War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

… There’s got to be a better way.

When I was a student in England in the mid-1980s I joined hundreds of thousands of people on marches organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). I remember too making a trip to show support to the women camping on Greenham Common, set up outside a US military base to protest against US Cruise missiles being located there. Such was the determination of the women that the peace camp, which started in 1981, lasted for 19 years. 

During the 1970s and 1980s the peace movement in developed countries seemed to be at its strongest, most visible, vocal and most radical. 

Protest inspired popular art and art in turn inspired protest. The band Frankie Goes to Hollywood covered the Temptations’ song, War, adding the refrain “there’s got to be a better way”. Elvis Costello sang (What’s so funny) ‘bout Peace, Love and Understanding.

During the second half of the 20th century, and after the end of the Cold War, the number of armed conflicts and particularly the numbers of people killed in wars declined. This was partly due to the strength of feeling expressed through the peace movement, partly thanks to the strengthening of multilateralism at the United Nations and partly because the sorrows of war were still fresh in Europe. 

But that trend has now been thrust into reverse, as can be seen in this Global Peace Index Map » The Most & Least Peaceful Countries.

Members of the Warsaw’s Euromaidan activists Natalia Panchenko (2R) and Viktoriia Pogrebniak (R) and Fridays For Future activists Wiktoria Jedroszkowiak (L) and Dominika Lasota (2L) during a press conference before US President Joe Biden visit to Warsaw, Poland, 20 February 2023. US President Joe Biden will pay a visit to Poland on 21 and 22 February. (Photo: EPA-EFE / ANDRZEJ LANGE POLAND OUT)

According to the Oslo Peace Research Institute, in its annually updated Global Overview of Conflict Trends, by the end of 2021, state-based conflicts were at a “historic high” and non-state conflicts were stabilising at “higher levels than previously recorded”. 

This was before the start of Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine, and the Western response to put all its eggs in a military solution, where an estimated 200,000 soldiers on both sides have already died; this is not counting civilian deaths estimated at between 7,000 and 10,000. Read: Charted: The Ukraine War Civilian Death Toll

It’s going to get worse

However, the worst is yet to come. 

The UN Secretary-General has recently warned that “The prospects for peace keep diminishing. The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing … I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

Wars look as if they are about to explode. Apart from the horrendous war in Ukraine, armed conflicts simmer over China/Taiwan; on the Korean Peninsula and in Israel/Palestine; the DRC; to name a few.  A fragile peace accord holds in Ethiopia after a war that took 600,000 lives in two years.  

Conflicts need arms. 

Or, to put it more accurately, the arms industry needs conflicts to make profits. 

The world is now caught up in a new arms race. This is borne out by the increased arms spending which, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, reached an “all-time high” of over $2-trillion in 2021. There are a lot of other things you can do with a trillion dollars. 

That too was before the start of the Russia/Ukraine war, which by some estimates has drawn up to $100-billion from the Western side alone. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: “How much money has the West spent on the Ukraine war?” 

Frighteningly the EU’s Foreign Affairs chief last week urged an even greater increase in defence spending. “We are in urgent war mode,” he said.  This is taxpayers’ money. Do we really understand the implications of what we are getting into?

Who’s winning?

After 363 days of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, you might be forgiven for thinking that the world has normalised war again, forgetting that there’s nothing normal about it. As if it’s just another Playstation battle, we are being desensitised to its human toll and giving little thought to what it actually means for those poor souls fighting and living on the frontlines. 

If there was ever a time for a peace movement it’s now. (Photo: reconcileworld / Wikipedia)

There is a paucity of descriptions about the brutal manner in which men are dying. There are journalists aplenty in Ukraine, but few descriptions of how 200,000+ soldiers have died. 

There are however historical precedents to what happens to the human body in trench warfare. Read timeless poets who lived to tell the tale, like Wilfred Owen or JD Salinger.

