General

AN ESTIMATE OF THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Sometimes War Costs are calculated by trying to add up figures of national income but they rarely see the full picture, because the real changes are so complex. A big danger is that GDP figures might make an American person’s income twenty times more important than an African person’s, which would obviously be false. This study uses a number of important economic indicators – economic disruption, working years, deaths and injuries, property destruction and market failure to guesstimate the overall costs. All assessments need sober judgements and will be approximate but they give us some idea of the full costs of war, something that is actually not much considered. The topic is far bigger than this study. We have estimates of the cost to the US of its Middle East Wars of $6 trillion or more, but no-one to my knowledge has attempted to estimate the cost to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc of the wars they have had visited on them. The real costs are almost impossible to value. So here is an attempt to weigh the WW2 costs through these intermediaries

ECONOMIC DISRUPTION.

The Second World War lasted six years, though states entered and left it at different times. But six years of disruption is quite a reasonable figure. The USSR and the US were preparing long before they entered and for a year or two afterwards several countries were completely stunned by the destruction. Japan was attacking China from 1937. Assessing disruption is difficult. Many people work and produce mainly to live, but for a long time trade, housing, property, towns, cities, arts, education, culture, sport, holidays, clothes, furniture, literature, much media and other areas of normal life partly mainly shut down through War. There are two caveats. First the United States was less dominated by the War than the main other belligerents, and it depends on whether you focus on population or GDP as to the weight you give it. I prefer population. Second, South America and Africa (away from North Africa) were possibly les affected by the War initially.  Moreover, the big recession in world trade had started with the Great Depression, so the cutting of trade was not a simple consequence either. The public figures on this are not very helpful either. They are poorly collected in most countries. Many would feel their lives were on hold for much of the War. Others would get on with life in the circumstances, doing different things.

The guesstimate here, taking into account the things that ceased, the diversion of resources to the War, the things that were not possible because of War and the closing down of economic and wider activities that went on, is that 60% of the normal economies of the world were disrupted for six years. This figure is chosen because of the vast areas of ordinary life which were closed down, the populations of the USSR and eastern Europe, China, India and East Asia who were made homeless, on the move, facing fairly total disruption, famine and forced labour, weighed against the areas where disruption was smaller. Notice, disruption is what it says, the things that cannot happen because of war. For what it is worth, that comes out at 3.6 years of world economic life lost.

WORKING YEARS.

Another line of approach is to consider the work and labour loss during and after the war.  Of course, the real loss, inestimable in value was the loss of persons, but we are undertaking to sift out economic impacts.  It was not just the immediate loss of labour in the War, devastating though that was. Through deaths and other processes it affected the world economy for over a quarter of a century. Two countries were especially affected – the USSR and China – something not really understood in the West. . The USSR lost at least 25 million of mainly young people and China 8-14 million. So, let us categorize the main areas of loss. Obviously, these are crude estimates, but in each case, there are reasons to suspect they are underestimates.

First, troops were fighting during the War rather than doing normal sustenance work.  In different countries there were some 70 -80 million troops serving for different periods between 1939 and 1945 when each state joined and ended the War. We take a five-year average. We estimate this at 350 million troop years of diverted labour (5 times 70m). Because they were diverted from learning other skills than killing people which they had to pick up later, we add another 20 million years. They were usually young workers entering the work training period. This gives 370 million overall, and this is additional to the disruption, though linked to it, because it was usually other states troops who caused national disruption. This was an absence of work which often women and the old tried to remedy.

They were backed up by those helping the War Effort, or those on the Home Front as it was sometimes called.  Those involved in the “war effort” – weapons, troop equipment, admin, transport – rather than the ordinary business of living are difficult to estimate. In Britain a third (13m) of the civilian population (40m) was engaged in war work in 1944. Other countries would probably be more labour intensive and Britain was fighting in North Africa and Italy between Dunkirk and D Day.  This was about three per member of the armed forces. Assume worldwide war effort workers at three per fighting person, and it amounts to 210m times 5 or 1, 050 million years. Another tranche of work surrounds perhaps 30 million worldwide who were working for, say, two years on average before the war on weapons and other war related work. In Germany and the USSR it was going on from 1933 on a considerable scale, similarly in Japan, and the Spanish Civil War was seen as a testing ground for munitions and bombing. Add in Britain, France, Italy and other countries preparing, and we have a further 60 million years of war work, probably an underestimate.   

