Of all the treasures unearthed by June’s General Election perhaps the most encouraging is the public’s endorsement of a compassionate and gentle-natured politician. “Weak! Weak! Weak!” cried the political classes. You can’t succeed in politics without being ruthless. Criticism can’t be countered with mere reason. You need withering put-downs, personal slurs, something acerbic for your supporters to bray-to in the House.
Well, fingers crossed, the public seems to be losing faith in this rule. Rather than ask why, perhaps it makes more sense to ask, ‘why not sooner?’ Why is our politics, supposedly rational democratic politics, dominated by aggressive players? Why does spitefulness win the cheers in Parliament, rather than compassion?
Odd as it might sound, I suspect it is rooted in the martial origins of our democracy. It’s easy to forget (or indeed die without realising) that our current aristocracy are the descendants of warriors, the marshal caste. Certainly, the appearance and behaviour of our own Queen Elizabeth (House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) does little to betray her ancestral origins – middle-class grandmotherlyness is more the pitch. But such modern exceptions prove the rule. As the political power of the nobility transferred to the commons the brutality of our aristocracy lost its use and evaporated. Rather than organising rape and genocide expeditions across the Middle-East, the modern Knight is more likely to be found sharing vacuuming duties in a National Trust property, before sharing a ploughman’s with the head gardener (“such glorious sunshine, Tom”).
By contrast, the lords and ladies who held political power prior to our elected MPs did so by force of violence. There was nothing gentle about those gentlemen. They killed their way to the top, and maintained their lead by the same means. This was nothing uniquely British or even uniquely European of course. In their own lands, the Hindu Kshatriya and Japanese Samurai filled a strikingly similar upper-class role to our own Knights and Barons, Kings and Queens. All too often, it seems, human societies have been forced (or inclined) to relinquish political sovereignty to brutes.
Of course there was more to kingship than terrorising the peasantry. There was also the guise of protector. The wise prince presented himself (and his barons and soldiers) as indispensable to the safety and security of his land and subjects. This provided cover for less noble pursuits – personal enrichment for example. Theft, piracy, and the enslavement of other peoples could all be practiced in the name of security, and sanctified by the grace of some old god or other. Indeed, when no external threat could be found, the benevolent king could send his troops into foreign lands to protect and liberate foreign subjects from the tyranny of their own leaders.
Sound familiar? It seems our democracy inherited some of the values and strategies of its aristocratic predecessors. As the sword of state (sword, you note) passed from aristocracy to commons, along with it went the intention to wield it – rather than smelt it. The aggression that characterises current political discourse is just the outer layer of a political culture obsessed with violence, the political necessity of violence. We need Trident missiles. How else would we stay safe on our walk to the food bank? We need to bomb foreign lands to prevent the ‘radicalisation’ of citizens in our midst. We need to sell weaponry to terrorist states to keep our economy afloat. Anything else would be irresponsible, idealistic, cowardly.
And who best to captain manoeuvres? A warrior-king of course. A political heavyweight who can stand twelve rounds against Pugilistic Paxman and Hectoring Humphrys. A modern Odysseus who can skip the verbal tripwires of the Kuenssberg and deflect the incredulous sneers of the Maitliss.
Such journalists are of course integral to the problem – which is why they were so baffled by the election result. They’d laboured hard to strip all political content from their scripts – and this was the thanks they got. They’d successfully condensed several millennia of political thought into a single leadership trait: are you tough enough? Are you a tough enough negotiator? How would you ‘deal with’ Assad and Putin and Kim Jong-un? Would you press the button? Would you vaporise other nations to protect your nation? Would you shoot to kill? Would you strike first?
Toughness. What more is there to ask of a king? And yet here was a large section of the public taking a perverse interest in manifesto content; distracted by such esoteric issues as health, housing and quality of life; attracted by talk of arms reduction, repelled by the prospect of endless campaigns of bombing and invasion.
If the warrior’s spell is finally breaking it can’t happen soon enough. The noble politics of greed and brutality has pushed us to the brink. The world urgently needs thoughtful, compassionate, feminised politics. Here’s hoping.
Thursday 31 August 2017
Monday 6 March 2017
Therapy for sufferers of Military-Industrial Complex
Behold, the mother of all no-brainers: If national and global security are our primary concern, why don’t we cancel Trident and spend the money on averting the impending climate catastrophe?
We British endlessly bang on about our technological brilliance, our illustrious history of scientific discovery. Well, why not prove it? Why not apply all these PhDs and countless billions in frittered taxes towards tackling the greatest, scientifically recognised, threat to human survival? The potential benefits are without parallel. We could save the world – the principal goal of all superheroes. In the more short-term, we could cut greenhouse gasses and reduce our reliance on fuels from volatile regions. We could stop putting money into the hands of those with a track record of terrorism, both state and retail. We could create new domestic industries, ones that would engage citizens in something moral and socially useful. We could spread our sanity globally through cheap access to our discoveries.
Pitched shrewdly, it’s a policy that could have widespread appeal. To the delight of leftists and UKIP-ers alike, we could become a more independent, capable, self-sufficient nation, a beacon for other nations to look-up to. Millennials, particularly, would love it. It would permit them a future. They’d vote for it in droves.
