The Terror of Fine Whiskey

Flying into Sydney airport for a transfer onto another flight to New Zealand recently, I discovered to my horror that the paranoid fantasies of the counter-terrorism imagination had claimed my fine single malt duty free whiskey as their latest victim. It turns out that following the UK liquid bomb plot, the Australian authorities decided that even when passengers are only in transit through the airport, they cannot take liquids over 100mls into the transit area and onto another plane – even if it is in a sealed duty-free bag and has transited safely through other countries and planes. I know this for a fact because I bought some delicious (and expensive) whiskey for a friend in New Zealand at Birmingham airport, safely transited it through Dubai, only for it to be confiscated (officially stolen) at Sydney airport – even though I was flying on to New Zealand!

The point is that this has almost nothing to do with security, even if it may have started out that way. This is clear from any reasoned analysis of the situation, namely, that if I was a terrorist carrying a liquid bomb in a fake duty-free officially-sealed bag, I could have detonated it over Sydney as we came in to land – or in the airport while I waited for security. If the authorities were that concerned at the risk, they would make other countries follow the same rules and not allow flights into Sydney that broke those rules (as the US does). A partial, half-hearted security regime is no security regime at all. Moreover, if the authorities are genuinely worried that explosives could be smuggled in via duty free whiskey, then they must also be extremely worried that a man put explosives in his underwear and flew all the way to America before trying to blow himself up. If they were really concerned about explosive risks, then Sydney airport would make every passenger remove their underwear for an explosives check.

We can also be sure that this is not necessarily about a reasonable response to a security risk, because there are simple procedures which could be adopted (like locking the doors to the pilot’s cabin in the case of hijacking). For example, in my case, they could ask me to take a drink of the whiskey to ensure it wasn’t liquid explosive; I would be very happy to do this. Or, they could have someone whose job it was to check that duty free alcohol really was alcohol by tasting a little of each bottle that passed through. Of course, they would probably need to rotate these people frequently and organise an AA meeting. Actually, a simple explosives test, which many airports use randomly on passengers anyway, could solve the question. Or, a simple security seal from airport security in the world’s main airports would also work. My point is that there are simple and reasonable measures which could be taken to reduce the sheer idiocy of some of the security measures currently in place – like confiscating my whiskey! The authorities have actually demonstrated that they can show a reasonable response when they realize that the alternative is too costly and too disruptive compared to the risk – as in the case of underwear bombs. Why not the whiskey, then?

But this is the catastrophic imagination we now have to live with, where paranoia makes policy and the security officers know they’re trapped in a Kafkaesque world but simply have to follow the rules (as the guys at Sydney security admitted to me). On average, there is one terrorist attack on a flight for every 17 million flights, and many of these attacks are unsuccessful. I’ve written about the factual risks of terrorism before; the real risk does not justify the overreaction and paranoid response, especially in terms of my whiskey. (Why must they take it out on people’s whiskey? For God’s sake, think of the children!) But the reality is that facts and reason no longer count for much in this new world; the heightened imagination of security officials is all that is needed to turn your whiskey (or maybe vodka or gin, you never know) into a security threat. And it seems that once an idiotic policy is in place, it is harder to change it back than to simply keep it going – a case of inertia and path dependency. Or maybe it has something to do with the security companies that have to charge a tidy premium for confiscating all that terrorist whiskey – not to mention the people who get to share the free confiscated whiskey at the end of the week? (I hope my stolen whiskey makes them puke! I’m not bitter about this at all, seriously.)

My question is: when will we – the whiskey drinkers; I mean, the People of the World – stop putting up with this stupidity and idiocy? How should we resist it? What are the tactics for fighting back? Next time, I think I will sit at security and drink the whole bottle of whiskey, sharing it with fellow passengers, rather than let them confiscate it. Either that, or take off my underpants which have travelled 24 hours from the UK and put them through the x-ray machine. I have to do something; I simply don’t want to live like this anymore. When good whiskey falls victim to counter-terrorism policy, you know we have reached the end of civilized society. It’s time to stand up and be counted, people – for the whiskey!

