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London, Pluto 2004. ISBN 07453 2188 7
hardback; 07453 2187 9 paperback
Reviewed by Alan Pleydell, Quaker Peace
and Social Witness (QPSW) Programme
Manager for the Post-Yugoslav Countries
This book attempts to get down to the
fundamentals. It argues that the human
institution of war, and the general state of mind
which excuses it, whatever the apparent
plausibility of arguments from ‘necessity’ in
particular cases, has led us all into a situation of
perpetrating and suffering mounting ruin and
disaster on a colossal scale , for which there is
simply no excuse. This is especially so once it
is realised that the great brunt of the suffering
is borne ever more overwhelmingly by civilians,
particularly women and children, in the poorest
parts of the world, as well as by the soldiers
themselves. Yet war is avoidable. It is our own
actions and practices that we are talking about,
and our culture of justification – not some alien
incubus that we imagine has settled on our
shoulders like the Old Man of the Sea. Unless
we all, whoever we are, consistently commit to
a cumulative and collaborative effort of
radically challenging and changing our
assumptions, thoughts and practices, our
humanity (what it means to be minimally
decent), cannot be rescued intact – even if
those of us who are better off and physically
more safely situated happen to manage to fix
our own survival. The obligation and
responsibility to find the way out of the
appearance of the necessity of war and the
ubiquity of its disasters lie equally with
everyone. (War and disaster are really
synonymous – not just accidentally related –
you can’t have the one without the other.) It
does not fall simply on those who by traditional
inclination or upbringing find themselves
already ‘naturally’ committed to opposing it.
The immediate situation from which the book
arises is the central role of the British
Government in the war on Iraq – and before
that Afghanistan and Kosovo: the ongoing,
accelerating and expanding violence of the
wars, first of the post-Cold War world, and
now of the post 9/11 world, each of them
represented as necessary and, of course,
successful. It is no accident that there has been
a plethora of books of this subject, effectively
from the usual suspects on each side, pro and
con, mainly talking past one another as usual.
But this is something different. It arises out of
the author’s intense concern with the
immediate issue in which we, as citizens, find
ourselves implicated. It carries the passion and
conviction of a lifelong activist committed to
empowering ordinary people stuck in hideous
situations (who, paradoxically, because of their
positive commitment to transformative thought
and action, are not stuck) to work their way out
of the trap of violence. She is angered by the
self-righteous and thoughtless adoption of
attitudes and policies which everywhere
deepen and spread those situations, whilst
purporting to solve them.
Yet the author is not primarily concerned with
blame, or indeed with asserting any special
virtue on the part of the more pacifistically
inclined. Though she powerfully attacks the
systematic mendacity and misrepresentation
regularly and deliberately deployed to support
the notion that there is ‘often’ no other way but
the ‘clinical’ application of violence, the book
broadens out to explore the entire field of
potential citizens’ action and effort, intellectual
and practical, that needs to take place to tackle
the situation. And the problem to be addressed
is us, humanity in the round, not ‘them’.
Therefore it is self-transformation that is
required, individual and collective, of ourselves
and our institutions, with all the destructive
assumptions they embody.
The first step in the argument is to nail the lie
that contemporary war is a success in its own
terms. Take Kosovo, for example: the
intervention was supposed to forestall a
massive refugee crisis, but it precipitated one.
Now, nearly six years after the act, the
situation of the country is desperate, unresolved
and intractable, tinder-box dry, with great and
realistic fears of a return to large-scale
violence. Or the Second World War, which
killed over 40 million people, failed even to
prevent the invasion of Poland, let alone the
later systematic genocide, and laid the ground
for the Cold War. Even in the extreme case
where appalling and mounting terror need to be
resisted or overcome somehow, there is a
massive disproportion between the benign intention of the armed response to fascism and
the reality of the outcome. And, we are
reminded; in the complexity of war there are
always many other less benign factors in play
which have precious little to do with an
altruistic concern for afflicted populations.
Secondly, the argument turns to culture and
psychology. The assumption that violence
resolves conflicts satisfactorily is historically
and socially constructed, maintained and
reinforced. The question of individual and
collective identity is central to this. And it is
deeply embedded in traditional gender roles. In
most cultures around the world, including our
own, boys are routinely inducted in the
understanding that status and worth are to be
found in the capacity to dominate. In the
author’s view, the apex of this culture of
domination is the institution of war, gaining and
maintaining one’s own and one’s clan or
country’s ‘honour’ by coercive and violent
means, supported by all the studied contempt
for others and outsiders that this means.
