whammy: 'free' trade on terms that benefit the rich states and 'structural adjustment plans' that drive millions further into poverty. Local elites, many complicit in these processes, are often the self-same clients enriched by bribes from the arms industry, whose military equipment is more often used for internal repression than to counter any external threat.
NATO fought Yugoslavia the way it did in order to preserve its monopoly of force in Europe. The Kosovo Albanians were not allowed the responsibility of fighting for their own freedom. Whatever the component motives for intervention, the establishment of western 'protectorates' involves the imperialists having a veto on the use of force - they are in ultimate control.
The people who staff most NGOs are motivated by the best of reasons, and often perceive the structural causes of the problems with which they try to deal. Even so, two forces render the work of NGOs problematic at best. The first is the fact that they are increasingly being used under an umbrella of imperialist force, or to ameliorate the effects of client terrorist organisations. Aid is the crutch handed to a man by the person who has broken his legs. The most damning recent indictment of this factor has come from Dennis Halliday, who quit his top UN post in protest at the way the UN 'oil-for-food' plan was being used as a fig-leaf to justify the mass murder caused by continued sanctions against Iraq. The second force is a result of their imperative to raise money. In order to do so, it is hard for them to challenge the dominant myths that exist in the rich states - of helpless starving Africans and gallant aid workers, for instance. Emergency appeals, generally devoid of explanation beyond the most banal, make the headlines and swell the coffers: the need for structural change does not.
Smiley happy UN peacekeeping isn't nearly as cuddly as much of the media would have us believe. UN operations in Somalia and Bosnia have led to widespread instances of corrupt or murderous behaviour by NATO troops: combat soldiers don't suddenly become nice people just because they put on a white helmet. The role of the UN in Bosnia has been to police ethnic cleansing - to maintain the partition of the statelet, and to preserve the border that was set up when the US-trained Croat army brought the war to a close by murdering and evicting thousands of Serbs. The UN's role is just another aspect of the status quo 'international community', which is dominated by the 'G7' states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A clause in the Dayton Agreement that did not get much publicity was the one (Article VII, 2) that means the Governor of the Bosnian Central Bank is appointed by the International Monetary Fund. The famous Rambouillet Agreement contained a clause (Chapter 4a) that stated: 'The economy of Kosovo shall function according to free market principles'. Not much about preventing ethnic cleansing there. Within the new protectorates, the committees of investors wield power in their own interests. In Tuzla, the miners who had fought for their lives in 1994 found themselves threatened with redundancy as the mines were privatised in 1996. The force exercising state power over them was and is the UN.
War against the planet
The environmental consequences are twofold. First, the culture of IMF-sponsored oppression in the name of the market in itself encourages behaviour that can lead to lasting damage. Strangulation of representative institutions and suppression of civil society in the interests of profit prevent concerned citizens from doing anything about environmental disaster. Endemic poverty, the child of structural adjustment programmes, makes the present so perilous that many of the world's poor have no choice but to mortgage the future by engaging in activity that they know is environmentally unsound.
The second set of consequences stem from the system of oppression itself. Increasingly, modern war has a permanent impact on the environment. We are seeing this with the human damage caused by land mines. Most tellingly, the use of depleted uranium ammunition appears to have had appalling health effects on whole swathes of Iraq, Serbia and Kosovo. This pollution is almost impossible to clean up, and will be there in hundreds of year's time. There is no point in going to war to 'save' anybody, if the effect is to poison them and their homeland for centuries to come.
One consequence of competing national elites each fighting for a share of the cake is that resources, especially water, become a weapon. Rivers like the Jordan and the Euphrates are literally battlegrounds. Climate change caused by global warming is likely to exacerbate many existing international tensions, just as international tensions make agreements to control climate change difficult to achieve. Militarism and environmental degradation are locked in a vicious circle.
