'...overwhelmed by a world in chains.' Photo: Trevor Leyenhorst / flickr CC.
World in chains
Richard Seebohm is overwhelmed by a world in chains
It has always intrigued me that we Quakers manage so seamlessly to bridge the split between the nurture of our worshipping community and our concern to confront the ills of the wider world (specific ‘concerns’, of course, are tested by the worshipping community in Meetings for Church Affairs).
World in Chains: The Impact of Nuclear Weapons and Militarisation from a UK Perspective deals clearly with the second category. It is edited by Angie Zelter. She is a Trident Ploughshares and Action AWE (Atomic Weapons Eradication) activist, so you can see where she comes from. But her book, which claims on the cover to be ‘the most important book you’ll never read’, acts as a checklist for all the factors that seem to be taking the world in the wrong directions. At the launch event I went to, Paul Rogers, of the department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, summed up most of it in the chilling phrase, ‘the bureaucratisation of homicide’.
The right to life
If you are an economist, you may see wars and disasters as undesirable because they remove producers and consumers from the world market. If you are an enlightened Western statesman, after two world wars, you may enshrine the right to life as a universal component of the rule of law. If you are a Quaker (or indeed any sort of Christian) you may seek to answer that of God in everyone – which, being interpreted, means that nobody is of no account.
The homicide from any nuclear release makes a mockery of the phrase ‘collateral damage’. The eighteen essays in the book certainly cover this. But they go further and wider. For one thing, any nuclear release or exchange would do far more environmental damage than simply sterilising the territory that was hit. Many in the world would starve. For the UK as a nuclear power, first use is inconceivable and second use mere murderous vengeance. The deterrent concept holds no water. It would not stop seekers after martyrdom. ‘Securing peace through fear’ does not guarantee either peace or security.
Nuclear power plants generate more fissile material (plutonium) than any Iranian enrichment programme, and it is hard to see how it can universally be contained or safeguarded. Even in ‘conventional’ warfare the use of radioactive materials is now commonplace. The war-torn Balkan lands are steeped in depleted uranium that was used to stop tanks and blast obstacles. The returning (noncombatant) inhabitants face a future of cancers and birth defects for years – indeed generations – to come.
The military-industrial complex
Paul Rogers, in the book, speaks of ‘liddism’ – the continuation of present policies as if no alternatives exist. There are threats even before we contemplate nuclear winter. Free-floating money, climate change and the globalisation of trade have ramped up inequality within nations and between the wider world’s communities. It is almost trite to speak of the seeds of conflict. The frantic pressure of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers is a symptom of the instabilities of governance and the struggle for resources (one of which will increasingly be water).
Where, also, does the bureaucratisation come in? For those locked into the miltary-industrial complex, both public sector and corporate, it is a matter of livelihood and career progression. If you are an engineer designing a missile system, you cannot stop to think what the payload might do if you want to keep your job. Even in the UK political arena, few ministers or officials have felt it safe to stand up against the uncollegiate administrations we now live with.
Livelihoods based on lies are a reality. This applies at the enterprise level too. Jacobs Engineering Group Inc, which has bought stakes in the privatisation of British Nuclear Fuels Limited and in the running of Aldermaston, has a stated objective of fifteen per cent growth a year. It cannot allow politicians to wind down the arms trade.
Militarisation
A sign of the militarisation of the UK is a ministerial statement that we should get more used to uniforms in the street. Anti-nuclear protesters are monitored and classed as ‘domestic extremists’. Bases, of which more and more are American, become harder to approach, though the book describes successful challenges. Much of this is in aid of global satellite surveillance with a view to military intervention, including extrajudicial killing by drones. A nightmare scenario is drone on drone wars, run from remote command stations manned as if they were office desks.
One can see no escape from a descent into a routine of political assassination unless the land mine ban is replicated for armed drones. The continued stand-off in the Ukraine has given a new sense of purpose to NATO.
But don’t look only Westwards for bureaucratic homicide. If you (whether Islamist or Marxist) believe that one day you will inherit the earth, you do not mind what you do to whom.
World agriculture may not be an immediate source of homicide, but the corporate bureaucratisation is alarming. We see monoculture ousting individual farmers, with single companies monopolising crop seeds made resistant by genetic modification to pesticides that the same firm sells. Biodiversity, where art thou?
One comforting chapter in the book, however, celebrates the role of women in the various manifestations of the peace movement.
The bureaucratisation of homicide
Three anecdotes not in the book reinforce its message. Firstly, Martin Bell’s 1996 book In Harm’s Way quotes an American marine trainee asked what he was being taught. ‘We kill people,’ he said, ‘and we blow things up.’ Secondly, president George W Bush in a 2002 clip in BBC2’s 2014 Afghanistan programme The Lion’s Last Roar says: ‘We’re not into nation building. We’re into justice.’
Finally, EP Thompson and Dan Smith edited Protest and Survive in 1980. It includes what may still be the best ever polemic against a British nuclear capability. But it also contains the account by Henry T Nash of his office task as an American enlisted man in the 1950s to identify cities in Russia that should be targets of retaliatory nuclear strikes. It was he who coined the term ‘the bureaucratisation of homicide.’
World in Chains: The Impact of Nuclear Weapons and Militarisation from a UK Perspective edited by Angie Zelter. Luath Press Ltd. ISBN: 9781910021033, £12.99.