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The Remembrance of War

Lest We Remember:

Ode to a Dawn Ceremony

 

RICHARD JACKSON

 

I

War is young men lying in the mud with their intestines spilled on the ground crying for their mothers;

War is an unwilling conscript buried alive under tons of earth, his arms thrashing, his mouth filled with dirt as he slowly suffocates;

War is a father screaming beyond pain as his flesh caramelises in the fire to leave a blackened skull, teeth shining in the desert sun;

War is a young girl running screaming, her seared skin hanging off in strips;

War is a little boy with his arms blown off, screaming piteously as his world disintegrates into never-ending pain;

War is a man holding tightly to his daughter’s butchered corpse while he squats to defecate, his mind unhinged, unwilling to let go of his only child;

War is a little girl’s broken body lying under a pile of rubble, her eyes covered in dust, forever sightless;

War is a prisoner getting his throat cut open and bleeding to death to the sound of derisive laughter by his captors;

War is young soldiers playing football with the severed head of an enemy soldier in a dusty bush camp under a blood-red setting sun;

War is a sniper in a frozen trench shooting an old pensioner forced into the open in search of water, smoking while thin blood trickles among the cobblestones;

War is hooded, bound prisoners, squatting in the dirt, their trousers soiled with their fear, shivering with terror at every sound;

War is landmines designed not to kill but to so horribly mutilate the human body that those who witness the victim’s suffering shrink back in horror;

War is flame-throwers which soak a person with flaming material, sticking like glue to the skin as it burns;

War is a bomb exploding in a crowded street, tearing bodies to pieces with white-hot metal shards, leaving nothing more than chunks of meat and bloodstains on the pavement;

War is the torn flesh and organs of a daughter, son, brother, sister, cousin, friend, father, mother, workmate, boyfriend, fiance, husband…

II

War is more than a hundred million dead in the previous century, the most murderous period in all of human history;

War is hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and sexually assaulted, ‘comfort women’ to the avenging gods of war;

War is tens of thousands of detainees tortured, abused and mistreated every day in casual violence by frustrated soldiers and systematically by desperate intelligence officers;

War is millions of ordinary people living under a daily blanket of suffocating fear, smothered in insecurity;

War is the destruction of incalculable fields, wells, homes, hospitals, stores, factories, schools, kindergartens, churches, mosques, offices, theatres, roads, power plants and countless other needful things which nourish and sustain human life;

War is tens of millions of families displaced from their homes, forced to leave everything they’ve known behind, compelled to live in tents and defecate in the open.

III

War is the suicide of a dozen veterans a day, morally injured by the violence they were forced to inflict on their fellow human beings, often for a cause they could barely comprehend;

War is lifelong nightmares, guilt, depression, and mental pain for anyone who has ever experienced it, practitioners and survivors alike;

War is the countless individual traumas which make up the collective shock of a society undone by the cruelty of mass violence;

War is thousands of maimed, amputated young people facing a future of predictable torments;

War is burying in the ground incalculable human energy, creativity, and potential, an uncountable loss to families, societies, the future;

War is thousands of the world’s greatest scientific minds working tirelessly to develop ever more lethal killing machines;

War is the application of creative knowledge to the practical challenges of killing fellow human beings in ever greater numbers and ever more ingenious ways, institutionalised in the scholarly disciplines of weaponology and killology;

War is the maintenance and continued development of hideously expensive weapons designed to incinerate entire cities and threaten all human life of earth;

War is billions of bullets, guns, and bombs which could have instead made farming implements for the world’s poor, chairs for school classrooms, medical instruments to heal the sick, wind farms for clean energy, computers for scientific research…;

War is trillions of dollars taken away from health, education, policing, science, the arts, overseas aid, drug rehabilitation, domestic violence programmes, mental health support…;

War is the perennial sacrifice of security, health, education, development, creativity, and progress, to the insatiable appetite of the military machine which feeds on the soft flesh of society’s scarce material and human resources like a plague of locusts;

War is the ultimate taxation of our collective future.

