by Priscilla Alderson (Dorchester Meeting).
Many journalists and other experts, even highly respected ones, are promoting the arms race. Friends might want to write to encourage them to have more sense, and here are some socialist ideas for promoting peace that they could use.
If children were fighting and throwing stones in the playground, would adults tell them to stop, or would they say, ‘I can help you to get bigger sharper stones’? And if the first choice is so obvious, why is there a double standard, with prime ministers and presidents being encouraged to arm and fight? Especially when they can do infinitely more harm than school children can. Where is the sense or morality in inciting war? Children quickly learn peace-making skills (see https://quakers.wales/the-mid-wales-peaceful-schools-project/).
One history professor recently stated, ‘The hard reality is that the defence of Europe today depends on the US-led Nato’. However, the late film-maker John Pilger accurately predicted in 2018 that NATO’s next war would be with Russia because of the NATO bases provocatively sited all around Russia’s borders. The professor advocated building up our military ‘defences’ and said, ‘As a largely benign military hegemon, the US protected us…’ But a ‘benign military hegemon’ is an oxymoron and, since 1945, the US has started over 200 armed conflicts.
There are well-known reasons to avoid building up armaments. These include, in escalating cycles and in many countries: costs borne by the public and funds diverted away from public welfare; subsequent increase in inequality, poverty, public distress, unrest and anger; the politicians’ tradition of diverting this anger against injustice into fearful hostility against other disadvantaged groups and other countries; growing xenophobia and support for war, fed by politicians and journalists; powerful pressures from arms companies on governments to buy and use their arms, freeing them to increase further production and profits.
When warfare moved from battle fields into and over urban areas, civilian casualties multiplied. Drones and other technologies are transferring major death tolls away from the military and onto civilians, particularly of poorer countries with lower median ages, that means onto children. The median age of people in Gaza and Sudan is under 19-years, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is 16 years. War is likely to force injured and bereaved surviving children to wreak revenge in future wars.
Research, resources and workers diverted into warfare are extremely urgently needed for work on reducing and coping with the effects of climate change. Instead, war, destruction and the rebuilding they require emit massive amounts of CO2.
Governments’ vast ‘defence’ budgets are notoriously overspent, under-regulated, inefficient and wasteful. When war-hungry politicians, military advisers and journalists dominate national politics, then chemical, biological and nuclear armaments are more likely to be developed and used. Developing AI, lasers, and cyber warfare can force hostile nations also to upgrade their stores of these weapons. ‘Deterrence’ encourages defensive aggression from rival states. Transferring international aid into military spending multiplies all the above national problems at international levels, harming billions, not only millions, of people. All these problems increase threats to the survival of humanity and all living beings.
Martin Birdseye, a radical Catholic, drew a Nuclear Morality Flowchart https://nuclearmorality.com/. It helps you to decide if nuclear war fits with your personal moral standards and choices. You could ask your MP to work through the Flowchart and cut through the strong current assumptions in today’s debates about nuclear ‘deterrence’.
We need to speak truth to power and aim to promote the public good and justice, and refrain from supporting destructive policies, factions and industries.
Priscilla Alderson (Dorchester LM).
Quaker Socialist Society 