Peace and Arms

‘The war challenges my pacifism,’ Paula our Pastoral Assistant and former Mayor told me when I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago. ‘when I hear the Ukrainians have managed to shoot another Russian general, I can’t help being pleased.’ I have a great sympathy with pacifism: I accept that most wars solve nothing on their own, and are better not fought at all even if not doing so results in a temporary loss of something you value. But pacifism has no answer once fighting starts; its best case is to build up a culture in which conflicts are managed by negotiation rather than arms, and that needs a long time, and favourable institutions which some states do not have.

The last few years since the election of Mr Trump have made me reflect how fragile those free institutions are, and how slender our grasp can be on the things that allow us to live relatively free of fear, and to have a tolerable degree of autonomy and agency; I have come to think, in fact, that any liberal state, no matter how stable and secure it seems, no matter how longstanding its institutions and structures might be, is at most only (say) four elections away from fascism. By ‘fascism’ I mean a state whose governing elite maintains power by violence (including war with other states), and protects its interests by undermining law, personal autonomy, security and property, and free expression, and works to stop its citizens even thinking about any alternative way of living (which is why they always hate gays so much). What such a state says it believes is irrelevant: look at Russia, which seems to have convinced itself that Russian nationalism is in truth no nationalism at all, but a kind of neutral position against which any other kind of independent communal expression is ‘Nazism’, and then reads this back into the history of the Soviet Union (reconceived as a sort of pan-Asian EU with added poverty) and the Russian Empire before it. This stuff means nothing, and results merely in subverting any useful understanding of words (the Russians refer to liberal movements in places such as Moldova as ‘the right’ and their own nationalist proxies as ‘the left’). Fascism isn’t fundamentally about ideology, which is just set-dressing for the self-interest of fascist elites: it’s about practice.

So what do you do in response? You regard it as important, in the first place. I got into a mild spat online with left-wing Goth friend Comrade TartanVamp who argued, regarding the French elections, that Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen are both enemies of the workers and that had he been French he probably would have stayed at home or spoiled his ballot paper. I, and Ms Mauritia, who has skin in the game being both of French-colonial extraction and a minority ethnicity, and having a home in France (in a Le Pen-voting area), couldn’t help arguing that this was a bit complacent. If you can’t see that a France run by Ms Le Pen would have taken a huge step away from civilisation and towards a place where a step wrong could land you in a windowless basement in the middle of the night having your teeth wrenched out with pliers, you need to recalibrate your political compass. If you are sufficiently left-wing you might want to say the difference between Macron and Le Pen is one of degree and not kind: I would argue it’s so big a degree it doesn’t matter. Perhaps such fears haunt me because I am comfortable, middle-class and privileged; perhaps the poor wouldn’t care so much. I don’t think that’s the case, though. The poor may have less to lose, but everyone wants to keep their teeth. And authoritarianism advancing anywhere threatens liberty everywhere: the poor always suffer most from it.

You are also prepared to engage in hybrid warfare, which aims to steer clear of armed conflict, certainly, but recognises that in extreme cases this might be necessary. Part of hybrid warfare is actively, consciously, shoring up the civil institutions of a free society. Every time you insist on truth, on individual autonomy, on free expression, you strike a blow against the enemy. I don’t think our Prime Minister is anything like an authoritarian, and forced to make a choice between him and Ms Le Pen I would plonk my cross in the JOHNSON box not only with reluctant acquiescence but with firm conviction that it was the right thing to do. But, with other choices on offer, he isn’t what we need. His disregard for law, his scorn for truth, weakens our defences against fascism every minute he and the crooks around him remain in office. He is wrong for this time of danger: and for freedom, it is always a time of danger.

Back to pacifism, where we started. Pacifism must explain how, absent any form of force, bad regimes change. I’ve sort of assumed in the past that every tyrannical polity contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction and what you have to do is sit out the pain and wait for the inevitable collapse; but, thinking about it, I am not sure I can point to a clear example of this happening, and I’m not sure I even know what it means. Instead, bad regimes are always forced out. Extinction Rebellion (to pick a radical group) was founded on the assumption that governing elites always cave in given enough mass protest, but I think experience belies this. You need a governing elite that has some sense of shame, that knows it’s subject to electoral displeasure, and that is reluctant simply to kill people who oppose it: not all are. In the UK, the Government tries changing the law to stop XR doing what it wants, but it's still a legal organisation, and I can stand speaking to a local councillor or police officer in Swanvale Halt with an XR sticker on my cycle helmet without any fear that I'm going to be dragged from my home at night and thrown into that windowless basement to the hazard of my teeth. XR have managed to have a significant degree of leverage in the UK; in Belarus, we'd all have been imprisoned or shot. Regimes like that don’t spontaneously crumble, they need a crumbling agent to make them.

What does the Scripture say? Only this morning I was reading Jeremiah’s jeremiads against the land of Moab, predicting what God was about to do to it for its oppression of the Israelites. The notion of cyclical regime change is very much there in the prophetic writings, and once they are ousted from possession of the land the Israelites are indeed told simply to wait until God takes his vengeance on their enemies and they are vindicated. But, disconcertingly, on a national level at least, violence is always involved in this process, and the Lord does not seem squeamish about it. Biblical regime change doesn’t happen by magic. In what seems like a miracle, the Israelites are sent back from exile to Jerusalem by Cyrus the Mede to rebuild the Temple, but the only reason Cyrus is there to send them is that his father Darius invaded Babylon and killed its king: violence being violently chastised.

Better red than dead, I would always argue, but how do we judge when conflict is avoidable, or when it can succeed? Is this the moment of choice, or this? I wish there was a blueprint.