An insignificant human being

I suppose this is the end. This book is not a history book, but just the plain tale of an insignificant human being. Countless hosts are to be maimed, killed, wasted, ruined. For what? For Poland? For the Greater Reich? No. These are just the slogans that cover the whole damnable, wicked, crass stupidity. Great God in Heaven, why did you create Man just a little lower than the angels, just a little higher than the beasts?

(extract from diary of Ted Pates, 01/09/39)

Last month, I spent three days in Berlin. The occasion was a family reunion that centred around an uncle’s birthday, and which brought me together with many people I hadn’t seen in several years. I’d passed through Berlin once before, spending a few hours in the place whilst en route from Prague to Amsterdam in the late 90s, but this was my first change to actually soak up any of the ambience of the place.

Berlin is a city that wears its scars on the outside, as a place that has been location for such historically significant events as it has can only do. These days, it also has a great sense of what can be achieved when divisions no longer divide so deeply. Eventually, I’ll put the pictures up here, as I'm sure they will do the city far greater justice than my stumbling words can attempt to achieve.

Many years ago, following on later from the death of my grandfather’s brother Ted, I inherited a sheath of papers from this same uncle whose birthday we had come to celebrate. This set of mercifully-legible dot-matrix printed pages spanned September 1939 to March 1944, and contained Ted’s personal diary from World War II. I’ve always intended to do something with this resource, but haven’t known quite what.

By ending in early ’44, the diaries are also incomplete. Tracing the parallel story of his life with that of the development and conclusion of the war is not possible without the missing parts of the puzzle. To my great surprise during the Berlin trip, I had a conversation with a cousin where I discovered that she actually possessed some of the remaining parts of this journal. I found out today that her copies go up to August 1945, so although there will still be parts of the puzzle missing (Truman officially declared the war over in December 1946, and that leaves Ted’s perspective on a year and a half of aftermath still hidden from view), that is a much more complete picture than I have now.

I mention all this here and now because I am contemplating preparing an abstract to submit to a conference on ‘War and Life-Writing’ at Oxford University in November this year, and Ted’s work seems like a gift horse of a resource for making a contribution to this conference with.

The problem I have (aside from not having the complete diary or even having completely read through the years that I do have) is that I don’t know what to do for it. I’ve spoken at conferences before, but doing so at Oxford’s kind-of taking it to a whole different level. I guess that even getting accepted for speaking at a conference at Oxford is bit of a step up in itself. I’ve also given myself very little headspace recently in which to think up things like this, so I’ve a thing (the diary) and a place (the conference) but I haven’t yet got a ‘what to do’.

In scholarly pursuit, a question always marks a beginning. Possible research questions that this conference seeks to address include:

• How do the genres of life writing (and/or film) mediate the experience of war?
• How does war impact upon the genres of life writing?
• What is the significance of the emerging digital genres of life writing for war representation (i-journalism, Twitter, social networking sites)?
• What are the relationships between gender and life writings about war?
• How can the phenomenon of missing or silent testimonies be theorised?
• How do representations of war in the life-writing genres challenge or support ‘official’, governmental, or archetypal depictions? 

 

One of the interesting facets of Ted’s diaries is that he was a pacifist, as far as I’m aware throughout his life, but certainly during that war. Although British men were no longer court-martialled for refusing to fight by the late thirties as they had been during WWI, pacifism nevertheless remained a socially taboo position to hold, particularly when London’s skies darkened with Luftwaffe and a rising tide of solidarity against an external threat produced certain common positions amongst neighbours.

Would this stance of Ted’s be considered a ‘missing or silent testimony’? How indeed could that be theorised? When today it is possible to give voice to a peaceful opposition to conflict by tweeting live from the war zone, what implications does that have for the silencing of testimonies? What challenges do his representations of the war present for contemporary readings of the period, ‘official’ or otherwise?

I do not know yet how or whether this one will pan out, but it is certainly tempting to try and get something together for the conference. I’ll report back if I manage to put an abstract/proposal together for it, but in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for an angle of pursuit, feel free to add in the comments below.

The coming wars on computing

This video is of a speech given by Cory Doctorow to the University of Westminister School of Law, and hosted by The Guardian as part of their 'Battle for the Internet' series. In the talk, Doctorow proposes that the so-called Copyright Wars are merely opening salvos in a wider coming (metaphorical) war on general purpose computing. 

For anyone that wants to be able to retain control over what they can or can't do with a computer (which these days means most devices used in daily lives), there are some very compelling arguments here.

198 Methods on Non Violent Action

Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Mahatma Ghandi

A week is a long time under the eyes of the global media. Events in Japan managed to stay on screens and front pages for just about that long, until last night when 'Allied forces' started missile attacks on Libya. The hunt for drama and stories is a hunger that must be constantly fed, thus all eyes moved on. Explosions carry far more drama than firehoses (the main story coming out of Fukushima Daiichi).