IV

War is systematic, organised killing;

War is the industrialisation of harm;

War is the real terrorism;

War is the unmaking of the world through the infliction of inexpressible pain;

War is the bureaucratic rationalisation of calculated butchery, a murder industry;

War is a gross orgy of suffering, a celebration of hurt inflicted;

War is ritualised slaughter, human sacrifice on a grand scale, blood satiation to the gods of destruction;

War is Satan’s playground, a demonic symphony of pandemonium;

War is a death cult, nurtured by a culture of violence, overseen by high priests in uniform.

V

War is a vast system of forgetting, a massive conspiracy of silence at the heart of the patriotic imagination;

War is the re-writing of history;

War is living in a city of lies, a country of untruth;

War is the stench of violent death disinfected by the balm of sweet-smelling theology;

War is a massive cultural industry which glamorises, glorifies, and normalises the preparation for, and periodic practice of, ritual organised killing;

War is dawn parades, ubiquitous red poppies, statues in every village, and regular remembrance ceremonies, a cult of memorialisation aimed not at saving future generations from the horrors of war but priming the public to accept the sacrifice of their children in the next one;

War is the suppression of human empathy through the reality-obscuring language of ‘surgical strikes’, ‘operations’, ‘collateral damage’, ‘friendly fire’;

War is the dehumanisation of others through names like ‘hostiles’, ‘nips’, ‘krauts’, ‘gooks’, ‘rag-heads’, ‘terrorists’ in order to make it easier to kill, torture and abuse them;

War is the transmogrification of killing into a computer game where blood and torn flesh loses all colour, smell, sound, magically reappearing as purified ‘data’ on a computer screen;

War is the exploitation of distance to hide the truth of an artillery shell, the logic of a bullet, the certainty of a bomb;

War is wilful ignorance, the avoidance of inconvenient facts;

War is the scrubbing clean of all media reports so that the public never see death and mutilation, leaving them to eat their dinner undisturbed by the troubling sight of blood spilled in their names;

War is the active suppression of truth, the acceptance of distortion, the embrace of lies;

War is the ultimate injustice to its victims;

War is the adoption of logical fallacy as doctrine, the insane threat of global catastrophe as rational policy;

War is the deliberate creation of a situation in which cruelty and all forms of savagery are allowed to flourish, a moral vacuum designed to bring out the very worst of human behaviour;

War is sheer human ugliness obscured by the wreaths of pretty red flowers, the sound of infinite human suffering silenced by the haunting melody of a lone trumpet;

War is the sight of children’s blood and bones blotted out by brightly coloured fluttering flags and endless rows of red wreaths;

War is the unknown mother rotting in her unknown grave, the unremembered daughter killed by the known soldier with his medals shining on Remembrance Day.

VI

War is the pathological embrace of self-destroying pessimism, the fantastical belief that there is no alternative to killing;

War is the irrational surrender of choice, the abandonment of individual will to fate;

War is the appeasement of bloodlust and aggression, the sacrifice of humanity on the altar of militarised patriotism;

War is surrender to intense hatred of the other, the absolute negation of humanity;

War is a kind of perverse childishness, the embrace of uncontrollable rage, resistance to reason, irrational pride, the lack of temperance and maturity;

War is the abnegation of kindness, mercy, empathy, love and the annihilation of human happiness;

War is the absolute failure of imagination and intelligence;

War is the vomit of malformed patriotism, the grossest delusion of glory;

War is the conversion of immeasurable human pain into the fiction of state power;

War is the ultimate perversion of humanity’s capacity for love and mercy;

War is acquiescence and passivity by those who could stop it;

War is our greatest shame, the colossal moral failing of the human race;

War is a stinking stain on every conscience;

War is distasteful, offensive, cruel, inherently ignoble;

War is evil, no less, no more.

VII

War is sometimes unmade when people like you and me choose to live more fully inside the truth.

EXPLANATORY NOTE:

I wrote this ode for ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day, Armed Forces Day, Battle of Britain Day, VE Day, and all the other commemorations of war which function to help people forget the true nature of war and thus prepare them to accept and embrace the next war. Some of the statements in the first stanza describe events recounted to me by people who experienced war first hand; the rest come from media and historical accounts of war. They are far from the worst things that happen in war. War remembrance is intended to make us forget the horror of war by replacing those kind of images with memories of heroism and sacrifice instead. This ode asks us to resist this falsification and remember war for what it really is. I believe that only in this way – only by living within the truth of war – can we start to move towards leaving this immature, barbarous way of settling our conflicts behind, as we are slowly but surely leaving slavery, public execution, racism, sexism and other collective evils behind. The ode remains unfinished, as the evils of war can never be completely recounted.

