31.03.2022

Peace-loving liberals for war

The rhetoric of the anti-war movement has been coopted by the war party in the west, argues Paul Demarty

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there have been, as it were, two anti-war movements. One has taken place in Russia itself; the other in various countries in the west.

The difference between them is very considerable, despite the fact that - at the level of official, conscious politics - they are very similar. In both cases we find predominantly liberal leaderships and generally people who prefer the supposed liberal norms of the west to the securocratic Great Russianism of the Putin regime. The difference is in the actual experience of protest. Russian opponents of the war find themselves beaten to a pulp, imprisoned, denounced and fined. Even in the case of the very most politically suspect elements involved, it is difficult to deny the courage required to face down Putin’s goons and take a moral stand.

Meanwhile, in the west routine demonstrations take place in support of the Ukrainians; a hundred people here, thousands or tens of thousands there. Sadiq Khan brought out some kind of crowd in London last weekend, though numbers have not been widely reported, and it was perhaps the least radical crowd assembled for a demonstration in London since the high watermark of ‘remainism’. Khan and a parade of luvvies and NGO ghouls denounced Putin’s adventure and proclaimed their ‘solidarity’ with Ukraine.

War fever

As with all these events, the atmosphere of self-congratulation was so thick that it was not clear what ‘solidarity’ actually meant. Whip-rounds for the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières? For our governments to continue their present course of arming neo-Nazi and Banderite irregulars in preparation for a long dirty war? Or (as many placards demanded, again typically of these protests) a no-fly zone - in effect a direct declaration of war against Russia?

Note that this presents a direct contrast with the equivalent movement in Russia itself. There are, after all, perfectly obvious demands on that side - immediate ceasefire, withdraw troops from Ukraine, and so on. In the west, what amounts - again - to the same substantive political programme resolves, as per the classic Father Ted joke, to be ‘down with this sort of thing’. Instead of demands we have vibes; and vibes always need to be interpreted by the real agents in the drama.

In that respect, the protests - ostensibly against chauvinist aggression - end up as a straightforward instrument of exactly chauvinist aggression on the part of the western countries (which at present seem happy to fight Russia, as the cliché goes, to the last Ukrainian). Indeed, the no-fly zone question demonstrates this neatly - polling data in the US reveals strong support for imposing one, which, however, drops off dramatically when it is explained that this will mean ‘hot’ war with Russia. The decades-long effort to rebrand such tactics as something other than direct acts of war, usually when the enemy (for example, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya) is incapable of fighting back, has succeeded.

The demand is so universally parroted by media talking heads, meanwhile, that we can only assume it is part of the plan, in spite of the apparent reality that the US government has no intention of imposing a no-fly zone. The US and UK media, in this day and age, are utterly supine instruments of their respective state cores and securocrats: the line is being peddled, presumably with the aim of reducing political space for pacifism or anti-imperialism through the cultivation of ever more insane degrees of war fever (all in the name of ‘peace and justice’, of course).

In the face of this, the ‘traditional’ anti-war movement - the one that most especially took form in the early days of the war on terror, but inherits the mantle of the anti-nuclear and peace movements of the 1950s-80s - is almost completely paralysed. Stop the War demonstrations in this country have attempted to put some kind of limited anti-Nato spin on things, but have been blasted off the face of the earth for doing so - the most notable episode being the capitulation of all Stop the War Coalition-supporting Labour MPs on the Nato question.

In part, this is a trivially predictable phenomenon. In 2001-03, Britain and the USA were obviously the aggressors against Iraq and Afghanistan; in 2022, the Russians are the aggressors against Ukraine. The duty of anti-imperialists, in each case, is to disrupt the aggression of our own states; but in the first case the aggression was ‘obvious’, whereas in the latter the aggression is the background context in which Putin’s gambit becomes meaningful. It was always going to be a harder sell this time around.

But this hard? Should it be quite so impossible to remind people that the US has deliberately sabotaged any attempts to implement peace accords, insisted on empty provocations and thrown weapons in the general direction of Banderites and Hitlerites? In fact, the hegemony of liberal warmongers over the peace narrative is in large part a predictable result of the political weaknesses of that earlier movement.

In 2003, 1.5-2 million people assembled in London to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq, including anarchists, fascists (the British National Party had a contingent), a lot of liberals, various species of socialists, and indeed your humble correspondent (at the time a teenage Brownite, embarrassingly enough). The demonstration was engineered, in effect, by the organisations at the spinal core of the StWC: principally the Socialist Workers Party and secondarily the Communist Party of Britain and Socialist Action. The objective of these comrades was the broadest possible coalition in opposition to the war, in which regard they were - for the one day of February 15 2003, and a few other occasions - spectacularly successful.

It was unsuccessful in one key respect, however, which was of course that the war went on regardless. And as soon as it did, those parts of the coalition closest to the establishment - like the Lib Dems - immediately locked into ‘back our boys’ jingoism. The vast scope of the movement against the war reflected at least in part real divisions in the British state over whether to join the American war (in America, where these divisions were more limited, the anti-war movement was correspondingly more marginal).

Pressing onwards

The SWP and other comrades had no alternative to their previous strategy, and pressed onwards even as numbers declined (predictably enough, given the changed circumstances). They had achieved something real: the British mood remained, in spite of terrorist atrocities and other fillips to the war party, sceptical of military adventurism, limiting the scope of subsequent interventions. Yet they had done so by radically restricting the political concreteness of the anti-war movement, which meant it defaulted to an implicit pacifism.

It is not that a more substantive anti-imperialist politics would have continued to turn out demonstrations of millions - it certainly would not have done any such thing. But such a politics would have done no more than reflect the plain reality demonstrated by the course of British politics circa 2002-03 - the only hope for circumventing British involvement in Iraq was in the overthrow of the war party, which would require either a parliamentary coup against the Blair government or an actual revolution.

Neither of these were on the cards at that time, and the only factor at all in the left’s control was the size, militancy and ‘general intellect’ of the revolutionaries. The commitment of the largest contingents of the left to pacifism in practice, however, sabotaged any efforts to grow the extant revolutionary organisations, never mind unite them. Of the millions out in London that day, perhaps 10,000 of us ended up passing through the ranks of some Trotskyist or anarchist or Marxist-Leninist grouping - a tiny fraction selected more or less at random from the vast human potential of that sea of angry men and women.

A healthier left would have done better, and even a few tens of thousands of comrades - supposing they are well-educated and competent activists - could have an enormous, outsized impact on the ability of the state to do, well, what it is doing now: imposing an extraordinary, near-comical uniformity of tone and content on the media, and marching people in blissful ignorance to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Instead we are reduced, once again, to voices crying in the wilderness - where we are not reduced to silence or (in an increasing number of cases) to the status of minor jingoes ourselves.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk