War Games

 

If I say “war, what is it good for?” and you don’t immediately think of the brilliant Edwin Starr track and reply “absolutely nothing” then you need to spend 3 minutes on the You Tube link before continuing. Edwin, or at least writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, weren’t a hundred percent on the money though. War, whilst wasteful of human life and destructive of the environment has been a feature of human culture for as long as we have records. You might recall being told during the Brexit debate that the EU had prevented war since 1945. Actually there has not been a single year since 1945 when there has not been armed conflict somewhere.. Although the number of conflicts varies as do death rates, war seems to be an endemic feature of modern civilisation, if indeed it is fair to characterise as civilised a species whose main form of conflict resolution seems to be violence.

Wars in the World

According to the website warsintheworld.com there are currently 70 countries involved in armed conflict (as of April 22nd 2021). I challenge anybody to be able to list even half of them. Is it because we don’t care or don’t know? Are you shocked at that number, especially bearing in mind that we are still in the midst of a pandemic which has been responsible for over 3 million deaths worldwide.

The Stop The War Coalition quote research by the International Institute for Strategic Studies which shows that the top military spenders (USA, China, India and U.K.) all increased their spending in 2020 compared to the previous year. Between the four of them they spent a staggering $1,057 billion in 2020 on military spending, an increase of $76 billion. Part of the problem is that these figures are so huge that it is almost impossible to compute them.  So to put some context a study sponsored by the German government calculated that the cost of ending World hunger by 2030 would be $330 billion.   In other words if the top 4 military spenders were to reduce their spending by just one-third, they could afford to eradicate food poverty within 10 years. Will they do so? Hell, no. 

Some of the biggest companies in the World are almost entirely reliant on military expenditure for their profits. In 2019 Business Insider listed the top 25 arms manufacturing companies in the World. Unsurprisingly, most of the companies were American. The thirteen American companies, including the World’s biggest arms manufacturer Lockheed, had sales of $180 billion. The four Russian companies, still huge companies, but sales of “only” $23.3 billion. The two British companies - British Aerospace and Rolls Royce - had sales of $50.6 billion. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the warmongerers are this side of what we used to call the ‘Iron Curtain’. Malala Yousafzai has estimated that the cost of providing primary and secondary education for all children throughout the World would be $340 billion.  Given that most countries are already financing education this would not all need to be new money. Is it possible that arms profits could be used for educating children? Not a chance.

Save The Children

War is a constant in human history and has been a driver of both human greed and human misery throughout our evolution. That does not mean, however, that it is inevitable. Many people, in many different countries and on different continents, will live their lives, relatively, untouched by war. But the number of people caught up in warfare is both staggering and terrifying. Save The Children estimates that 415 million children worldwide are living in war zones and areas of conflict. That’s almost 18% – or 1 in 6 – of all the world’s children. It is difficult to imagine for those of us who have lived in relatively peaceful countries what daily life is like if you are a non-combatant in a combat zone.

At the UN Security Council in May 2017 delegates heard that life in war zones around the world remained grim, with suffering “pushed to the limits” as cities turned into “death traps”. There were widespread reports of attacks against hospitals and wide-spread sexual violence. There is no war on racism or sexism in a war zone. Warfare is a breeding ground for racist attitudes as the ‘other side’ must be dehumanised to make killing them easier. Sexual assault and rape are commonplace in war and always have been as women are treated as possessions to be fought over and used by the victors for their own ends. Whilst female non-combatants are often targeted so are children. As Christine Beerli, Vice-President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), points out some 50 million people in urban areas now bear the brunt of conflict.  “At the ICRC, we see daily the realities of what happens when civilians are not protected,” she said, describing cases of children as young as three years old being killed or treated for the loss of limbs.

I did try to find testimony from those who have actually lived through a war zone as a non-combatant but they seem to be few and far between. There are plenty of soldiers memoirs and some from aid workers but the voices of those most affected are, as far as I can tell, mostly silent. My friend and comrade Ted Parry  located an article by Nadine Sinno which included accounts by women who had lived through the conflicts in Gaza, Iraq and Libya. Laila El-Haddad wrote a blog, later published as a book Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between, between 2004 and 2010. In one entry she notes the destruction caused by Israeli troops during a raid:

“Some fifteen houses, citrus groves, olive trees, two green houses, one chicken pen (with about 10,000 chickens), a water well, cattle, and other animals—all were eviscerated out of existence. The only surviving animal was a donkey. The poor beast was shot in the neck but survived with a battle scar and a bandage on his wound.”

It is difficult to imagine a life where almost everything you own can disappear in the blink of an eye. Where it is not only your life that is at stake, but also your livelihood. It is worth reminding ourselves that around one-third of the land mass of this planet have ongoing armed conflicts. There is not just a human cost to this but an environmental one. Zena El-Khalil’s “Beirut Update” provides a personal account of the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war that lasted for 33 days. In it she describes the devastation of war along with the raw emotion it creates:

“I fear that one day I am going to wake up and everything around me will be black.... they have been dropping chemical weapons on the south ... I also heard that they are using depleted uranium. Does this mean that after this is all over with, we are going to be looking at a generation of cancer victims?”