In total this is roughly 1,480 million years. The world population at the time was 2.3 billion. The world population-employment ratio is usually something under a half, but that tends to be paid employment and possibly more were “subsistence” employed. So, it seems reasonable to take 60% employment as reasonable. This means an additional economic loss of over a year’s world-wide economic activity.  

DEATHS AND INJURIES.

Deaths. There were 70-80 million war-related deaths in WW2. Most of the armed forces who died and those in Concentration Camps and other massacres were young. It seems reasonable to conclude that 70 million times 20 years of later working life was snuffed out by the loss of these people. Obviously, the age distribution around the world was distorted by this missing generation, and 20 years seems a reasonable, or under, approximation of the work loss. This comes out at a further 1,400 million work years. Given parents and teachers had invested their time in bringing up these usually young people, a token 70 million times 2 years is added on. It could easily be three or more. This gives the total loss of work before and after the war through deaths at 1,540 million years. We take this at another year’s work loss of economic activity.

Those injured amount to some 25 million. The range of injuries vary greatly, but many of them were debilitating in terms of work and cost the work of others in care and medical support. If we guesstimated four years of work loss for each of them it would be almost insulting, but that we do. That is a further 100 million work years. In addition, there were those suffering trauma. It was different from the “Shell shock” of WW1, but the traumas of Concentration Camps, bombing, invasion and war slave labour were deep and especially in the USSR and China were almost incalculable. We call it PTSD now and recognize the costs more. We even understand secondary PTSD as a further cost. Again, we guesstimate a two year work and healthy living loss for a hundred million people, a further 200 million work years. This amounts to, say 20% of a world economic year. This is 1.2 years of economic destruction through death, injury and trauma, actually spread over the next twenty or thirty years.

THE DESTRUCTION AND DAMAGE.

Thus far, we have not calculated the damage and destruction caused by the War. It was, of course, the first great bombing war.  Bombs of all types were used systematically to destroy ships, railways, roads, bridges, dams, factories, ports, cities and towns. The scale of this destruction varied from country to country and with the state of the War. London was bombed and Dresden was bombed, but so too were Stalingrad, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Milan, Turin, most Polish, Soviet, Chinese, Japanese and many other cities. Britain dropped about 1.3 million tons of bombs and the US one and a half million tons. Germany, the USSR and Japan also bombed heavily and the explosions destroyed efficiently. They were aimed at high value targets. In the case of Japan and many German cities where wood was used extensively burning multiplied the effect. Then, of course, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. France which experienced moderate destruction –  a description which is almost obscene – estimates its destruction at three years of GDP. That is, it would take three years of economic activity in the whole economy, aside eating and a few essentials, to restore all that was destroyed to full working order. In some locations old buildings were lovingly restored, while in others, like Rotterdam, a new conception of city centre was developed. For example, the cost of rebuilding cities, towns, factories, roads, infrastructure in the devastated countries is nearly inestimable. Workers slaved to recreate the pre-war housing stock for decades. I remember having seen the poor quality of some Eastern European housing decades later and judging that this was “Communist” housing, but then realising with shame exactly the challenge of building housing for a vast population without Marshall Aid to survive east European winters after the devastation in 1945. The destruction was epic. Perhaps the three year GDP guess will do for the overall impact of war damage. In the USSR, Poland, China, Japan, Germany and elsewhere it was far more. Areas which were really hit faced an awesome task which was one of the taken-for-granted but most outstanding achievements of the late 40s and 50s.  So, the further waste was to throw away three years of the world economy in destruction of infrastructure, housing, cities and factories. It is notable that the United States, the one major country to avoid this kind of destruction, suddenly jumped in 1945 to being half of the total world economy in terms of GDP, and its wealth was suddenly unrivalled.

MARKETS, TRADE, GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY.