Likewise girls have been routinely trained in
subservience, frequently being violently
reduced to the position of chattels. In wartime
they are most often placed in support roles for
the maintenance of collective superiority over a
country’s neighbours. War and gender are
profoundly interlinked.
But if the culture of domination is indeed
constructed and maintained to protect and
advance particular oppressive world-views and
interests, it must mean that it is a matter of
choice, and that other choices could have been
and can be made. The key here is starting to
believe that there indeed may be a choice.
Once believing this, one is able, at least, to start
conceiving the possibility of alternatives, and to
begin to act differently. This goes for both
women and men, for all people in all cultures.
There is an extended section on the traditional
ethics of war and the varieties of ‘just war’
argument. The most powerful part
concentrates on the inherent and deep
contradiction between the values of peacetime
on the one hand and those of war preparation
and fighting on the other. The author attacks a
form of ethical reasoning which is effectively a
sophisticated version of the notion that the end
justifies the means. Amongst other things, the
psychological deformation required to train
people to kill is so ruinous as entirely to
undercut and deny whatever good is claimed to
be the goal. Put bluntly, ‘the prohibition against
killing per se is a fundamental one’. One
cannot advance good by doing things on a huge
scale that are ordinarily understood to be
categorically evil. That makes oneself and
one’s society part of the structure and dynamic
of evil, and there is no way of insulating or
immunising oneself from the fact – despite all
the rituals which attempt to achieve such moral
immunity. One might temporarily achieve it
psychologically, by the process of denial, but
the fact remains.
Light is then thrown on the history of
nonviolent resistance to evil and ‘standing up
for good’. We are reminded of many instances
of the courage and fundamental integrity
shown by ordinary people around the world in
standing up, unarmed, to evil and superior
physical force, not only as a token but
effectively, in particular cases, in seemingly
impossible circumstances – including in Nazi
Germany and the countries under its
occupation. It surely tells us something that
many of the instances quoted are simply not
popularly known. If indeed rare, they are far
more common and often far more effective,
even in the most extreme situations, than our
public culture has generally allowed us to
know. This is another reflection of the fact that
propaganda on behalf of the assumption of the
effectiveness of violence is far better funded
and supported than the exploration of
alternatives. There is also an examination of
the growth of people power and of international
solidarity movements in more recent times.
The growth of international communications –
and person to person communication – leads to
further hope in the midst of the violence.
Everywhere the traditional forms of collective
identity – racial, cultural, religious and gender
stereotypes, maintained by unfamiliarity and
ignorance as well as by force – are broken up
by the plurality of new experiences and
acquaintance. A growing, tangible awareness
of the thick web of interdependence renders
the old ‘identities’ more and more implausible.
In the midst of violence and mayhem comes a
growing and deepening sense of human identity
and a common identification of self with
humanity in all its incidental forms.
So far so good. For those of us who have
lingering or considerable doubts about the moral feasibility or indeed responsibility of a
wholly non-violent or rather non-coercive
stance in all circumstances (the two concepts
tend unfortunately to be conflated), the book is
somewhat short on a detailed analysis of the
real and deep dilemmas facing governments
and international institutions such as the UN
(rather than private citizens) at critical
junctures in and around the occurrence of
actual or imminent massacres and other largescale
violent abuses inflicted on sections of the
internal populations of some states, be it
Rwanda or ex-Yugoslavia. At the eleventh
hour (and, short of the full realisation of the
reform of human institutions that the book calls
for, the eleventh hours is still always potentially
with us) it is not unreasonably believed by
many, amongst whom I would include myself,
that there are at least some forms of coercive
intervention which are morally inescapable, and
therefore in the last analysis legitimate, if the
disaster of massacre is to be forestalled, and
for whom complete inaction (or at most purely
symbolic action) at such a point seems morally
intolerable. And if this is really so, since ‘ought’
implies can, then minimally it presupposes
sanctioning some form of armed preparedness
in some specified circumstances. This begs
huge questions, since it reintroduces the
prospect of some sort of arsenal authoritatively
held in reserve against such cases, and the
knowledge of how to use it, even if only
‘preventively’ – which once conceptually or
practically allowed could break its bounds and
usher back in the entire escalatory cycle of
suspicious armed preparedness and counterpreparedness.
However, in the final chapter, the author turns
to action and asks what we can do to effect
change. She produces a random list of 38
things which people as active citizens can
individually choose to be involved in, as a
practical contribution to challenging and
deconstructing the embedded mythology and
practice of war and the ideas that support it.
These suggestions range from exposing the
reality of militarism’s destructiveness and
cruelty to using every means available to
awaken people’s sense of power, responsibility
and connectedness.
Diana Francis has written a brave and noble
book. It deserves a very wide audience.
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