While there are many arguments given in favour of outside military intervention in Libya's internal conflict, some even hard to refute, a stepping up of aggression inevitably leads to more trouble down the line, more deaths, and easy propaganda coups for those such actions are directed against (in this case Gaddafi).

Should there not be a long and drawn out conflict, in Britain Cameron may well come out of this with his own 'Falklands moment' - a comparable incident that turned around Thatcher's unpopularity and laid the groundwork for a decade of Thatcherism - making it harder to turn back the tide of cuts and changes in this country. This may be of little importance to the Libyan people opposed to Gaddafi, but could be but one consequential turning point in Britain felt for many years to come.

Peaceful objection to militarism of any sort is harder to justify in the face of the slaughter of innocents, but I think that as more and more countries slide into bombing campaigns, it's worth taking a moment to pause and consider other methods of non violent action. Maybe none of the actions that are described in the content of this post would make a jot of difference to what Gaddafi seems to be doing, but they certainly had some effect in Egypt and Tunisia this year.

Dr. Gene Sharp created a list of 198 methods of non violent direct action that can be used to express opposition to an individual, government or other system. These include protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and intervention. This list was supposedly influential (and translated into Arabic) in what happened in Tahrir Square just last month, as it was in the revolutionary changes that swept Eastern Europe in the late 80's/early 90's.

They are published in English here in the document below, or are available as direct downloads here (same document as embed) and here (1 page, full colour). If any readers have pdfs of version translated into other languages, they are welcome to link to them in the comments below and I'll try to update the post with more versions. For more on the Albert Einstein Institution, an organisation that studies nonviolent action around the world and is part-run by Sharp, click here.

198 Methods of Non Violent Action

Photo credits: Atomic Headlines by London Permaculture (issued under CC-BY- NC-SA licence), LIBYA/ by B.R.Q. Network (issued under CC-BY licence)

Obama's Nobel Doctrine and the Pacifist's Dilemma

Image: 'The Nobel Doctrine' by D1 Designs (issued under CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 license)

On December 2 at West Point Military Academy, President Barack Obama announced his long-awaited new strategy on US military policy in Afghanistan, pitched as a short-term escalation of the war coupled with the intention to begin troop withdrawals by July 2011. On December 10 in Oslo, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded according to the Nobel Committee 'for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.'

He is the fourth US President to have been awarded the prize, following Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, but the only one to have been awarded it during his first year in office. This decision by the Nobel Committee prompted much criticism around the world that he'd yet to do anything noticeable enough to warrant the honour.

Addressing the irony of receiving the award so soon after announcing the despatching of another 30,000 troops, along with the other criticisms made, Obama commented in his speech

I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize...my accomplishments are slight...But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.

Naturally, his remarks have sparked extensive reflection amongst the global commentariat. The BBC's Mark Mardell believes that Obama has 'pulled off a difficult balancing act in walking the tightrope between war and peace'. The Guardian's Martin Kettle described the speech as having not just a reprimand to the Nobel committee for awarding the prize before he had any notable achievements to be worthy of the award but also to liberals who refuse to understand that 'politics will always be more complicated, nuanced and messy' than they seem to understand. Steven Hurst for the Associated Press interpreted the speech as many others have also done - no less than the outlining of the Obama Doctrine, 'a steadfast defense of warfare against evil, praise of nonviolence and exhortations for mankind to affirm the 'spark of the divine' in everyone'.

I felt that by Obama's standards, it was a good speech, and not a surprising one from a man that is the President of the United States and who has both a job to do and an incredible global mess inherited from his predecessor to try and clear up. To please everybody would be an impossible task. The best that he realistically could hope for is to leave the situations he has found himself responsible for in a better state than they were when he picked up the reins, whilst striving to actually improve them rather than just leave them in a less worse state.

However, I still come to the Afghan question as an avowed pacifist, a person who believes that non-violence has to be the primary approach to resolving issues of conflict, and one that is fully aware of the history of failed intervention in that particular country - such as those of the British and the Soviet Union - that has earned Afghanistan the sobriquet of 'the graveyard of Empires'.

A dictionary definition of pacifism describes the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means. It goes on to describe that a pacifist will refuse to participate in war or military service because of such a belief.

This is a belief that I have held for much of my life, a fusion of family influences (such as a grandfather who was a conscientious objector during World War II - a particularly difficult position to take at the time) and the evolution of my own observations of the world and its human history, combined with my sense of justice - a sense that echoes the epithet most often attributed to Gandhi that 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' (ie revenge only breeds the desire for more revenge).