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In Memorium: Jacob Bercovitch (1946-2011)

Professor Jacob Bercovitch of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, passed away recently. He was an outstanding scholar who has left a tremendous legacy in the wider field of peace and conflict studies. Through his teaching and research, he influenced a whole generation of scholars, of which I count myself one. I first met Jacob in 1987 when I began studying political science at the University of Canterbury. Inspired by his research and teaching from the very first day, I went on to study with him through both undergraduate and honours levels, and then later for my PhD in international conflict resolution. During this period, I also worked closely with him as research assistant for his internationally recognized and hugely influential project on the Correlates of Mediation. In time, we became colleagues and worked together on a number of publications. More importantly, he also became my good friend.

The impact and legacy he left was, in many ways, immeasurable, as it included all aspects of the academic life, including his teaching approach, his relationships with his students and colleagues, and his research and scholarship. In this respect, Jacob did not just study conflict resolution, but he embodied and practiced the ethos and values of peace which were his life’s study.

In terms of his scholarship, there two aspects in particular which have left a lasting impression on me. First, Jacob always sought to apply theory and practice in such a way that each would inform the other. His empirical research always flowed first from the application of theoretical reasoning, while empirical findings were allowed to speak back to theoretical formulation. In this way, I believe he found a balance between the often de-contextualised empirical research which sometimes seems to revel in the employment of complex statistics for its own sake, and the overly abstract theoretical reasoning which equally seems to ignore the real world of people and communities in conflict. The necessity of applying theory to practice has remained with me, and as a contribution, I believe its effect has been to strengthen the broader field of peace studies which was often viewed as theoretically naïve and lacking in empirical rigour.

A second contribution lies in Jacob’s development and application of the Contingency Approach to the study of conflict resolution. This was a way of thinking about the operation of human agency within, but not determined by, structural constraints. It is, I believe, a major contribution to both peace studies and international relations. Not only does it provide an analytical framework for reintegrating historically-visible human action and choices into structurally-oriented accounts of political processes, but it reminds us that social processes like war and peace are made through human action and choice; they are not the result of impersonal forces or structures. Crucially, the effect of this is to return ethical responsibility to the individual and to make each of us a potential actor for peace with all the expectations this entails.

In short, through the theoretical development of the Contingency Model and its application to the systematic empirical study of conflict resolution processes such as mediation and negotiation, Jacob Bercovitch has left an indelible mark on the wider study of peace and conflict. His insights and understanding have inspired a generation of both scholars and practitioners, and he stands proudly alongside other great scholars of peace studies and international conflict resolution. We can only hope that scholars new and old will continue and expand his research, and thus, try to fill the immense gap left by his passing.

I feel privileged and immensely grateful to have worked with him, to have known him, and to have called him my friend. He will be missed.

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Prevent: The Wrong Paradigm for the Wrong Problem

Asked by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Research and Documentation Committee and the editor of ReDoc’s Soundings website to write a short response to the government’s Prevent review which was published recently, I wrote the following:

The Failed Paradigm of Prevent

There are a number of problems with the government’s recently revised Prevent strategy for tackling the threat of homegrown terrorism. Two particular issues concern me in the government’s explanation of its new strategy. The first is the confused and ambiguous conceptual paradigm it continues to evidence. The strategy and its supporting documents are infused with discredited and nebulous terms like ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’, and seem to view these as both readily identifiable characteristics and causative of political violence. The fact is that ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ ideas are contextual and based on value-judgments, not objectively identifiable features of someone’s belief system or rhetoric. For example, given that the belief in the superiority of Islamic law is probably the majority opinion of the world’s billion Muslims, can it really be characterized as ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’? Is it extreme or radical to believe that Britain acts in an imperialist and violently aggressive manner around the world, that it is wrong to try and bomb other countries into adopting democracy or human rights standards, or that unilateral nuclear disarmament is a moral necessity? I believe all these things; does that make me an extremist? Similarly, is the desire for an Islamic homeland or Caliphate an extreme or radical viewpoint in itself? Was it also extreme to believe in a Jewish homeland? The point is that determining which of these constitutes ‘extremism’ is a matter of subjective viewpoint, either historical or geographical.

