History Is Bunk

HISTORY IS BUNK!

Well, yes, OK... Maybe that does call for some explanation, or maybe even a retraction, because oviously history is an essential part of our lives. It is the memory of the life of the world. Without reference to it the human race would be helpless. What I am suggesting is something particular. It is this: that to use past history as the definitive indicator of how things are now and what should be done about them today, is a mistake.

The reason is, of course, that the world has changed rather a lot in recent times. Consequently, for nations and their leaders to go on using the ‘conventional wisdom’ of their time-honoured definitions and assumptions as an excuse to apply knee-jerk reactions to situations that arise today, can be blood-chillingly dangerous.

That may seem fairly obvious and I don’t expect many of us consciously do that sort of thing. But, although almost everybody, including politicians, analysts, advisors and academics, may do their best to examine and comment on current happenings in logical ways, their deliberations, like all human thoughts, are based on underlying assumptions that they have collected over time. These are the labelled packages and categories that we think with, the bed-rock on which our thought is based, and, understandably perhaps, we can be reluctant to open them and ask whether they are still valid.

Our language is riddled with pre-packaged concepts and, a bit like shopping in a supermarket, our casual thinking can often consist almost entirely in choosing, collecting and comparing the conveniently-labelled goods that happen to be about.

This very ordinary habit has long been exploited by the advertising industry and has turned into a fine art. More recently, this has been adopted and adapted by our government and refined into what is now called ‘spin’, a way of carefully crafting language so as to provide us with simple, plausible-sounding versions of events and situations which we can take on board without having to think. Their words and phrases are skillfully chosen to keep us complacent and confident in our fairly comfortable world. We don’t usually notice this because ours is a world in which whether or not the words we are offered are true rarely makes much difference to our lives. But, out in the real world, the way words are used or misused can make the difference between life and death.

Let me offer you a well-worn but terrible example of this.

Sixty years ago the Allies dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They called them the most powerful weapons in the world, and this was a perfectly true description – at the time. However, quite soon, the two politically opposed super-powers both possessed them and were thereby in a position to deliver what was called ‘unacceptable damage’ (ie, utter, total destruction) to each other in a matter of minutes.

That meant that nuclear weapons had ceased to be usable weapons of war and had become something else - instruments of mutually assured destruction (M.A.D).

From that moment on the nature of international relationships was changed in an absolutely fundamental way. The basic question of whether or not nuclear devices, which would utterly destroy both the receiver and the sender, could legitimately be classified as military weapons had to be considered, and considered urgently.

It was not considered. The ‘conventional military wisdom’ was that the more powerful a weapon was, the greater was its military value. The military strategists could not bring themselves to entertain the perception that suicidal nuclear bombs might not be classified as weapons, on the declared grounds that to admit this would be to render them defenceless!

So, as many of us will remember, this self-contradictory attitude brought on the Nuclear Arms Race of the Cold War; the decades during which instruments of Armageddon were stacked up, trigger-ready and targeted, in their thousands, with each side competing for superiority in their potential ability to blow up ever more of the already dead.

That was a terrifying period of human history, a time of complete international insanity. We are lucky to have survived.

Common-sense ultimately prevailed, the ‘doctrine of deterrence’ was established, non-proliferation treaties were agreed and the prospect of universal incineration gradually receded.

But not for ever. The word ‘weapon’ has remained.

Now that the memory of Hiroshima has begun to fade, several countries have recently set about acquiring for themselves a ‘Nuclear Weapon Capability’, apparently believing that, in some imponderable way, possession of these inherently suicidal instruments will bring them political and military power. The jubilation and the dancing in the streets that greeted Pakistan’s revelation that it now had nuclear weapons was chilling evidence of the durability of that misconception.

Thus, absurd as it may seem, the Pandora’s Box of nuclear peril has now been reopened, and our world is once again at risk to a nuclear holocaust. And this has happened basically because the military strategists have, for over half a century, consistently failed, or perhaps forgotten, to reconsider an out-of-date historical assumption in the light of a fundamentally changed situation, and as a result have persisted in using the wrong word to describe something that is infinitely more dangerous.

That is just one awesome example of continuing human folly, one which shows that life on earth is still in danger of being extinguished by a potty misuse of language.

It is important to bear in mind that in a democracy the priority of persons seeking or wishing to retain political power or office is not so much the welfare of the world as the need to persuade people to vote for them. Consequently much of what they say is directed inwards towards their particular electorate rather than outwards to the rest of the world.

For instance: after Nine-Eleven, President Bush resoundingly declared war on terrorism. That sounded good. The fact, obvious to most people, that the declaration made no sense, simply because you can’t wage war on something you can’t see, was presumably not as important to him as the need to deliver the traditionally-expected aggressive response to an attack and so maintain his public image as a brave leader.

Thus "war on terrorism" became the policy of the West, a misnomer that has made it difficult to entertain any solution, other than counter-violence, to the urgent task of identifying the complex grievances that give rise to that phenomenon.

President Bush went on to proclaim that Saddam Hussein, the despot of Iraq, was not only in league with the said terrorists but also possessed an arsenal of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ ready and waiting to be fired. Saddam Hussein was indeed a despot, but it was well known there was no clear evidence that he had any connections with terrorists or that he possessed, let alone might be mad enough to ‘use’, any such devices. However, once again, this truth was less important to President Bush than the need to identify a tangible enemy against whom he could exact revenge for the ignominy of Nine-Eleven and show his people that the United States was still the mightiest military power in the world.

