Reith Lectures - War and Humanity

[DracoM]

Nobody is disputing the validity of the enterprise, or her researches.
I sense that what some are asking is why such manifestly unsurprising, nay even commonplace, [so far] 'findings', as presented on the BBC justify a Reith Lecture status.

I find S-A's arguments as presented on this Forum more challenging and more worthy of debate.

[richardfinegold]

Nobody is disputing the validity of the enterprise, or her researches.
I sense that what some are asking is why such manifestly unsurprising, nay even commonplace, [so far] 'findings', as presented on the BBC justify a Reith Lecture status.

I find S-A's arguments as presented on this Forum more challenging and more worthy of debate.

I think it is wrong, and perhaps somewhat arrogant, to describe her conclusions as “commonplace”. When Leaders foment Wars (and no one here is disputing S-A point that Wars are terrible events, but if we are looking for an ‘unsurprising’ and ‘commonplace’ observation on this thread, I nominate said observation as the Prime Candidate), they mobilize the emotions of Masses of People by convincing them that aggression is morally justified. I cannot recall any case of a War being fomented with the slogan “Invade our enemy, and when the War is over, if you survive, you will have drinking buddies for Life”. Hitler and his cronies may have thought that the Creation Of solidarity in Arms was a desirable byproduct of War, but that wasn’t the featured appeal of their propaganda.
Many people may take her arguments as foregone conclusions, but it is far from Universal. The more people who realize that the grand justifications for conflict begin to appear ridiculous when the actual mangling commences, and that the more desirable byproducts of conflict—namely, social bonding—can be achieved by more peaceable means, the better off we will all be, and perhaps avoid a conflict or two, although I agree with Richard T that War always has and always will be part of the Human Condition. I see no harm in Dr MacMillian being given a forum for airing her conclusions.
Of course I’m not a Citizen of the U.K. and I don’t know what Reith Lecture is or what is an appropriate topic for it. However today is July 4, and we are commemorating a War here, which to 21st Century eyes, seems to rank highly in the list of unjustifiable aggressions. That however, might be the Topic of another thread

[jean]

I think it is wrong, and perhaps somewhat arrogant, to describe her conclusions as “commonplace”...

It is wrong certainly, because if she is right and there really are perceived benefits to war on an individual or communal level, this is something we have not really been permitted to acknowledge for about a century - but if it is true, we had better speak about it, or wars will continue to catch us unawares.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had recently with a Kurdish woman I know. I was reiterating the received wisdom that the Iraq war was a piece of unrelieved evil.

Don't ever let my father hear you say that, she said. To him, Tony Blair is a god.

[aeolium]

It is wrong certainly, because if she is right and there really are perceived benefits to war on an individual or communal level, this is something we have not really been permitted to acknowledge for about a century - but if it is true, we had better speak about it, or wars will continue to catch us unawares.

Surely there are many examples of this, for instance women getting the vote here in 1918, the welfare state post-1945 (how long would that have taken to come about without the 2nd war?), numerous medical and technological improvements, and as Prof MacMillan indicated, the enormous organisational requirements of war in the age of nationalism demanded investment in education, science, technology etc.

I think the "commonplace" view about war nowadays is that it is evil, barbaric, irrational and so obviously damaging and destructive that it is incomprehensible why people would ever fight, which really achieves nothing towards understanding why there are so many wars, what is the motivation, why people have found war exhilarating, why there have been and still are militaristic cultures. Comments like "the real pretexts for war, which are based on power, position, money, and access to information (read propaganda) control and dissemination" do not begin to illuminate the complexity and deep historical roots that lie behind some of the most intractable conflicts. The last thing we need is an ahistorical approach, whose disastrous effects we have seen with Bush/Blair's Middle Eastern interventions. And that is why I, at least, value the contribution of a historian for these Reith Lectures (unbelievable to me that some people are questioning her right to give them ).

[Serial_Apologist]

It is wrong certainly, because if she is right and there really are perceived benefits to war on an individual or communal level, this is something we have not really been permitted to acknowledge for about a century - but if it is true, we had better speak about it, or wars will continue to catch us unawares.

Would the latter really matter if there are perceived benefits that cannot be obtained by means other than wars??? Once we start going down that excuse-laden road, even a short distance, we really are on a very slippery slope.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had recently with a Kurdish woman I know. I was reiterating the received wisdom that the Iraq war was a piece of unrelieved evil.

Don't ever let my father hear you say that, she said. To him, Tony Blair is a god.

The only occasion, post-WW2, I can think of, when for a majority population an invading army was probably a welcome change from an incumbent régime, is the Viet Cong's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge. I've tried linking to the Wiki article but my computer seems to lack a double-length hyphen.