Also inherent to the language of the Prevent strategy is a very simplistic and problematic notion of a generic process by which individuals go along a pathway which eventually leads them to violent extremism. This notion of the ‘radicalization’ process is presented as being both undesirable and a kind of linear development with identifiable markers. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily true: in some cases (such as environmental awareness) it might actually be socially desirable to radicalize people, and more of them. At the same time, individuals rarely follow a linear line of development from ‘moderate’ to ‘radical’. Rather, everyone holds a variety of views at different times and places in their lives, on different subjects, which are usually a mix of ‘moderate’, ‘radical’ or in the case of the many millions of conspiracy theorists, downright ‘loony’! Moreover, people’s viewpoints are continuously being revised through interaction with others and are always in a state of evolution.

An important point sometimes forgotten is that some ‘extremists’ and ‘radicals’ have in the past been the drivers of positive social change, from anti-slavery proponents, to the anti-colonial movement, the suffragettes and environmentalists; in their time, they were all considered radical extremists. The fact is that today’s radicals may be honoured tomorrow with a commemorative statue. In addition, radicalism and extremism are wrongly assumed to imply an association with violence: given my opposition to war and militarism, some might call me a ‘radical pacifist’. A policy that seeks to challenge extremist ideology therefore must clearly provide some guidance as to what political viewpoints it is that are considered unacceptable, and show when a viewpoint crosses the line from ‘moderate’ to ‘extremist’.

A second serious problem with the government’s approach is its lack of a basis in, or even knowledge of, the evidence and research on the causes of political violence. The notion that extremism or radicalisation is the main ‘driver for terrorism’ or the reason why people support violence is simply not supported by the evidence academics have gathered thus far. At the most basic level, the notion that ideas cause actions is simplistic and rarely the case – as most people reading this article will know from their own experience when their beliefs about the value of healthy eating and exercise more often than not failed to result in desired actions! In fact, this paradigm represents a fantastical belief in the power of ideas to magically transform otherwise normal individuals into psychotic murderers. It is akin to the belief that rock music can make ordinary teenagers commit suicide, a notion now thoroughly discredited. From this perspective, there is little point to banning certain websites or burning books.

The evidence we actually have is that choosing to use violence is largely unrelated to an individual’s political beliefs, and often, individuals choose to give up using violence while still retaining their commitment to their original political goals. This also explains why there are so many armchair radicals – people who express a belief in revolutionary action but are unwilling to go the final step and engage in action due to fear or laziness. At the same time, the converse is also untrue: people do not support or participate in violence solely because they are extremists. People support and engage in violence for a great many reasons, including fear, insecurity, anger or love of country. In Britain, many support military violence out of patriotism, while in colonial America and Palestine today, people have supported violent struggle for love of freedom and justice. Others support violent humanitarian intervention out of a desire to protect human rights. Finally, it is important to note that individuals are not like computers who are programmed by their beliefs to act in certain ways, but can always choose to act in ways contrary to their earlier beliefs at any given moment. This is why there are numerous people in Israeli prisons today who at one time volunteered for a suicide mission, submitted to a period of training and indoctrination, made all the necessary psychological preparations, but then backed away at the final moment and surrendered; they chose to act against all their deeply-held beliefs.

In other words, the real problem is not that certain individuals or small groups believe that Northern Ireland should be free from all British imperial influence, or that Britain is engaging in a violent war against Muslims around the world, or that Muslims should have a homeland where they can live under their own legal system, or that all animal testing must be eradicated – and then this belief compels them to act violently. Tens of millions of people believe all these things without ever considering joining a terrorist group or engaging in violent behaviour. The real problem is when individuals or groups go on to choose to use violent as opposed to non-violent methods to try and advance their goals. And at the root of this choice of violence as a tactic is the unquestioned belief that violence works – that violence can achieve positive political goals when applied strategically. It is therefore pointless (and counter-productive) to try and convince people not to hold certain political viewpoints, because that is not the real problem; holding what may be considered ‘radical’ ideas has little or nothing to do with the strategic choice to use violence.