War is a thousand miles away

If you are worrying about how to pay the electric bill or how to afford to feed your children, you don’t need somebody like me telling you that you are lucky, because you are not. But, these problems which appear as belonging to one nation state are not disconnected to problems that are happening thousands of miles away. The same powerful elites who refuse to provide a decent standard of living for citizens in England, Wales, Scotland, America, France and elsewhere are profiting from wars that mean that people like Zena, not just a statistic incidentally but a real person with hopes and dreams just like the rest of us, are living their lives in fear of weapons manufactured in countries like Britain, America or France. They fear the long-term effects so that even when the war finishes they worry that they, or their families, will still be affected by the weapons.

I don’t wake up every day thinking about those in war zones, do you? They somehow seem incredibly remote. I glimpse them on my TV or through social media, but they are no more my lived reality than waking up in a mansion to be served by my entourage. It is worth considering though that for the 2 or 3 billion people caught up in a war zone that they would very much like the luxury of falling out with somebody on social media or having to endure a partial lockdown in the comfort of their own home. It is also worth remembering that Covid 19 did not pass by the war ravaged countries. In Afghanistan, Palestine and Syria not only are people trapped by armed conflict they are also facing an onslaught from Covid, though to those in those places a virus they cannot see may seem fairly remote compared to bombs and bullets and soldiers which are highly visible.

According to a recent article in The Lancet “After decades of war, Afghanistan has a weak public health system, with only 2·8 doctors for every 10 000 patients according to the World Bank. Poverty is endemic and so is a lack of education.” The main hospital is in the capital of Kabul. So far reported cases of Covid 19 are around 59,000 and there have been 2,600 Covid related deaths. But Covid is not the focus of most people in Afghanistan. There have already been over 8,000 fatalities from armed conflict in 2021, bringing the total since the war began again in 2018 to 227,510. This after the estimated 2 million casualties from the war in 2014. As Jaffer Shah, a researcher at Drexel University puts it:

“For the millions who have lived through an endless war, and who now face rising violence across huge swaths of the country, in addition to poverty, job losses, hunger, and more, COVID-19 is yet another thing to worry about—or not. If you've survived the Taliban and non-stop war, and you've grown up in an environment of insecurity where every day can be a life or death situation...you just don't have space to see the severity of COVID-19 and how widely it can spread”. Of course they may not have survived the Taliban because as the Americans pull out, it is the Taliban (once backed by the Americans of course) who look most likely to fill the vacuum. And that is particularly bad news for women and girls whose position will return to that of a second class citizen with no access to employment or education. 

War is good for business

The good news for the west, of course, is that armed conflict feeds the profits of some of our biggest companies thus ensuring that shareholders continue to enjoy massive dividends whilst keeping themselves well clear of the danger the products of the companies they are investing in bring to the World. Afghanistan is only one example. We could also mention Yemeni (6,199 deaths so far this year in its war with Saudi Arabia). Or, Tigray (up to 50,000 deaths so far this year in a war between Ethiopia and Sudan). Or, of course Palestine, where according to Human Rights Watch the Israelis “robbed with rare exceptions the 2 million Palestinians living there of their right to freedom of movement, limited their access to electricity and water, and devastated the economy.”

According to Von Clausewitz in his classic text On War, “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” often rendered as “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” I used to think that this was profound as well as correct. And, to be fair, it is. But, I now feel that this is only true if politics rather than being a means to decide policy is actually a means by which we bully others into agreeing with us. War in this definition is not a continuation but a failure. In the same way, and more trivially, that politics is often reduced to name calling, the idea of war as a form of politics is the belief that ‘might is right’, a point made by Plato in The Republic. I won’t go into Plato here (sighs of relief all round), but it is the case that the history of warfare is also the history of technology. The side with the most advanced technology - weapons wise - tends to win, although the Vietnamese managed to beat America despite their lack of sophisticated weapons. 

War is inevitably wrong. I know that people point to wars against fascism as so-called just wars, and they have a point. In the face of a bully diplomacy rarely works. But the reason socialists tend to be what Michael Foot described as ‘peacemongerers’ is because wars once started favour only the ruling classes who are happy to sacrifice our young in pursuit of their economic goals. It is invariably young working class people who suffer the brunt of the military casualties and it is ordinary women and children who find themselves caught up in the battle zones or forced to become refugees to escape the carnage.

If we want to both stop wars being propagated by an elite who profit from them and deal with racism, sexism, ableism, and poverty etc then maybe, and this is just a suggestion, we have to get to the root of the problem. What drives all these things? The answer is that they are rooted in social relations and those social relations are characterised by the pursuit of profit by the elite who are happy to see the rest of us squabbling amongst ourselves. To put this simply the root of the problem is capitalism. A failure to address that means that all the other problems we can so easily prioritise can only be scratched at. That is not to say we should ignore them, but that we should always remember that until and unless we change the social relations which dominate our lives that people such as Laila El-Haddid will continue to see their lives quite literally blown apart. What do the elite fear more than anything? That the 99% who do not benefit from war, oppression and discrimination (even if it appears that some of them do) realise that what unites them is more powerful than what divides them. A united working class, across national borders would be a truly terrifying spectre for those who assume their entitlement to rule. The question is are we big enough to put our differences to one side and unite to win the big prize. As the great German socialist Rosa  Luxemburg put it: “Today, we face the choice: either the triumph of imperialism and ..depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism..” Its up to us to choose.