Tani Newton
OPINION
In the 1970s, in the Peace Movement, there was a poster that said, “What if there was a war and nobody came?”
What a sweet, beautiful sentiment that seemed. But what we often don’t realise today is that that could happen in mediaeval Europe, because the whole of mediaeval Europe held to the Biblical principle that a king could not keep a standing army in peacetime. If a king wanted to have a war, he had to get the barons interested in fighting it. The barons could exact a specified amount of military service from their vassals under the feudal system, and kings were owed service by knights, but there was no army ready to be deployed. It actually happened quite often that a king would declare a war and nobody would come.
It is inevitable, perhaps, that over time societies become more complex, more centralised and more interdependent. Hardly anyone today could survive without the whole of society, and we are obliged to be dependent on the government for an endless array of things which we seem to have no power to resist or question. We take it for granted that one man can decide to start a war and thousands of people will get blown up.
It could be argued that standing armies are needed today because modern military equipment takes so much training to operate. But old-fashioned armaments were hard to use too and required years of practice. It’s just that everyone had them and it was part of the culture to learn to use them. Again, it will be argued that people can’t be allowed to have weapons today because they’re too dangerous. And again, it can be argued that old-fashioned weapons were dangerous too. Perhaps it is more significant that we have a culture of shame and disapproval around boys playing with guns and swords. After all, it is a definitively masculine activity and our society is anti-masculine and anti-violence. How ironic that the result of that is that weapons are now the privileged preserve of the heartless warmongers who don’t care how many innocent lives they obliterate.
It would be nice if there was a war and nobody came. But it doesn’t look as if that can happen in the modern world.