Check-in with historians of the resistance to war like Adam Hochschild whose latest book (American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis) recounts how the socialist Eugene Debs, on trial in 1917, told the court: 

“Men talk about holy wars. There are none. Men are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder .. I can hear the shrieks of soldiers in my dreams. I have imagination enough to see a battlefield. I can see it strewn with the legs of human beings, who but yesterday were in the flush and glory of their young manhood.”   

We might be being taught to hate all Russians (again), but we should not forget that many Russian conscripts are fighting with guns targeted at them from in front and behind, as this report from the “hellish” battle for the Ukrainian town of Soledar makes plain.

Read: Soaring Russian Death Toll in Ukraine Gives Grim Insight Into the War – The New York Times

Neither are we weighing up the catastrophic implications of this war for how we manage the other urgent crises the world is facing: in particular the climate crisis and inequality — both of which fuelling and being fuelled by the march to wars.

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There is understandable sympathy with the idea that war and rearmament is the necessary cost of defending Ukraine and Western democracy. 

But that is what people have been told about every war.  

When the elites realise that they can’t win this one without their own self-destruction, ultimately there will be no victors, at least not among ordinary citizens of Russia or Ukraine. There will be an opportunistic peace, and hundreds of thousands of lives will have been sacrificed in vain, as happens with all wars.

As Jeffrey Sachs has recently warned “Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster” in a proxy war.

Read in Daily Maverick: “The New World Economy — what Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars”

When a negotiated end to this war happens, as it surely will, unless we choose or blunder into Armageddon, we will discover that the pending tipping points caused by the climate crisis are a war our governments won’t just be able to switch off, even if we declare a peace with nature — which we won’t. 

Neither will they be able to switch off an even deeper inequality, reverse the rape of multilateralism. 

On the other hand, there will be victors. 

The arms industry is already laughing all the way to the bank. Each missile fired costs a few hundred thousand dollars, so every time the trigger is pulled it’s a win. 

According to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) “As the war in Ukraine heads towards the one-year mark, so far there has been only one clear winner — the US arms industry.” As proof, they cite the “surging” share prices of two arms companies: “Northrop Grumman increasing 40% by the end of 2022, while Lockheed Martin’s was up by 37%.”

The stock prices of many of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers shot up in late February after Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine began.(Source: ABC News: Markus Mannheim/New York Stock Exchange/Euronext Paris)

And, just as happened with Covid-19 vaccines and masks, the media has exposed unscrupulous middlemen coining it as they feed the market for weapons.  

Does peace stand a chance?

For reasons I hope are clearer now, the need for peace and peace activism, targeting every site of military conflict, is becoming the issue that underlies all social justice and human rights issues in the world.

Read in Daily Maverick: “All we are saying is ‘Give Peace a Chance’”

Yet sadly, as happens in all wars, peace activists are being stigmatised and misrepresented. Look, for example, at the calumny against Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters because he has expressed an independent anti-war position. 

We agree 100% with the Russian punk band Pussy Riot who recently released an immortal new song against Putin (watch it here), but can still advocate against war: arguing for peace is not appeasing Putin. There are routes to democracy and justice in Russia and Ukraine other than a limitless arms race and the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people. As Indian writer Arundathi Roy said in a lecture in October 2022:

“The dangerous brinkmanship being played out in Ukraine is being somewhat obscured by the noise of propaganda on both sides. But history’s clock could very well be racing towards sunset … Isn’t it time for everybody to step back? Isn’t it time to begin a real conversation about complete nuclear disarmament?” 

The question is ‘does peace stand a chance against a two trillion dollar industry and authoritarian governments intent on preserving themselves, but not necessarily their people?’ 

Up until this point informed discussion, and the voice of citizens and civil society in this conflict have been on mute. 

That has to change. This weekend international demonstrations against war and for peace are taking place across Europe, in London, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Zurich. We should wish them success. Millions of lives depend on it. DM/MC

Some recommended listening to inspire peace activism: 

Goodbye Blue Sky – Pink Floyd – The Wall – 4K Remastered; Mixtape 58: Give peace a chance : New Frame