The changing world system is reflected materially in the changes that the imperialist powers are making to their military forces. If we examine the small print of the UK's Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of July 1998 ('Modern force for the modern world') we can get some idea of what the New Labour government thinks it is worth killing people for. Despite a 2.5% cut in overall expenditure, many systems and capabilities are expanding. The new death-machine is about fighting wars overseas, designed to protect UK capital overseas, and to defend client rulers in poorer countries. The review admits that 'there is today no direct military threat to the United Kingdom or Western Europe'
Take the plans for the Royal Navy. In MOD-speak, they call it this: 'The emphasis will move from large scale open-ocean warfare to force projection and littoral operations in conjunction with the other two Services, with a premium on versatility and deployability.' It means: the RN will be better at attacking people in far-off lands. The UK will build two new aircraft-carriers, designed to be able to attack targets onshore anywhere in the world. Currently the RN lacks the ability to do this with more than 20 subsonic planes at a time (10 per carrier). The new ships - twice as big as the existing carriers - will each give them about 25 supersonic attack aircraft. There's quite a substantial tooling-up going on here. Also on the way up are minesweepers - the SDR increases the force from 19 to 22. This isn't surprising, either: small poor countries can be expected to try to use relatively cheap marine minefields to protect their shores from attack.
The SDR further increases the capacity of the RN to launch amphibious assaults. Currently it can transport 700 troops in dedicated assault ships, and 2500 in 5 fleet auxiliaries. Under construction or undergoing trials are 3 new assault ships - one the same size as the 'Invincible' aircraft carriers - that will increase the first figure to 2000. The SDR promises to replace two of the older fleet auxiliaries: the other 2 older ones are currently being re-built. So we can expect to be paying for a brand new invasion fleet in just a few years time. Meanwhile, the SDR will give the RN 4 ro-ro container ships (in addition to the 2 it already has) to help with the transportation.
The British Army will see a reduction in the number of troops occupying Germany, and a doubling of the number of air-mobile and 'rapid-reaction' forces, to 30,000. These will be ready to go anywhere in the world and fight a war at short notice. The Parachute troops will get armoured vehicles: the army is being tooled up to engage most of the other armies in the world on unequal terms, minimising casualties. The RAF will get 4 very large long-range transport planes, to help get the army to far-off places more quickly.
Delivering death from above on demand
The ultimate military aim is to completely destroy your opponents with impunity. It led to the British use of 'air control' via 'police bombing' in the 1920s and 1930s. It led to the German state wasting millions on the V2 in World War 2. Closest to success yet, it led to the H-bomb and the ICBM. The US lost in Vietnam because of the steady stream of body-bags: Reagan was forced to pull out of Beirut for a similar reason. Even if the enemy is only bombed from the air, never engaged by 'our' ground troops, it's still a dicey business where 'real' (i.e. Western) people might get killed.
The US adventure in 'lawless Somalia' can be precisely timed. It began in December 1992 with a landing by US marines scheduled to coincide with the prime time news hour. It ended in October 1993 when the TV cameras showed a new scene: the mutilated bodies of US helicopter pilots being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Another example: in 1995 a US navy pilot, Scott O'Grady, was shot down over Bosnia by Serb forces. He was rescued several days later. In the US, national euphoria greeted the news. The window had not cracked: the barrier erected by advanced technology and overwhelming force had stayed up. 'We' were not going to suffer any loss at all.
It is no surprise, therefore, to see the SDR introduce an increase in the 'death from above' component of the UK's armed forces. All the navy's nuclear-powered attack submarines will be modified to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles while submerged. These have a range of 900 miles, and there is no realistic defence against them: as the people of Belgrade found out. They are perfect for destroying the infrastructure of uppity 'dictators' (or even democratically elected leaders... ), who might be tempted to question their place in the scheme of things. This capacity also bodes ill for any future re-proliferation of nuclear weapons: Tomahawks can also carry nuclear warheads, and their presence or absence aboard a top-secret submarine is almost impossible to verify. We were sold the Euro fighter (at £70m each) on the basis that it was the only way our boys could overcome the awesome power of the latest Soviet planes. Now the Soviet fighters are rust, but the UK is still buying it, to be overwhelmingly superior to any possible enemy, and thus suffer no losses.
