‘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.