The business of economics – markets, trade, sea transport, distribution, the efficiency of tools, logistics, trust in trading relations and many other factors are deeply damaged by War. Obviously, a lot of merchant shipping was sunk. Other bulk transport systems required months or years of work. Harvesting, storing, moving, refrigerating food was difficult and rationing was practiced through beyond 1950.  International trade was depressed. Marshall Aid was only introduced in 1948, three years after the end of the War because trade was so stifled, and the USSR was excluded from it in an act of spitefulness against the state that had done most to defeat Hitler. The organisation of government in economic life was destroyed in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, China (which then had a destructive Civil War), Japan and many other states. For a number of years external control operated until national governments were able to reform. It seems reasonable to assess this as another year of world economic loss.

FIRST COUNT THE COST.

There were other costs to war. The activity of War, although among the Allies it was bent to destroying Fascism, was destructive, as all war  activity is destructive.  Even Churchill said the War could have been prevented as late as 1935-6 and certainly it could have been prevented at the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference if the Hoover proposals had been accepted by Britain. But instead we entered the great War waste. Here the estimate is that WW2 cost 9.8 years of the world’s full economic activity, nearly four years longer than the duration of the War itself, a tenth of the century. The generation of the blighted years has died or is dying. They knew something of the waste directly. Seeing it at a distance is more difficult, and this figure merely conveys something of what it was. Understanding how to end war is necessary, for we have long been building towards another big one. Count the cost. The words of Jesus warn us.

General

We Think Too Late

We are all slow in our thinking. Changing our mind may take ten years, but by then the chance is over. Consider the end of the Cold War. The USSR had imploded under its military costs, and both Gorbachev and Yeltsin wanted an end to these two vast arsenals which were impoverishing us all. It was the obvious opportunity to close down world militarism. There was genuinely no big enemy. Millions of us probably thought – I certainly did – Why don’t they disarm and agree to stay disarmed? What a great move that would have been. Saddam off the map. The Middle East stable. The CIA without a job and seventy million refugees not fleeing their homes. Yes, that was good thinking of a kind, but it was pathetic, inadequate.  

What was needed was another bit of thinking. I was dimly aware of it then, but not really switched on. It was not difficult, or academic, though academic thinking helps a bit sometimes. It was really ordinary human wisdom. I needed to understand that turkeys do not vote for Christmas, and they have never voted for Christmas. Of course, everybody understands that, and most people have probably said it. But you cannot do disarmament if the militarists are in charge of it. They will not do their own obsolescence. And insofar as they control the politicians, they will not let the politicians do it either. So, disarmament in 1990 would be killed if the wrong people were in place, and they were. Thinking needs to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, as Someone once said, but most of us are as wise as doves.  We were not up for it. We were not prepared. We were foolish virgins, as Someone once said. We could read the weather, but could not read the times, as he insisted he should. We were cooing about the end of the Cold War, but our thinking was asleep, and the wrong people were in charge. President Reagan had learned his trade with an arms company, General Electric, and George H. W. Bush was pro-military and had Rumsfeld as his advisor, the one who had given aid to Saddam to buy arms. There was not much intellect there.

So, there was the time we all lived through. We celebrated the end of the Cold War, but we were not thinking. We were not switched on. Millions needed to think and act decisively. Really, we had about six months to think. On 2nd December 1989 Bush and Gorbachev declared an end to the Cold War. But nothing happened. The US military were asked about disarmament, but they said they would wait about for another enemy to emerge, and the CIA eventually laid on Russia and possibly China, after they had had to make do with Saddam for a decade, even when he had no WMDs.

So, where were you in early 1990? You were probably not thinking effectively, like me. You made do with a warm feeling. You were asleep. Things were better, but not really better, because turkeys do not vote for Christmas. We are still not thinking, and now the leader of the free world is an idiot.

Sign:  https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300818

It does not require much thought.

General

CHRISTIANITY AND THE MARKET NOW

Sometimes the Lord God collects the ball from the other side of the pitch, puts it in front of you on the six yard line and says, “Kick”, and it is like that now on Markets.