[jean]

I think the "commonplace" view about war nowadays is that it is evil, barbaric, irrational and so obviously damaging and destructive that it is incomprehensible why people would ever fight, which really achieves nothing towards understanding why there are so many wars, what is the motivation, why people have found war exhilarating, why there have been and still are militaristic cultures.

That's exactly what I meant.

The last thing we need is an ahistorical approach, whose disastrous effects we have seen with Bush/Blair's Middle Eastern interventions.

But as I said above, however badly managed and historically uninformed, it's impossible to ignore the fact the the Bush/Blair Iraq adventure hugely benefited the Kurds.

[jean]

The only occasion, post-WW2, I can think of, when for a majority population an invading army was probably a welcome change from an incumbent régime, is the Viet Cong's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge...

But I've just given you another!

[Serial_Apologist]

That's exactly what I meant.

But as I said above, however badly managed and historically uninformed, it's impossible to ignore the fact the the Bush/Blair Iraq adventure hugely benefited the Kurds.

So, as long as someone, somewhere, is advantaged, we can dispense with value judgements.

[Serial_Apologist]

But I've just given you another!

Thank you - my wit is slow.

[jean]

So, as long as someone, somewhere, is advantaged, we can dispense with value judgements.

Not just someone, somewhere, but someone who has been cruelly oppressed in the past, and is now immeasurably better off as a byproduct of our adventure.

Though I feel bound to point out that, as the article I linked to above wisely says,

...relying on the collateral benefits of warfare is a little like waiting for a jail to catch on fire so your wrongly imprisoned friend can escape. It's dangerous and not terribly reliable...

But it's not a question ofvalue judgments exactly, is it?

[Serial_Apologist]

Not just someone, somewhere, but someone who has been cruelly oppressed in the past, and is now immeasurably better off as a byproduct of our adventure.

Though I feel bound to point out that, as the article I linked to above wisely says,

...relying on the collateral benefits of warfare is a little like waiting for a jail to catch on fire so your wrongly imprisoned friend can escape. It's dangerous and not terribly reliable...

But it's not a question ofvalue judgments exactly, is it?

It depends on the reach of the matter over which one can deliberate one's value judgement, doesn't it? My own view has long been that it's a shame "the Left" doesn't campaign on matters other than defined by Western interests - and not just because it allows The Daily Wail and other right wing organs to accuse us of not campaigning on the forcible suppression of women's rights in Muslim countries for PC reasons: The Kurds being one such overlooked (by the Left) group. Advantages obtaining to one group at the expense of massive, often untold disadvantages to many others, is one value judgement one is obligated to make in weighing up the balance of probable outcomes. Unless one believes in total wipout as a viable way out of an untenable situation, these are considerations one takes into account when supporting resistance in the forms it takes.

[Richard Tarleton]

It depends on the reach of the matter over which one can deliberate one's value judgement, doesn't it? My own view has long been that it's a shame "the Left" doesn't campaign on matters other than defined by Western interests - and not just because it allows The Daily Wail and other right wing organs to accuse us of not campaigning on the forcible suppression of women's rights in Muslim countries for PC reasons: The Kurds being one such overlooked (by the Left) group. Advantages obtaining to one group at the expense of massive, often untold disadvantages to many others, is one value judgement one is obligated to make in weighing up the balance of probable outcomes. Unless one believes in total wipout as a viable way out of an untenable situation, these are considerations one takes into account when supporting resistance in the forms it takes.

S_A, as with your first post on this thread I'm struggling to understand exactly what you're saying here , starting with what you mean by "the Left". What is "the Left"? Was (e.g.) Stalin "the Left"? What advantages accrued, and to whom, for example, in Stalin's occupation of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany etc. in the aftermath of World War 2? I suppose you could say the advantages accrued to the Western allies whose casualties in the course of the defeat of Nazi Germany were kept to a minimum by 9/10ths of the Wermacht being tied up on the Eastern Front, fighting the Red Army. Unfortunately none of the advantages accrued to the populations of said countries, whose occupation was the price to be paid for the defeat of Hitler and the alliance with Stalin.

[jean]

I don't think I understand this bit (even if I assume you mean the Left as it exists in Western Europe, now).

It is certainly sometimes argued that women's rights are a peculiarly Western preoccupation, and we should leave other cultures to manage their own affairs. Is that what you mean?

But either way, the Kurds haven't got a particularly bad record on women's rights.

...My own view has long been that it's a shame "the Left" doesn't campaign on matters other than defined by Western interests - and not just because it allows The Daily Wail and other right wing organs to accuse us of not campaigning on the forcible suppression of women's rights in Muslim countries for PC reasons: The Kurds being one such overlooked (by the Left) group...