This belief also contributed to my leaving the UK in disgust at what I saw to be Tony Blair's attempts at British imperial revivalism with the joint invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and subsequently my setting up of an organisation in Japan (where I moved to) for the purpose of raising consciousness amongst a younger generation of Japanese of the idea of peace - a concept embedded in their country's constitution but which many younger people seemed almost unaware of despite the suffering that their country had both experienced and inflicted during the last period of major global conflict.

Whilst working on this consciousness-raising effort, I studied the notions of conflict and peace more deeply than I had before, as a vehicle for examining my own beliefs. Having always tried to avoid conflict at all costs, my position underwent an evolution of sorts. The No-Nonsense Guide to Conflict and Peace describes conflict as having some benefits, and being therefore not a concept to dismiss completely:

Conflict can prevent stagnation; stimulate interest and curiosity, the airing of problems, the development of solutions. External conflict can promote internal group cohesion. Creatively handled, discord can enable social structures to readjust by eliminating sources of dissatisfaction and removing the causes for opting out, so creating a new balance in a society.

With such insights, I re-evaluated problems that I faced in the work I was doing. I soon found that in facing up to and tackling a problem head-on rather than accepting it and avoiding dealing with it invariably led to that problem finding some sort of resolution. This does not lead on to suggest that violence therefore becomes acceptable, but merely that conflict doesn't always have to be avoided.

During the news about Obama's Afghan escalation, I had a telephone conversation with my father, a man I can generally talk to in depth about global affairs and who has a good understanding of history and politics, amongst other things. He was raised in much stronger socialist traditions than I was and we talked about Afghanistan. I asked him what would he do or suggest as a solution, mindful that he would be fully aware of the history of failed intervention in the area.

He had no clear answers to the question either, for it seems to be an intractable problem for those who care about the fate of other peoples around the world. He described his repulsion at the medieval actions of the pre-invasion Taliban government, in particular their treatment of women, and then went on to talk about the British and European volunteers who went to Spain to fight Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War, and the subsequent fight against Hitler and fascism as examples were using violence was deemed necessary to overcome the 'greater evil'.

Wary as I am of Godwin's Law, which states that 'as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches' and its use suggests overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided as it robs valid comparisons of their impact, in the big pacifist issue of whether there is ever a right time to use violence or take up arms to resolve a conflict, it seems appropriate to invoke the Hitler analogy.

This then leads to the question of whether the Taliban posed as serious a threat to the international community as the Nazis did. On a surface level, in allegedly sheltering Osama Bin Laden shortly after 9/11, there was certainly a provocation to a recently wounded giant. However, it hardly ranks as highly as the invasion of Poland in the provocative stakes.

Did the Taliban have an intention for conquering other peoples as part of their gameplan? While it seems that some of their very strict interpretation of sharia law spread to parts of Pakistan, it is highly unlikely that the group that ruled the country from 1996 - 2001 had serious expansionist intentions. Arguably, they emerged only due to the power vacuum left in an Afghanistan divided by the warlords that stepped in after the Soviet withdrawal.

Should Allied powers have intervened militarily then on humanitarian grounds? Following the Battle of Mogadishu, the US refused to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and was criticised heavily for not doing so. This act of non-intervention by Western powers had clearly changed when, even prior to the Bush Administration, Tony Blair sent troops in to places such as Sierra Leone under 'humanitarian interventionist' grounds. Yet if saving native populations from vicious regimes is the policy of Western military powers, why not Burma, Zimbabwe or Darfur?

The case for ending further war has been made most eloquently by Malalai Joy - an Afghan - in a column published in The Guardian. She states that 'it is not a case of a 'bad war' and a 'good war' (Obama's describes a 'just war' in his Nobel speech) – there is no difference, war is war'. Should the people of the country, devastated by decades of foreign invaders and civil wars, should they not have the ultimate say in how their country is managed?

Ultimately, these kind of conundrums raise more questions than they provide answers. While I can say that I'm overjoyed that the President of what still remains the most powerful country on the planet is a thoughtful and intelligent man who clearly has peaceful intentions rather than warmongering ones, I remain sorry that he has chosen to prolong the military actions that his country (and this one, amongst many more) will continue to inflict on that ravaged place. I remain saddened that he has chosen to have the blood of innocent women and children (for they are always the unchosen victims of war) on his hands. I appreciate his position and the massive challenges he faces, but still disagree with him over the most vital questions of war and peace.

I haven't solved the pacifist's dilemma over the Hitler issue in this post, but will end with the words of Buffy Sainte-Marie from her song 'Universal Solider':

He’s fighting for democracy,
he’s fighting for the reds
He says it’s for the peace of all.
He’s the one, who must decide,
who’s to live and who’s to die.
And he never sees the writing on the walls.

But without him,
how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He’s the one who gives his body
as a weapon to the war.
And without him all this killing can’t go on.

He’s the universal soldier
And he really is the blame
But his orders comes from
far away no more.

They come from him.
And you and me.
Oh, brothers can’t you see.
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Comments welcomed.