So why isn’t so? How is it that even the most peacenik Labour leadership since the 1980s dare not pick-up this idea and run with it? How is it that the bravest thing they can suggest is the second most stupid idea after renewing Trident? – renewing Trident without the war-heads. What madness is this?
As a fitting pun, we could label it military-industrial complex, with Britain currently suffering a mental health epidemic second only to the US. Eisenhower’s warning was not heeded. We have allowed a dark alliance of industry and military to take over our economy, take over our politics, take over our minds. In its mundane quest to enrich a modest number of shareholders, the arms industry has turned us into a nation of gibbering idiots, incapable of recognising real threats from fabricated ones, preferring to dive for dear life when we could be diving for pearls.
As ex-imperialists, we are soft prey for this kind of marketing. A country that once dominated the globe now finds itself privatised, its component parts sold-off to the highest global bidder. Aside from Adele’s CD sales figures, there isn’t much left to feel proud about, so we are suckers for anything that rings of continuity with past glory. Obviously, our industrial greatness is long gone – our standing army of shelf-stackers, baristas, Deliveroo-istas and mobile nail technicians testify to that. But military greatness is more ethereal, a less gaugeable quality and an easier lie to sell.
The overt lie is that our military spending allows us to remain a major player on the world stage. Our arms and armies protect us, keep us safe and selflessly defend the liberty of others – look no further than the peace and liberty bestowed upon Ireland for 3 decades, and more recently brought to Iraq, Libya, Syria. Suckled on an endless loop of Dad’s Army repeats, we are suckers for a self-image of stoicism in the face of ‘foreign’ adversaries, regardless of any of genuine parallel with our own plight or conduct. Seventy years on, with no fathomable justification, the cult of Winston Churchill is at an all-time peak. It’s certainly far stronger than when my parents’ generation politely asked him to step down in 1945. I don’t know what they’d make of it.
Behind this puff-chested pride, lurk more base lures – principally the desire to look tough. Guns and soldiers are sexy, hard, macho; they appeal to the adolescent male still lurking inside too many British grown-ups. Pride in one’s ability to instil fear is not restricted to the BNP and EDF. Secretly, many Britons love the thought that their country is tough: a huge pair of fists confidently striding across the globe – ‘Does anybody want some!?’
It’s all a dream of course. Like the anorexic, British patriotism is blind to its own emaciation. Rather than an illusion of obesity it’s an illusion of rippling vitality that smiles back from the mirror, its decency hidden only by the tightest of Union Jack Speedos.
Meanwhile the arms companies prattle-on about how important they are to the economy. To our shame, in a sense this is true. Against our better judgement, we have overfed this cuckoo to the detriment of much else. But gross immorality should not be excused on the basis of its economic importance. This noble industry is currently arming ‘22 of the 30 countries on the UK Government’s own human rights watch list’. Defending that level of depravity on the grounds of economic necessity is no better than defending human slavery of the basis of its economic importance – which of course is exactly what the anti-abolitionists did argue at the time.
Interestingly enough, the United States’ economy did not crash and burn subsequent to abolition. The US seems to have come out of the 19th century rather plump. And besides, Trident isn’t even private enterprise – this is tax payers money. Since when did monetarists prop-up industries that could not otherwise sell their goods? Isn’t that argument antithetical to everything we’ve been told about economics for the past forty years? Furthermore, since when did ‘leftist’ trade union leaders put the employment security of their members ahead of the ‘existence security’ of their brothers and sisters abroad? A fine show of international solidarity, I’m sure comrade Marx would be very impressed.
I’d cheer to see the whole arms industry go bust. It can rot in hell for all I care. It is awful to lose your job, of course, but there are much worse things you can lose. Perhaps we could temper the images of crestfallen workers, clutching their redundancy notices, with images of limbless Yemeni children? Perhaps those children could be shown the footage of the British factory closing its gates for the last time, the one that played such a decisive role in their lives, and be given the opportunity to express their sorrow at this sad turn of events?
The good news for Trident workers, however, is that it doesn’t have to end this way. To repeat, Trident money is tax payers money. We can spend it as we want. If we can invest it in a fantasy Armageddon protection system we can equally invest it in protecting ourselves against a genuine existential threat. All those workers – and more – can stay in work, doing something profitable in every sense; something useful, with potential for growth, rather than something useless with a chance of genocide.
It really isn’t so farfetched. Bernie Sanders was ten points clear of Trump nationally, running on a ticket that openly advocated such strategies: Rein-in the military and invest the savings in halting climate change. But for the idiot DNC, and their blind loyalty to a toxic candidate, by now Bernie might well have been getting this vital transfer of industrial priorities underway.
Neither BP nor BAE have any interest in world peace or the reduction in use of fossil fuels; quite the opposite. One company makes its money from oil, the other makes its money from selling the weaponry synonymous with securing foreign oil. We need to slacken the grip of these snakes. Beating Trident missiles into climate ploughshares would be a wonderful, and logical, first step.