To support his mission President Bush had announced a policy called ‘selective regime-change’. This buzz-phrase, when unwrapped, simply means that, without a shred of legitimacy, he, as President of the United States, has arrogated to himself the right to conquer any nation that does not have the sort of government which ‘shares US values’.

We know only too well what happened next. Against the will of the United Nations and perhaps half of the world, the US army, the mightiest military machine in the world, charged into Iraq to liberate its downtrodden people. Very soon, after not many (American) deaths, President Bush was able to stand triumphant under the banner: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and know that, in terms of ‘conventional military wisdom’, the war was won.

But, once again, the President’s strategists had failed to take into account the fact that, because of certain things that had been happening in the recent past, ‘conventional military wisdom’ had become, if you’ll pardon the expression, bunk.

Setting aside the fact that not knowing the language meant that the U.S forces could not distinguish friend from foe, discounting the fact that countless numbers of innocent people had been ‘collaterally’ killed and the infrastructure of the country ruptured, the simple truth that was waiting to greet the U.S forces once they had arrived in Iraq is that (except perhaps in certain very particular circumstances) war no longer works.

The conqueror had occupied the defeated nation, but he could not walk the streets.

He had proclaimed himself victor, but he had to cower in heavily-guarded fortresses. He may make occasional armoured sorties to inflict terrible damage and destruction, which serve to re-invigorate the hatred he has earned, but then he must retreat again.

Why must he do this?

Because if he didn’t he would be shot or blown to bits. Iraq, like much of the rest of the world, happens to be awash with modern, sophisticated small-arms and huge quantities of explosives, (much of which was originally manufactured by the sacred Arms Industry), and now every hatred-inspired zealot in the Middle East has homed in on Iraq to do his violent best to prevent the U.S. ‘imposing its values’ on that benighted land.

How did this come to pass?

It came to pass because President Bush, and indeed his friend and henchman Tony Blair, chose to believe the words that they wanted to believe, not those which were true. The words that had been selected for the President sounded great and rich and romantic. The Historic Mission of the great American nation was to liberate an oppressed people and bring its own brand of freedom and justice to their country and to the whole world. This was a challenge which the President heroically accepted. He will not flinch from carrying through the task that he has undertaken. He will not entertain the idea of failure.

In reality, although the Historic Mission has technically liberated an oppressed people, it has set them free into a land in which it has comprehensively shattered, a land where it is almost impossible to find a way to live, where no services work, where death may wait around every corner and there is no law. But even so the American people will still be told that they are steadfast and confident in its power-for-good.

Even though their heroic campaign is heading in the opposite direction, with its every military action being seen to drive the country further into hatred and despair, now, after many months of carnage, somehow, at any cost, the conquerors must cobble together some sort of civilian administration so that a form of words can be found with which the President will be able to proclaim that his Mission has been carried forward to ultimate triumph. This must be done, not because it is true but because, for this U.S Administration, that is the only version of history that will be acceptable. It will be so written and it will be bunk.

But the underlying message of the Iraq fiasco - that political power is no longer vested in a single nation’s superior ability to destroy - is not likely to be entertained, probably on the undeclared grounds that to do so might limit the United States’ capacity to dominate!

Today the true military reality (as distinct from the ‘conventional military wisdom’) is that modern armaments have been allowed to proliferate and develop to the point where they have largely defeated their own purpose. As the Russian proverb goes: "If you’ve given shotguns to the foxes, you don’t go hunting."

Military force can inflict terrible damage and cause great suffering, and where it is used by one belligerent nation (and a few co-opted allies) to force its will on another, it will inevitably inspire fierce implacable hatred and eventually fail, because nowadays the ‘enemy’ will always be well enough equipped to be able to disperse and retaliate piecemeal with renewed hatred. So, quite simply, without the united, considered, whole-hearted sanction of the rest of the world, there is no longer anything to be gained by attacking in the first place.

This situation is, in a very real sense, similar to the impasse that was faced by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s in order to end the insanity of the Nuclear Arms Race. Facing and dealing with it calls for a similar solution: the application of respect, collaboration, generosity and common-sense.

The first step towards that must be a rejection of bluster, brave fancy and the convenience-packaging of weasel-words, coupled with a genuine readiness to recognise and accept the full reality of a situation, whatever it may be. And maybe the first step we ourselves can take towards that is to stop being hoodwinked, to give up blandly accepting everything we are told by our ‘tricksy’ government and, instead, look closely at what they say and ask ourselves three questions: 1. Is it true? 2. Does it make sense? and 3. Has something important been conveniently missed out? And lastly, above all, whatever our party-political feelings, we must remember never to give our vote to somebody who tells, or is seen to have told, lies.

This unseemly behaviour may well be seen by our leaders as inconvenient, perhaps too inconvenient for many of them to cope with. But the future of the human race, if it is to have one, actually lies in our own hands, in the hands of ordinary people, the ones who will choose and elect the men and women whose job it will be to run the world fairly and sensibly.

That, I understand, is what democracy is about.

Oliver Postgate

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