At this point, it becomes obvious that the British government faces a serious problem in its efforts to try and prevent people from pursuing their aims through violent means, not least because it has to try and convince people and groups to ‘do as I say, not as I do’. The fact is that the British government chooses to use violence as the primary means of achieving its political goals all the time, whether it is regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, or securing its colonial possessions in the south Atlantic. This belief in the efficacy of violence is a powerful lesson to individuals and groups wanting to achieve political change; in many ways, the ‘violent extremists’ the government wants to influence are simply following the example of British foreign policy. The government is thus faced with two options: either it must try to demonstrate a more moral, non-violent foreign policy which will then make its message to homegrown terrorists far more believable, or it must make a much better case for why it is entitled to use violence to achieve its political goals but others are not. This latter option could be possible but it would entail an open and robust public debate about the morality and purpose of British militarism, foreign military engagements and the utility of military force in the contemporary international system.

A related point raised in the government’s new strategy is the contradiction between the ‘values-based’ approach Prevent takes, and the actions of the British government. For example, the document states: “We will not work with extremist organisations that oppose our values of universal human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in our society. If organisations do not accept these fundamental values, we will not work with them and we will not fund them.”  The problem with this is that British actions in support of the war on terror, support for Israeli actions, involvement in torture and rendition, draconian counter-terrorism measures directed at the Muslim community, lack of equality before the law for terrorist suspects, and the failure of successive governments to follow the democratic will of the country in pursuing foreign wars, budget cuts and the like, make such statements appear deeply hypocritical. This gap between words and actions creates frustration and undermines the government’s message.

In the end, I suspect that the real, hoped-for purpose of the new (and previous) Prevent strategy is actually to produce docile subjects who will accept British foreign policy without seriously questioning or opposing it, rather than engaged citizens willing to challenge and contest democratically the government’s right to act in our name in certain situations. To my mind, one of the key dangers of the Prevent strategy is that denying robust and open debate on controversial issues of foreign policy, and securitizing particular political viewpoints, will actually drive many individuals and groups underground where their anger and resentment can fester and their decision to adopt violent tactics goes unchallenged. It will thus encourage the very outcomes the government says it wants to prevent. Paradoxically, the report recognizes this very point, at the same time that it seems to want to close down certain kinds of debate. It states: “In the UK, evidence suggests that radicalisation tends to occur in places where terrorist ideologies, and those that promote them, go uncontested and are not exposed to free, open and balanced debate and challenge.”

In full agreement with this, I believe that encouraging real open debate, political activism, and genuine democratic engagement is one of the best options we have for discouraging further political violence. Apart from repairing the growing democratic deficit in our system, which would be a valuable goal in itself, it would also remove one of the key reasons groups sometimes decide that violence is necessary – because they see little chance of engendering policy change through the limited democratic channels that currently exist. More importantly, it would provide an empowering and safer alternative to the use of clandestine violence.

Taking this perspective, I would recommend that the government abandons any elements of the new Prevent strategy which seek to restrict speech and instead embarks on an alternative ‘Radicalisation Programme’ in which young people, students and anyone who feels aggrieved, are encouraged to debate, contest, and challenge the government on any of its policies without fear of reprisals, and to protest, demonstrate, write letters, join a political party or start an activist group. The added value of this might be the emergence of new solutions to some of our most pressing contemporary problems. After all, we cannot rely on traditional thinking and ways of acting to solve the present challenges posed by climate change, poverty reduction, weapons proliferation, human rights protection, economic recession, quagmire in Afghanistan, and the like. Seriously, it is time we recognized that it is only ‘radicals’ and ‘radical’ solutions which can save us now.

For more great commentary on the government’s new Prevent strategy, please visit the ReDoc’s Soundings website.

