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Re: Is this Forum just for supporters? |
| Name: |
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Simon |
| Date Posted: |
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Jul 21, 05 - 12:12 PM |
| Message: |
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No, this forum isn't just for supporters and it's good to get a different view. I'll answer as best I can. This is a personal response, not a statement on behalf of the whole group.
Firstly, although I don't agree with the course of life they choose, I have every respect personally for many serving in the armed forces. But for one thing, their wishes aren't taken into account when deciding policy or strategy. The world might be a better place if they WERE taken into account. But they aren't. When Tim Collins told his men they were entering Iraq as liberators, not as conquerors, I think it was a well-intentioned but mistaken thing to say. But whether he was mistaken or not, he was talking about something which, in reality, neither he nor his men had very much influence over. They got orders to do something, so as professional soldiers they did it. That's the reality. Even military commanders don't seem to get consulted about the decision to go to war. It's a political decision, taken by politicians. These politicians aren't motivated by humane considerations and they aren't sufficiently accountable for their decisions.
I'm getting close to politics here, but it's not a political issue. In the case of education, health, fox-hunting and other political issues, perhaps it's enough to say that if I disagree, I can vote accordingly at the election. (I'm not sure it IS enough, but that's a different argument.) But in any case, none of these political issues involve the deliberate taking of human life. War does. That makes it different from foxhunting.
On a personal level I absolutely respect your beliefs and opinions and the reason why you have chosen a military life and career. As a way of life there is a lot to praise in it, and in a dangerous world there are lots of good-sounding reasons for doing it. But the main thing which the armed forces do is kill people, including defenceless civilians, on my behalf, with my money. There are a lot of ways of dressing this truth up in softer words, but that is the bottom line. I don't blame you personally for signing up to this. You're clearly doing what you sincerely believe is right.
But I disagree. The point is that the deliberate killing makes it a matter of personal conscience. The British government has already accepted this principle, nearly a century ago, when it allowed conscientious objection by tens of thousands through 2 world wars. It also accepts the principle that paying for killing is itself killing: if I gave £500 to al-Qaeda, I would be guilty, no question. Although it upholds both these principles separately, by some act of doublethink, it refuses to uphold them both together. In fact I give about £500 a year to the British military. This makes no sense. If I'm a conscientious objector (which I am), and if paying for violence makes you morally responsible for it (as it does), then I cannot co-operate if the state expects me to pay towards military operations. I don't have a choice about this. From where I'm stood "the luxury of choice" would mean choosing to live a nice quiet life paying up my tax without protest and not thinking twice about the death and misery my money was buying. This is no choice. I can't do it. That's what conscientious objection means. I'm lucky enough to live in a country where it's relatively easy for me to take a stand against it. So more shame on me if I don't.
When you talk about defending my freedom to choose, what you seem to mean is defending my freedom to sit there and accept the system as it is, and perhaps make the odd token protest. If I could go along with this, I would. But I am not going to kill defenceless people in order to preserve my own life. I don't believe that is the real choice we face, but if it came to it, I would rather die innocent than kill the innocent. If killing the innocent is the only kind of protection which you can offer, than I have no option but to refuse your protection. You talk about defending a way of life. By these methods you are not defending my way of life.
But in fact, as I say, I don't believe we are faced with that choice, because I don't think we do live in a world where we can ever defend ourselves through military aggression. In the long run, violence begets violence. As a method of making peace, preparing for war has never worked before, and in the modern world it works even less. I don't think NATO is all that responsible for peace in the last 50 years. For one thing, there hasn't been much peace in the last 50 years. The ongoing conflict wasted incredible amounts of resources and skills which could have been better used elsewhere, and cost millions of lives in proxy wars around the world, more than one of which escalated almost to the point of nuclear war.
And when it comes to nuclear weapons, it makes no sense to say you can put up an umbrella but you can't stop the rain. Firstly, in this case, you can stop the rain, and secondly, there are no umbrellas, that is, defensive or effectively deterrent nuclear weapons systems. The major nuclear weapons states are now quite open about the fact that they regard their stockpiles as offensive, not defensive weapons, and in reality they always did regard them as offensive weapons for pre-emptive use in a winnable nuclear war. So of course you can "stop the rain" - that is, get rid of nuclear weapons. All the major governments have already committed themselves to doing it.
The other current major threat to the safety of the British people is from paramilitary or terrorist activity. This threat is real and demands a response. I'm no expert, but practically all the expert opinion I have read on the subject, most of it from people within the armed forces, stresses the fact that paramilitary insurgency is a 99% political, economic and social problem and only 1% military problem. Our response to it should therefore not be primarily a military one. It's not a military problem.
So if you want pacifists and conscientious objectors to contribute to the safety of the community - the defence of the realm - then good: so they should. They can pay for the other 99%. They could pay for civilian negotiators to intervene in political crises. They could pay for civilian peaceworkers in post-conflict reconstruction. They could pay directly for international development, poverty alleviation and economic development in poverty-stricken, strife-torn, marginalised countries. They could pay for the conversion of military industry for peaceful production, or for disarmament programmes - small arms and WMD alike. They could pay for further research and development in peace studies and conflict resolution.
And so on. None of these things are directly related to the issue of conscientious objection, but they are all things which have a proven track record of making the world a safer place (which is what we both want). They all need a lot more money then they get. So on the one hand you have several pacifists and conscientious objectors who want some form of nonviolent security they can pay for, and on the other you have a lot of nonviolent security methods which only get a fraction of the funding of the military, and desperately need more.
So there's a big opportunity there to match the two up. This is why, in reality, I don't need to choose whether to kill large numbers of Iraqi or Afghan civilians, or die myself in a terrorist attack. In any case, plenty of experts seem to think that the one makes the other more likely, not less. We do not live in a dog-eat-dog world; the world is now so interconnected that we will all live together unless we all die together, and we need a new view of security to replace the received wisdom of the past.
We're not claiming exemption from the normal rules and responsibilities of citizenship. The whole reason we're bringing this case is precisely because we want to pay all our tax. But if this means killing the defenceless, we can't do it. |
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