[Serial_Apologist]

S_A, as with your first post on this thread I'm struggling to understand exactly what you're saying here , starting with what you mean by "the Left". What is "the Left"? Was (e.g.) Stalin "the Left"? What advantages accrued, and to whom, for example, in Stalin's occupation of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany etc. in the aftermath of World War 2? I suppose you could say the advantages accrued to the Western allies whose casualties in the course of the defeat of Nazi Germany were kept to a minimum by 9/10ths of the Wermacht being tied up on the Eastern Front, fighting the Red Army. Unfortunately none of the advantages accrued to the populations of said countries, whose occupation was the price to be paid for the defeat of Hitler and the alliance with Stalin.

From the perspective of the Bolshevik Revolution, as a good Trotskyist (or what remains of one!) I and others of my political ilk would argue that the socialisation of the means of production and distribution achieved by the Russian revolution was an advantage to humanity as a whole, worldwide, inasmuch as it deprived western capitalist interests of a large territorial area from expansion and exploitation, and, potentially, allowed for lessons to be learned from its consequences.

Trotsky characterised the Russian Revolution as establishing a workers state, which thereafter, in the wake of the civil war launched by the White armies with the support of Britain and other western countries, degenerated; he was executed by order of Stalin for proclaiming the Fourth International with the aim of (a) restoring the active principle of proletarian internationalism to a movement that had been usurped by those prioritising defense of the USSR above all other considerations, and (b) calling for the overthrow of the bureaucracy and restitution of the grass-roots-based democratic forms instituted in the course of overthowing the Kerensky regime in 1917, in what he characterised as a political revolution, ie a revolution to restore workers control - the original meaning of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - over the already socialised processes of wealth creation and distribution.

Whether or not under any circumstances violent revolution can or should be countenanced might be a discussion outwith the province of this one, save for the obvious observation that it will likely lead to civil war, and that is war. Since, however, we're talking here about advantages and disadvantages, on the left acros the world the abolitions of private in favour of nationalised ownership were regarded as a plus, analogous to how socialists in Britain regard the NHS as a plus in terms of one area of life being socialised to the advantage of a population living under an otherwise still capitalist mode of ownership and production etc., and as a model from which lessons are to be derived for better practice The occupation of the E Bloc countries consequent on the Roosevelt/Stalin Pact extended this reality geographically. For the people of the Soviets and satellite states the foregoing advantages were eclipsed by the rise of Stalin and, leaving aside () issues of human and democratic rights, the concomitant rise of the bureaucracy. Without needing to follow the various leftist and rightist turns pursued tactically to defend its privileged hold over all levels of society, one can designate the Communist Party of the USSR as right wing, in the context of a society socialist only in name.

As to who benefitted from the demise of the Soviet Bloc, one can clearly point to the western capitalist interests keen to exploit the cheap sources of labour power and natural resources, their state sponsors, and the erstwhile Soviet bureaucrats whose knowledge and expertise in running things and dominating people has proved of benefit to the new ruling class that has emanated therefrom, but not anybody else; the world could have benefitted by supporting Gorbachev in his efforts to re-democratise his country and proffering advice and assistance in cleaning up the ecological disaster zone that resulted from the indiscriminate industrialisation instituted in the 1930s to " keep up" with the west, in Stalin's terms, when other approaches to development could have been pursued, drawing on Russia's natural advantages and mitigating its geographical disadvantages in the way Canada, for instance has in relation to its native peoples, as far as that has gone. Clandestine links were being made between scientists in the East and West well prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall that are rarely spoken of - I know of otherwise scientifically professionally qualified people in the jazz world who were involved in planning for a more rational future, both in terms of how the E Bloc could be sustainably developed under human rights-observed conventions and through furthering cultural exchanges; one could have envisaged equivalents of the Spanish Brigades and all those volunteers who went over to Cuba to help build its infrastructures anew after the Castro revolution: environmentalists with know-how regarding plants capable of filtering toxins out of polluted lakes, and building or renewing tired estates with new, safe, sustainable materials, for instance. T'wasn't to be: the "west" was too eager to advantage itself by getting its mitts on the aftermath and on its own terms. That's what the world is up against...

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't think I understand this bit (even if I assume you mean the Left as it exists in Western Europe, now).

It is certainly sometimes argued that women's rights are a peculiarly Western preoccupation, and we should leave other cultures to manage their own affairs. Is that what you mean?

Yes. There is a widely held assumption that we - the "left", or anybody in the west - have no business criticising cultures other than our own, having at least in part polluted those cultures in the process of trying to impose our own at some colonial or neocolonial stage via the gun, the Bible, and consumerism, and not acknowledged this properly until PC offered some guidelines. I suppose this is one accounting for postmodern "relativism", in the absence of one that makes more sense! Actually, come to think of it, consumerism would seem the one value "we" have no qualms about imposing, since it brings "our" (shareholders') companies much-needed profits. Perhaps I should have written "tourism".

But either way, the Kurds haven't got a particularly bad record on women's rights.

That's as I have assumed. I was thinking of the Kurds in terms of broader principles I was putting forward, in my usual clumsy way!