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Campus Extremists

When I hear the oft-repeated argument that there are violent extremists operating on British campuses, I know it’s true. I have heard countless students and professors alike advocating the use of extreme violence to enforce their way of life on others. They recommend bombing campaigns, full-scale invasion and counter-insurgency against recognized states in the full knowledge that it will result in the deaths of thousands of innocent. Shockingly large numbers of them support kidnapping and torture, otherwise known as rendition and enhanced interrogation. Others openly support state terrorism – the use of extreme violence or the threat of violence to intimidate other societies into changing their policies. They call it ‘shock and awe’. I have even heard some express pride in the genocidal murder of millions as they waxed lyrical about the glories of the British empire. Some campus extremists I have heard advocate the building of horrible, indiscriminate weapons that can incinerate entire cities without distinction between soldiers or civilians.

When I hear the oft-repeated argument that universities radicalize students, I know it’s true. I have known countless former students who have gone on to join violent organisations where they received weapons training, bomb-throwing instruction and specialized training in all the dark arts of killing fellow human beings. I have also known former students who have gone on to work for fundamentalist groups like banks, investment firms, the Treasury, the Conservative Party, the IMF and others – groups who won’t be swayed by evidence or rational argument but who cling rigidly to discredited ideologies and try to remake the world in their dark image, no matter how much suffering it creates. Strangely though, I know far more former students who have gone on to become peace workers, aid volunteers, arms protesters, human rights lawyers, diplomats, journalists, and teachers. I guess that is a kind of radicalization, too, wanting to help people less fortunate than themselves and change the world for the better.

When I hear the oft-repeated argument that extremists preachers or websites turn young people into terrorists, I know it must be true because I have heard that ordinary young people can be turned to suicide by listening to rock music and that dancing leads to unwanted pregnancies. I confess that when I accidentally overheard Osama bin Laden speaking on the BBC in one of his videos, I had a sudden urge to build a homemade bomb. I had to make a cup of tea to calm down. I’m sure this is how the mind works: you hear someone suggest some radical kind of action and you can’t help but rush out and act on it, which is clearly why the government must ban all extremist speakers (except those in their own cabinet, of course) and block all extremist websites, apart from The Times.

When I hear the oft-repeated argument that extremism leads to violent extremism, I know it’s true because I too want to end capitalism, overthrow western imperialism, free Palestine, force China and Russia to uphold human rights, end the arms trade, and a great many of ‘radical’ goals. I have many friends who agree with me, and we have been discussing these issues for years, most often while drinking red wine after a barbeque. Sometimes we even have the urge to do something. I remember we once looked up Amnesty International online, but then realized you had to give money and write letters. We opened another bottle instead.

But when I hear the oft-repeated argument that tackling violent extremism means promoting British values, I admit I get a little confused. Aren’t British values about an ingrained intolerance for people of other religions, language, race, and culture and how they are ruining our country? Don’t we want to convert them all to Anglicanism, football hooliganism and drinking tea (or lager)? Aren’t British values about settling conflicts primarily through violence, as we have done for centuries in the colonies, Suez, the Falklands, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya? Aren’t British values about the valorization of military might and the glories of war? Don’t we have statues to war in every village and street corner? Don’t we celebrate our martyrs on Remembrance Sunday, Battle of Britain Day, Armistice day? Don’t we value the power that comes with owning weapons of mass destruction? It seems to me that the government doesn’t need to worry about these violent extremists; they have already clearly demonstrated their commitment to the most important British values.

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The Costs of Militarism

A recent article by Joshua Holland for Enduring America provides a salutary analysis of the financial costs of recent military spending and war. It notes that since 9/11, the US has spent $7.6 trillion on the military and homeland security. Another recent media story notes that if operations continue against Libya, it will cost the UK taxpayers £1 billion by September this year. At the same time, the UK government has recently given the go-ahead for the renewal of the Trident nuclear submarine system which will eventually cost taxpayers £20 billion. Of course, it’s common knowledge that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost the US $3 trillion and the UK £20 billion so far. With no end in sight in either of these wars, the billions continue to pour out like a ruptured oil pipeline.

These shocking figures are important because they give lie to the relentless political rhetoric of the debt crisis and the necessity to cut budget deficits. They demonstrate that there is in fact plenty of money which the government could use to keep its social programmes running; cuts are in fact a matter of budget priorities and a political choice. The figures clearly demonstrate that the priorities of our leaders are militarism and violence over social services, education, health, the homeless, mental health, libraries and ironically, debt repayment. There is always enough money for fighting wars and building weapons, it seems.

