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If you have an analysis that perfectly explains the present conflict in Iran, say on. I’ll listen but with only half an ear. There comes a time when competing explanations begin to sound like white noise. Each layer of depth or complexity that one descends into changes the picture to something completely different. At the top, the most superficial level, are the day’s headlines, fit only to inspire an outburst of hate against whomever someone has decided we should be angry with; at the bottom, the conspiracy theory that unravels all of history into delusion and leaves us with an echoing void.
Somewhere between these two is the truth, the thing we are not allowed to know. Perhaps wars occur not for a single reason but because of the alignment of many private interests and agendas. Some of these are not even hidden: the American high-ups are barely bothering to hide the fact that they are making money by selling weapons to both sides.
How public does this kind of thing have to become before people become as outraged as they should be – before they refuse to participate any longer? But it’s not as simple as we used to think, back in the days of the Peace Movement and the Flower Children.
I know I’ve said this before, so I apologise for repeating myself, but it’s worth saying again. There was a poster back in the ’70s that asked, “What if there was a war and nobody came?” A sweet, sentimental thought, a dream of a better world that might come one day when we all became more aware.
But we have forgotten our history. Mediaeval Europe held to the Biblical principle that a king ought not to keep a standing army in peacetime. And so it often used to happen that there was a war and nobody came. Kings could declare a war, but they couldn’t fight one unless they could persuade their nobles to join in, and the nobles were limited by law in the amount of military service they could require of their vassals.
All of this is long gone – indeed, as I said, all but forgotten. We take it for granted nowadays that nations and their leaders can keep huge standing armies and that they can exact unlimited amounts of military service from the people when the occasion arises. We take this as the price of the relative peace and prosperity we have come to expect.
And yet it somehow doesn’t keep delivering peace and prosperity. Instead, we now have endless war and the privations and hardships that war necessarily entails.
Why don’t we just say no? But it’s not that simple because it’s not just a matter of soldiers enlisting in regiments. War can be fought without anyone being on the ground now. And it’s not confined to the military, either. People go to university and stay there to advance research and development, science and technology and medicine, and somehow it all ends up being used in the war machine, or in the even stranger and more horrible arenas of biological warfare, chemical warfare, and psychological warfare. What is anyone to do? To halt research and development would be contrary to the motive force of the whole human project, which is to make things better. To try to keep helpful discoveries out of the hands of the warmongers seems not possible. To understand how to dismantle their vast and labyrinthine systems of control would defeat the greatest minds.
As George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, to keep people enslaved you have to keep them poor and you also have to keep them busy. War serves this purpose excellently, because people who are being attacked do not question the need for defence, or for the military monster that gobbles up their productivity.
I don’t have any better solution to offer than Winston Smith’s: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”[1] Neither Trump nor Musk nor any other popular hero will save us. If we hope for a better future, we must each of us begin at home, and begin by keeping our own minds and our children’s minds free. I believe that Jesus Christ will come to be acknowledged as the King of Kings and reign as the Prince of Peace. But in the meantime he requires us to be active. And even not believing the narrative may ultimately prove to be one of the most powerful things we can do.
[1] That is, the proletarians. See Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter VII.