This is not caused by any peculiarly British hooligan tendency. If you look reasonably closely, you can see that several of the NATO countries (France, the Netherlands, and Spain) are tooling up in a similar fashion. They are cutting down on their ability to fight the Red Army, and investing in 'amphibious warfare' - the ability to invade unreliable clients. The armed forces of the advanced capitalist countries are no longer devoting themselves to fighting the Soviet Union. Instead, they are going back to a nineteenth century model, optimised for fighting small wars in other countries, using high technology to maximise their advantage. One important change from the nineteenth century is that due to a growth in egalitarianism within the liberal democracies, their soldiers are no longer considered dispensable. This in turn leads to a greater use of disproportionate firepower (as we saw over Serbia) in an effort to eliminate NATO casualties totally, at the expense of passers-by.
NATO's spokesman during the Kosovo war got his PhD in History for a study of the way that the belligerent powers in World War One justified themselves to intellectuals. As old communists would say: 'this is not a co-incidence'. Every war fought by an advanced capitalist country in the last 150 years has always had a group of liberal cheer-leaders, ready to explain why, even though all the previous conflicts might have been wrong, this one is 'the first moral war'. It is like those 'Peanuts' cartoons, where Lucy held the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Each time she convinced him that this time she wouldn't pull it away at the last minute. Each time, she did. Each time, the liberal intellectuals come to a grudging conclusion some years later, that maybe the Gulf War wasn't fought to usher in a new era of democracy and freedom, for instance.
Ruling groups are well aware of the need to dress up their nationalism in the clothes of internationalism. The idea that NATO can fight a 'moral war' for 'humanitarian ends' is dangerous in the same way that patriotism or communalism are dangerous - because they do have a certain appeal. It would be nice if all this expensive overwhelming force really was being used to selectively kill the bad guys. We want our taxes to be financing a crusade, rather than paying for selfish aggrandisement. But we need to remember the first usage of the word 'crusade'. Interventions have always been presented as defending a nice person (those White Russians, for instance, or the lovely Greek Royalists, or the Kenyan settlers, or those useful Kuwaiti Al-Sabahs) from nastiness both general and specific.
According to the SDR, the
British armed forces are now going to be 'a force for good'. As Mandy Rice-Davies
once remarked, 'They would say that, wouldn't they?' Illustrative examples were
peppered throughout the SDR press releases. The new modifications to the software
in Nimrod aircraft will help them do things like look for refugees in East Africa.
We're going to train the South African Army. That's nice: the training given
to the armies of the feudal Gulf States doesn't seem to feature in the PR.
International Lynch law
The Kosovo war was a turning point for New Labour because it marked a U-turn in their policy towards international law. Before the illegal intervention, they had been consistently advocating an international order based on a binding court of justice, and intervention according to the UN Charter. Both these proposals were being opposed by the US. Labour had also been co-operating with attempts to bring Pinochet to justice. The use of War Crimes indictments is not even-handed. Only the paranoid think that 'they' are reading everything we send and tapping our phones. Of course, they're not - there are not enough of them - but they are reading and listening to everything they want to. For details of exactly how this is done, read about project ECHELON. What this means in practice is that, given the dodgy dealings inherent in the exercise of state power, the G7 states have enough evidence to drop any world leader in the War Crimes Trial soup any time they feel like it.
Most of the time, the rulers stay on side, but sometimes they have to be brought up sharp. Remember Noriega? The manipulation of war crimes indictments by the selective release of intelligence is something only the G7 states are capable of doing. Thus, we have to remember that, whatever the motives of those human rights lawyers working to bring criminals to justice, the likelihood is that they will only ever get to practise their prosecution skills on those criminals who have stepped out of line. A 'rule of law' that exempts certain groups is no rule of law at all.
