I’m anticipating that this little essay won’t be popular with many folk.
It’ll upset the Gammonry, obviously, as anything that isn’t moronically monosyllabic hate-filled tripe does. But it’ll upset the liberals as well, perhaps. We’ll see, I guess?
I’ll try and keep this brief and to the point. But that is hard, given the enormity and complexity of the many interrelated issues.
Before I get going, why am I even bothering with this? There are two main threads to the answer: motivation, and the subject itself.
First, the latter: I’m prompted to write this due to the tidal waves of vacuous crap that one encounters on social media around Remembrance Day (today!) [RD, hereafter, for brevity]. I want to address that later.
Secondly, as a wet behind the ears country bumpkin, newly arrived in London, studying art and art history, I wound up interviewing Noam Chomsky, for a putative student rag that never really took off. It was a disaster. But you learn from your mistakes. At least I hope we do?
My key issue that I’d hoped to explore with the famed linguist and philosopher was ‘why bother?’ In relation to his stuff about manufacturing consent, and engaging with politics. This seemed so alien to him that it appeared to irritate him. The interview was a shambolic mess. Or at least that’s how I remember it.
The point of this reminiscence is this: I find ‘The Man’ has already defeated me; I’m simply overwhelmed by the oppressive state of the world as it is, as I experience it. Any desire to engage is punched out of me, before I can even try and get in shape.
To live like that is to live defeated; it’s enervating and depressing. But I think it’s poss’ far more a norm than is generally admitted. Sadly, Stockholm Syndrome means that many might not even see it. They’re so embedded in The Matrix of everyday consumer Crapitalism that no other reality seems plausible, never mind possible.
Anyway, in moments of higher energy and more optimism, I’m with Chomsky, in wanting to create a better present and future, somehow. So… enough with the digression. Let’s get to the meat…
WAR
I believe that war, like religion, has been essential to getting us to where we are today. And as much – maybe even more? – in a good way as a bad way. But that’s a whole huge other debate from the one I’m concerned with here.
Like religion, however, whilst essential to our survival and thriving up to this point, we may have reached or be reaching a point where it is becoming less beneficial. Even counterproductive.
Just as religion’s explanations of what we don’t understand have been and are being replaced almost entirely by better understanding, through science, so too ‘politics by other means’ – aka War – now that we have world-obliterating tech, may no longer be the ‘least of all evils’ it once, arguably, was.
REMEMBRANCE
The way WWI and WWII are talked about – in the popular culture soundbite arenas of social media – esp’ in the run up to RD – is stupendously one-dimensional. Anyone who actually studies these conflicts will know that they were neither of them righteous anti-fascist Crusades.
Both world wars were essentially started (WWII), or escalated (WWI), by the kind of 19thC empire-building associated with Britain’s short-lived global dominance.
The hordes of the lower orders recruited and sent off to kill and die, under the type of appalling circumstances war always produces, weren’t well informed politically aware heroes. They were cannon fodder, fed into the ever more mechanised machinery of empire building (Germany) or preservation (England).
If we cross The Pond, and take the US’ role, in both World Wars, the idea of good vs evil is even more problematic, as the US was, despite their 19thC Civil War over the issue, a massively racist and largely apartheid nation.
I hate Trump, and his fascist DHS/ICE goons. But the endless ‘our fathers fought fascism’ stuff I’m seeing, mostly from the US (but the UK as well), right now, is just nauseatingly oversimplified. These complex issues shouldn’t be so relentlessly dumbed down.
POISONED POLITRICKS
It’s interesting, as a Brit, to see that some of the American military are, as they should be, disgusted by Trump et al’s fascism. Here in the UK, sadly, almost all ex-military types I’ve encountered are hysterically and myopically right wing. Many loudly braying their support for the beyond odious Reform.
There is a small quorum of folk who appear to see through the tsunami of misinformation that is most of our mainstream media these days. What’s odd to me is that it all seems so blindingly obvious.
If you want to investigate a crime, look to see who benefits from the commission of it.
It’s so blatantly obvious that the real enemy of the masses is, as always, the hyper-elite. In our times that means the billionaires. And the systems that produce and enable them. That would be unregulated capitalism.
The ‘plunder of the commons’ that has characterised Tory politics – and the word Tory derives from an Irish term for ‘thief’ – for hundreds of years, from The Enclosures Acts to the selling off of nationalised assets (PO, utilities, etc), has been relentless.
Reform represents the extreme right wing, i.e. the worst, of Toryism. And that’s who they are: Farage and most of his cronies are former Tories. Mostly ex public school, many millionaires, and all on a quest for personal enrichment via deregulation (the real reason for Brexit, and the motivation for their antipathy towards the ECHR). Sold to idiots as ‘taking back’ or ‘making Great’ Britain.
The role of the Tories in preparing the ground for this, with the sham referendum on voting (we urgently need PR), the politically destabilising and economically catastrophic shambles of Brexit, along with chronic underinvestment in social services coupled with constantly bailing out private disaster with public funds, is fundamental.
Modern Conservatism is an oxymoronic (not to mention plain moronic) nonsense. They’ve taken a wrecking ball to a lot of what was once (and only very briefly, as in post WWII) good about British public life and the fabric of society.
I like to say that this long and disturbing drift ever further right in UK politics doesn’t just beggar belief, it buggers it, with a barbed-wire chainsaw.
The Boris Johnsons, Rees-Moggs, Michelle Mones, Farages, and their like – and the millionaires and billionaires who fund them (and the CEOs and shareholders, milking this oligarchy) – enjoy luxurious lives largely funded from the public purse, or built on the back of underpaid workers. Countless thousands of whom – people these politicians (and even the business types) are supposed to serve – live miserably squalid lives, only to die long, protracted, painful deaths.
Not because nothing can be done about it. But because it doesn’t suit the richest to give up even a fraction of their privilege.
NOTES
[1] And what do we do with these beauties? Get high, or remember/celebrate killing each other. Humanity, eh!?