For me, one real sadness of these figures, apart from all the direct victims of widespread military violence, is the horrendous opportunity costs of such profligate spending: what else could we have spent all that money on (or even just a small fraction of it), and how much better off, happier, and more peaceful could the world have been as a result? Joshua Holland’s article mentions just a few things in answer to this question. Similar to other compilations of what a portion of the world’s military spending could achieve in terms of development assistance, the provision of clean water, education, healthcare, housing, peace education, and so on, Holland shows that:

1. Post-9/11 Defense Hikes Equal Five Times the “Medicare Gap”

Economist Dean Baker notes that “the projections in the Medicare Trustees report, as well as the CBO baseline budget, show that the program faces a relatively modest long-term shortfall.” The amount of money needed to balance the program’s finances over its 75-year horizon, he adds, “is less than 0.3 percent of GDP, approximately one-fifth of the increase in the rate annual defense spending between 2000 and 2011.”

2. Afghanistan Costs Alone Could Pay for 15.6 Years of Head Start

Head Start provides education, health, nutrition, and parenting services to low-income children and their families. It’s an incredibly successful, effective and popular program, but there are only 900,000 places in the program for more than 2.5 million eligible kids. According to the National Priorities Project, what we’ve spent on the Afghanistan war so far could fund Head Start for all eligible children for the next 15.6 years.

3. Covering the Uninsured

A 2007 study conducted by researchers at Harvard University estimated that 45,000 people die every year in the United States from problems associated with lack of coverage. The study found that “uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts,” even “after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health.”

According to NPP’s analysis, the costs of the Afghanistan conflict alone could cover every uninsured American for 1.7 years.

4. Closing State Budget Gaps

Forty-six states face budget shortfalls in this fiscal year, totaling $130 billion nationwide. The supplemental requests for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year add up to $170 billion – that doesn’t include the Pentagon’s base budget, nukes or Homeland Security.

5. Iraq, Just in 2011

Iraq is still a bloody mess, with an insurgency still underway. But our politicians have declared victory and the media have largely moved on. That doesn’t mean we won’t spend almost $50 billion on those “non-combat troops” which remain, however. What else could we do with that kind of scratch if we just brought them home? NPP tells us it would buy:

• 24.3 million children receiving low-income health care for one year, OR
• 726,044 elementary school teachers for one year, OR
• 829,946 firefighters for one year, OR
• 6.2 million Head Start slots for children for one year, OR
• 10.7 million households with renewable electricity — solar photovoltaic for one year, OR
• 28.6 million households with renewable electricity-wind power for one year, OR
• 6.1 million military veterans receiving VA medical care for one year, OR
• 9.8 million people receiving low-income health care for one year, OR
• 718,208 police or sheriff’s patrol officers for one year, OR
• 6.0 million scholarships for university students for one year, OR
• 8.5 million students receiving Pell grants of $5,550

I can’t also help wondering what a small portion of military spending invested in research into non-violence and peace-making could achieve. Is it possible that a few hundred of the world’s best scientists and academics, taking a year or two to examine how nations and communities might better resolve conflict without recourse to war and killing, could take us a real step towards a genuine alternative to war and militarism? It would only cost a day or two’s military budget, but the benefits and savings in the long run would be incalculable. Finally, it can be argued that all the spending on militarism and organized killing, and the lost opportunities of improving human well-being because all the money is being spent on war, actually creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which further military spending is required. Not only is violence mimetic – an act of violence most often provokes a violent reaction – but the conditions of poverty, exclusion, and frustrated aspirations provide the pre-conditions which can later lead to intense violent conflict.

In the end, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States’ Cold War experience seems as depressingly relevant as ever:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?

My question is: how can we break the cycle of militarism in our politics? How do we pressure our leaders to change their priorities to secure a more peaceful future? An important first step must be the de-militarisation of our own minds, thereby giving the politicians one less voter they can count on for their militarized patriotism and the endless feeding of the deathly war machine.

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