Pitched shrewdly, it’s a policy that could have widespread appeal. To the delight of leftists and UKIP-ers alike, we could become a more independent, capable, self-sufficient nation, a beacon for other nations to look-up to. Millennials, particularly, would love it. It would permit them a future. They’d vote for it in droves.
So why isn’t so? How is it that even the most peacenik Labour leadership since the 1980s dare not pick-up this idea and run with it? How is it that the bravest thing they can suggest is the second most stupid idea after renewing Trident? – renewing Trident without the war-heads. What madness is this?
As a fitting pun, we could label it military-industrial complex, with Britain currently suffering a mental health epidemic second only to the US. Eisenhower’s warning was not heeded. We have allowed a dark alliance of industry and military to take over our economy, take over our politics, take over our minds. In its mundane quest to enrich a modest number of shareholders, the arms industry has turned us into a nation of gibbering idiots, incapable of recognising real threats from fabricated ones, preferring to dive for dear life when we could be diving for pearls.
As ex-imperialists, we are soft prey for this kind of marketing. A country that once dominated the globe now finds itself privatised, its component parts sold-off to the highest global bidder. Aside from Adele’s CD sales figures, there isn’t much left to feel proud about, so we are suckers for anything that rings of continuity with past glory. Obviously, our industrial greatness is long gone – our standing army of shelf-stackers, baristas, Deliveroo-istas and mobile nail technicians testify to that. But military greatness is more ethereal, a less gaugeable quality and an easier lie to sell.
The overt lie is that our military spending allows us to remain a major player on the world stage. Our arms and armies protect us, keep us safe and selflessly defend the liberty of others – look no further than the peace and liberty bestowed upon Ireland for 3 decades, and more recently brought to Iraq, Libya, Syria. Suckled on an endless loop of Dad’s Army repeats, we are suckers for a self-image of stoicism in the face of ‘foreign’ adversaries, regardless of any of genuine parallel with our own plight or conduct. Seventy years on, with no fathomable justification, the cult of Winston Churchill is at an all-time peak. It’s certainly far stronger than when my parents’ generation politely asked him to step down in 1945. I don’t know what they’d make of it.
Behind this puff-chested pride, lurk more base lures – principally the desire to look tough. Guns and soldiers are sexy, hard, macho; they appeal to the adolescent male still lurking inside too many British grown-ups. Pride in one’s ability to instil fear is not restricted to the BNP and EDF. Secretly, many Britons love the thought that their country is tough: a huge pair of fists confidently striding across the globe – ‘Does anybody want some!?’
It’s all a dream of course. Like the anorexic, British patriotism is blind to its own emaciation. Rather than an illusion of obesity it’s an illusion of rippling vitality that smiles back from the mirror, its decency hidden only by the tightest of Union Jack Speedos.
Meanwhile the arms companies prattle-on about how important they are to the economy. To our shame, in a sense this is true. Against our better judgement, we have overfed this cuckoo to the detriment of much else. But gross immorality should not be excused on the basis of its economic importance. This noble industry is currently arming ‘22 of the 30 countries on the UK Government’s own human rights watch list’. Defending that level of depravity on the grounds of economic necessity is no better than defending human slavery of the basis of its economic importance – which of course is exactly what the anti-abolitionists did argue at the time.
Interestingly enough, the United States’ economy did not crash and burn subsequent to abolition. The US seems to have come out of the 19th century rather plump. And besides, Trident isn’t even private enterprise – this is tax payers money. Since when did monetarists prop-up industries that could not otherwise sell their goods? Isn’t that argument antithetical to everything we’ve been told about economics for the past forty years? Furthermore, since when did ‘leftist’ trade union leaders put the employment security of their members ahead of the ‘existence security’ of their brothers and sisters abroad? A fine show of international solidarity, I’m sure comrade Marx would be very impressed.
I’d cheer to see the whole arms industry go bust. It can rot in hell for all I care. It is awful to lose your job, of course, but there are much worse things you can lose. Perhaps we could temper the images of crestfallen workers, clutching their redundancy notices, with images of limbless Yemeni children? Perhaps those children could be shown the footage of the British factory closing its gates for the last time, the one that played such a decisive role in their lives, and be given the opportunity to express their sorrow at this sad turn of events?
The good news for Trident workers, however, is that it doesn’t have to end this way. To repeat, Trident money is tax payers money. We can spend it as we want. If we can invest it in a fantasy Armageddon protection system we can equally invest it in protecting ourselves against a genuine existential threat. All those workers – and more – can stay in work, doing something profitable in every sense; something useful, with potential for growth, rather than something useless with a chance of genocide.
It really isn’t so farfetched. Bernie Sanders was ten points clear of Trump nationally, running on a ticket that openly advocated such strategies: Rein-in the military and invest the savings in halting climate change. But for the idiot DNC, and their blind loyalty to a toxic candidate, by now Bernie might well have been getting this vital transfer of industrial priorities underway.
Neither BP nor BAE have any interest in world peace or the reduction in use of fossil fuels; quite the opposite. One company makes its money from oil, the other makes its money from selling the weaponry synonymous with securing foreign oil. We need to slacken the grip of these snakes. Beating Trident missiles into climate ploughshares would be a wonderful, and logical, first step.
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