PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT

1. INTRODUCTION
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A great deal of anti-war propaganda tends to rest on the premise that since war is evil it can best be resisted by seeking to persuade people to renounce war, and indeed to renounce violence in general, as a means of settling disputes and of persuading them of the advantages that such a renunciation would yield in terms of social progress and a general increase in human happiness.

That war is indeed evil and that a world freed from war might well be an altogether better place few would doubt. For that matter, since few indeed would doubt it, why then is the global scene dominated by acts of war and threats of war? And why, to press the point, do these acts and threats emanate from countries that often make proud claims to being democratically governed as much as from those governed by totalitarian dictatorships?

It seems possible that a rather different approach to the problem is called for here, and not least because the argument for peace and against war has clearly already been won. The vast majority of people in every country are against war. It is the people who fight wars, it is the people who are killed or maimed, it is the peoples homes which are destroyed, it is the peoples lives which are scarred with bereavement and tragedy and ultimately it is the people who pay for wars in terms of misdirected productive capacity into armaments and war machines, resources which might instead be used to build social palaces for hospitals, schools, colleges, theatres and a general elevation of the quality of social furniture.

There is one glaring fact about the mass unpopularity of war which stares us in the face, a fact which ought perhaps to lead us to question one of the basic assumptions of much pacifist propaganda, that people need to be persuaded not to fight: It is that all modern wars at least are fought by conscripts, they are also paid for in part by the lives of conscripts. The actual fighting is done mostly by young men in uniform who, if they refused to fight, would either be shot or made to suffer long years of imprisonment. In the same way people who persisted in refusing to pay the taxes used to finance a war would find themselves facing all the oppressive power a war-prone state machine could muster and of which a long period of imprisonment would not be the least of its manifestations.

It would seem then that the real problem is not so much persuading people not to fight as to persuade governments not to compel people to fight. But governments guilty of this form of compulsion are frequently democratically elected are they not? And if this is the case where is the mismatch - popularly elected government compelling people to participate in unpopular and disastrous courses?

Simply to state the problem is to stumble upon a rather startling fact of political life, one buried under many reams of empty political rhetoric about democracy and freedom. Such qualities, we need urgently to remind ourselves, are moral attributes, but what then is morality? And how does it function? It clearly does not flourish in centres of power, be they political or commercial; morality, we must never forget, is a function of human relationships and can only be operative where such relationships are a dominant feature of the political landscape. The fact that our relationships have ceased to have this dominance is at the heart of our problem and is important to see why and how they have so ceased.

As any political (or other) unit grows in size, the significance of the individual proportionately declines. If you are a member of a 500 strong community, in the governance of its affairs your membership and your morality matter simply because your membership is both morally and statistically significant. They will matter even more if you are deeply concerned, since a large number of people in any community are generally, because of age or disposition, unable or unwilling to care.

But if your political unit numbers 500 million your significance is reduced from 1/500th to 1/500 millionth! Yet despite this shrinking of your significance to proportions so minute as to be infinitesimal, the power of the unit itself has increased to quite staggering proportions: Where then is that power located? It is of course at the centre. The price of your diminished power is the tribute you pay to the swollen octopus of power at the centre.

In terms of democracy, never forgetting for a moment that it is a moral attribute, this development means that democracy is also proportionately diminished. Why? Because since morality is a function of human relationships the nature of those relationships has been transformed, so that instead of the citizen being in a moral relationship with others he is now in another type of relationship with the central controlling mechanism, for in such giant societies the moral and statistical significance of the individual inevitably plummets; what was a moral relationship with his fellows has become a power relationship with a political or administrative machine.

It is obvious that any considerable increase in the size of a political unit results in the elected representatives becoming more remote from those who elect them. But this isolation from the electorate does not mean they thereby enjoy unfettered freedom to legislate as they may wish; it simply means that the power of the electorate to influence proceedings is replaced by other forms of power, forms which operate in the same remote, highly centralised manner and which, since they invariably control industrial, commercial, financial and, not least, media operations, often on a global scale, are able to wield decisive degrees of clout in regard to the political process.

Inevitably there arises here a clash of interests. Market forces are concerned with stock market values, with current share prices and short-term budget projections and expectations, whereas the citizen and the general polity is concerned with the long-term, generational effects of current decision-making; on the effects on the health of the land, on the climate, on the broad drift of affairs as they may be affected by stripping the world of its forest cover, of over-fishing, of the excessive use of anti-biotics (the word itself means 'against life'!), of global warming, of genetic engineering and so on, to name but a few of the major problems now pressing on human destiny and calling for wisdom rather than just expertise, knowledge or information.

This is not to say that morality, (involving of course such questions as war and peace), ceases to matter; it is rather that whereas in a small community questions relating to the use of its power are subordinate to the moral values and judgements of the citizenry through the strength of their relationships, in the mass form of society it is morality which becomes subordinated to the play of power politics.

As Lenin put it, the key question in a mass structure is not how? Or why? But 'who, whom?' Meaning of course, who decides? Who is the boss? And to whom is everyone inevitably subject? On such a scale the centre is not a focus of moral concerns but of power imperatives. In short the very term 'mass democracy' is an oxymoron; you cannot have democracy on a mass basis and the supposition that you can is one of the most persistent myths of modern political life.

We may note in passing that it was the popular adherence to this myth, which enabled the monstrous perfidy of Stalin's terror to flourish, and even to find acceptance among foreign communist sympathisers, who were convinced the mass purges were simply capitalist propaganda; was he not the democratic leader of the workers state?

In the same way Prime Minister Blair is able to hand over to private profiteering interests valuable items of social furniture such as the railways and public utilities, including it would seem now, the post office. Has not Mr. Blair been democratically elected? What you do have on a mass basis is endless manipulation of a gullible and ill informed mass electorate by those in command of the central controlling mechanisms, who are using their power first and foremost to maintain that power and wherever possible to increase it.

This in itself does not explain why wars happen, but it does help to show how people are compelled to fight them and why ordinarily people feel unable to follow their private moral judgement by refusing to do so; the factor of size has pre-empted the ground on which moral decisions might otherwise prevail. It is a situation epitomised with untarnishable radiance by the action of ordinary British and German soldiers on Christmas day in 1914; both sides were celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Peace, so what more natural that instead of fighting each other they should decide to play a game of football!

They played until they were stopped by the high commands on both sides, whose members presumably felt it might spoil their war. In this case the real war was between morality and power and, as is usually the case on mass terms, power won!

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