While not ideal, Labour's attempt to give more teeth to international law was certainly a better option than: 'bomb the people ruled by this week's bad guys'. Think of the difference between a corrupt judge and lynch law. But all this went out the window - along with the UN Charter, the NATO treaty, and the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which prohibits the threat of force to get a signature on international agreements - when they bombed Yugoslavia. The NATO powers have since 're-defined' their treaty to include interventionist operations, in a statement issued on April 24 1999, which even though it fundamentally changed the justification for the alliance, does not need to be ratified by the parliaments of any of the signatory states. The executives are (literally) calling the shots.
We must at all times question the idea that the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, located in a bunker near Brussels, has anything to do with something called the 'international community'. This latter entity might exist as a formless set of desires for peace and justice, but at the moment its only expression in practice is via the militaries of the 'liberal democracies': organisations that have a very different agenda built into all of their preferred outcomes, and which rarely go to war in the spirit of liberality or democracy.
The 'moral war' argument is a threat. In order to counter it, we must do more than just say: 'bring the boys home'. For if we merely say that, our rulers can point to the pictures of human tragedy and respond: 'what would you have instead?' We may answer that the carnage on our TV screens is as much the fault of the long term policies of the imperialist nations, but this answer still leaves the question of action unanswered. Alongside demands for withdrawal, we must offer concrete alternatives and an alternative vision to neo-colonial intervention dressed in humanitarian clothes. Economic sanctions, for decades the darling of large sections of the left (myself included) are not the answer. Applied to Iraq, they have produced only human misery and deaths on a scale that approaches pre-industrial levels. The poor suffer - the ruling elite do not. The state of siege has strengthened their hold over the economy and led to some sections of their population uniting behind them against the imperialists.
Our organisations need to help people in other countries. Not through charity that merely fulfils basic needs and steers away from politics. Instead we should combine aid with advocacy, and building bilateral and multilateral links between people around the world that operate independently of governments, and of their tame NGOs. We should attempt to internationalise civil society. One model for this is the Workers Aid for Bosnia/Kosovo organisation: which was begun through links established when miners from Tuzla gave help to the NUM in 1984/5. Solidarity, not charity, should be the name of the game. Initiatives such as this give us a chance to offer an all-important immediate alternative to doing nothing when faced with a crisis. The massive success of the Jubilee 2000 coalition has shown that there is a major constituency that will take political action on the basis of common humanity. A decent peace movement would copy this attempt to 're-moralise' political relations. In addition, it would attempt to incorporate some of the tens of thousands of people who have been inspired by Jubilee 2000 to protest against mass inequality and oppression.
At all times, we must use our media to expose the spin and reveal the true priorities of the 'defence' establishment. We especially need to cast aside any ideas of the armed forces as any kind of 'force for good'. During the Kosovo war, many 'left' commentators expressed an odd kind of conditional support for NATO, provided it made its mission a bit more progressive. This was best expressed in statements like 'It will be alright as long as they fly lower'. Forget it. They're not listening to you. There are only two choices: support NATO whatever it decides to do, or oppose it. It's not suddenly going to get progressive without a major change in the state of the earth.
We should also avoid the tendency to reduce the problem of militarism to anti-Americanism. Militarism is locked into the core of the foreign policies of (among others) the UK, France, Belgium and Germany. The core of world imperialism is best represented as the G7 - although other states also provide key regiments in the armies of the status quo, notably Turkey, Israel, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan.
Some demands for change
It is never handy to have the killing-machines around because they can do nice things in their spare time. If large transport aircraft and highly-trained aviators are really needed to deliver food to the starving, then let's start paying for them as such. Don't have it as a second-string role for a military force. When last offered the choice between feeding the starving and fighting a war (in 1941), the UK 'defence' establishment went for the latter, and a million Bengalis died. So, our 'alternative vision' should include a non-military disaster relief force.
The recent illegal use of NATO force in the Balkans led some to demand that the operation be carried out by the UN instead - though I doubt that would have made much difference to the flattened Belgrade suburbs. The UN's 'security' operations have never functioned as anything other than the cat's-paw of the OECD states, offering a fig-leaf of legitimacy to what they were going to do anyway. 'We' (UKnians) should resist any moves to put British forces under the control of the UN as it is now. Instead, we should we campaigning (preferably in concert with like-minded groups in other countries) for a new democratic UN, with a sovereign General Assembly, and an end to the Big Five veto. Then, if we ever get such a UN, our alternative defence policy demand should be that all offensive or foreign-based UK forces be placed under the operational command of this UN.
Hundreds of thousands of
jobs depend on the 'defence' industries. But nowadays, these are more likely
to involve electronics or software engineering than bending armour plate. This
means that the skills in these industries are the very ones we are short of
in the civil sector. Any re-orientation of the 'defence' budget will take time
before it can show real savings. Rather than just dump Wharton, Barrow, Leeds
and Yeovil, we should invest in their economies so they can make goods which
produce, not goods which destroy. Therefore we should ask for a state programme
to re-tool the arms industry for civil production, designed to convert 3/4 of
this capacity inside 5 years. The Arms Conversion Project is already working
on this issue, and deserves our support.
But clearly, if the analysis outlined above is true, and our armed forces really
do exist only to prop up UK capital, and those regimes friendly to its freedom,
then real long-term solutions lie elsewhere. They lie in an international economic
system based on democracy rather than the demands of profit: in short, on socialism
not capitalism. We must organise the economy to fulfil long-term human need,
not short-term private profit. Until we make that leap, it is likely to be business
as usual - freedom for capital and its servants: death and destruction for those
who have the audacity to oppose the Almighty Market.
Chris Williams, July 1999
Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia (Allison and Busby, 1982). This book analyses the 'Falklands debate' in the House of Commons in 1982, showing the Jingoism that marked both sides of the House that day, and the fact that the nationalistic justification for war was based not on human rights but on 'blood and soil'.
David Edgerton, England and the aeroplane: an essay on a militant and technological nation (Macmillan, 1991). This short polemic by the Professor of the History of Science at Imperial (still!) College shows how the British state in the twentieth century has been characterised not by a commitment to welfare, but by a unique attachment to high-technology warfare.
Robert Clough, Labour - a party fit for imperialism (Larkin Publications, 1992). Has some good information, but needs to be read with a pinch of salt, since Clough sometimes refuses to let truth get in the way of a good ultra-left polemic.
John Ellis, The social history of the machine gun (Pantheon Books, 1975). Shows the marketing and use of machine guns before 1914 - used to kill Africans struggling for independence, and militant workers striking for their rights.
David Omissi, Air power and colonial control: the Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1990). Omissi looks at the way the RAF pioneered the tactic of 'police bombing', chiefly to give it a reason for continued existence as an institution.
Mary Kaldor The Baroque Arsenal (Abacus, 1983). A good exposé of some of the MIC's less rational moments, but it neglects: the extent to which modern arsenals are rational responses to imperialism; the fact that they actually work better than the peaceniks hoped; and the fact that military technology has always been highly inefficient.
Race and Class. (Institute for Race Relations). This periodical often contains excellent articles on imperialism and the fight against it.
Strategic Defence Review:
'Modern forces for the modern world'. What they're up to: http://www.mod.uk/policy/sdr/wpconts.htm
Workers Aid for Bosnia Taking Sides (WAB, 1998). The story of a Europe-wide
movement to directly aid the Bosnian people fighting against ethnic cleansing
and blockaded by the 'international community'. Workers Aid: ADDRESS
Noam Chomsky Deterring Democracy (Vintage, 1992). Chomsky's not always right, and for a linguist he's overly verbose, but this book poses some very useful questions about the extent to which countries under attack from the imperialists can ever have 'free' elections.
Nicky Hager's expose of project ECHELON in Covert Action Quarterly (pub. New York, winter 1996-97).
Arms Conversion Project (http://www.gn.apc.org/acp/) c/o Chief Executive's Dept, City Chambers, Glasgow, G2 1DU