What are Markets? The short-version Adam Smith needed “an invisible hand” from no-where and self-interest. Then we needed entrepreneurs and capitalists and “free competition”. Then nearly sophisticated economists constructed micro-economic systems of supply and demand which equilibriated, which then became systems of equations and calculations allowing profits to be creamed off from irregularities. Then a lot of it stops for Coronavirus, and we have to really reflect.

And we realise, markets are a form of human co-operation. Markets are people working together for good, and for goods, like the present preoccupation with PPE. Christianity, as it usually is, was right all along. Markets are an extension of Loving your Neighbour as yourself, the Second Great Commandment. Over thousands of years, often as in 1279BC (guess) , 1929, 1939 and 2008 with hiccups, people have been constructing markets on the basis of loving your neighbour as yourself. Some got it fully, and others just tagged along, but this is the basis of all markets. They are co-operation systems for good. There is no way round, over, under or through this understanding. You must love your neighbour.

Of course, some people have got it all the way through. Wilberforce got rid of slavery. Shaftesbury got rid of child labour. The Salvation Army realised that strong alcohol was a bad, and the Good Samaritan realised that Healthcare was a non-traded good, or was that just fiction? Angela Merckel and the German Christian Democrats understood the social market while we were awhoring off after Thatcherite wealth creation, and the Chinese made and make things we need. Thank you, China.

There are at least seven major market lessons, and now they are hitting us in the face.

  1. LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR. We love and are loved by our neighbour. We depend on them and we do for them. That is what we are doing in schools, factories, shops, fields, hospitals and a hundred and one other ways. We are not loving our neighbour when we are killing, addicting, shoddying goods, enslaving or abusing them.
  2. YOU LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR AS YOURSELF. There is justice here – just wages, not one person getting 1000X what another does, – fair prices, not exploiting shortages and making billions out of others, – international fairness, not economic colonialism, slavery or resource rape. All goods are fairtrade goods. Capitalist systems of control are immoral and unjust and should be destroyed.
  3. THERE ARE BAD MARKETS. Markets can exploit workers, consumers, political weaknesses, market anonymity, consumer addictions and weaknesses, the environment and the planet. We have to stay responsible for markets, not treat them as systems which govern us.
  4.  WHAT IS GOOD FOR US? We need to think about goods and bads. Advertising is mainly based on selfishness and self-reward. You owe it to yourself. But what is really good for ourselves and others? The Tories were downgrading healthcare, but now two nurses have saved Boris’s life. “Oh, we got that one wrong” say the Tories. Perhaps a third of what we consume is not good for us. It makes us fight, fat and foughtless.
  5. PRICES MUST REFLECT VALUES. We have been taught by those who make money out of it, that prices rule the world. They do not. We make prices. Mainly, these days we make them for the rich. But our values give price – what we pay people, what we will pay for diamonds, healthcare, food and saving the planet. Sometimes prices are complicated, but values must make them. We structure prices.
  6. BAD MARKETS NEED REFORMING. World-wide, there are markets for the FEW, the bosses, the major shareholders, the stars, the moguls. But markets are meant to be for the Common Good, not the few. They used to be controlled by nationalisation, but now they have gone international. They have tax havens, accumulate power, run governments and distort our economic lives. There need to be a major world reform addressing the control of the superrich. We must all do it.
  7. GOD’S GIFT TO US. The basis for all markets is God’s gifts to us in creation – food, water, wood, energy, light, air, minerals, plants, animals, insects, fish, oil, warmth, metals, rivers and much more. We depend on these. We are stewards of these. We understand them with God. We make what is good better. We must address global warming and the sin and arrogance of our modern exploitative mindset. We are nearly out of time before we face the judgment we call upon ourselves, and God waits. Our children’s children are also our neighbours.

This Christian understanding is the deepest wisdom about markets in human history. It should be understood by all, and is inescapable. Markets require that we love our neighbours as ourselves and they come from that source. So, as Coronavirus blows the foam of selfishness away, let us properly understand the markets within which we partly live.

General

Reassessing China’s Surveillance.

I’m sorry. This is a time when I have to step up to the plate and admit I was wrong. Let’s give some background. I had looked at the way China was treated by the colonial powers in the 19th century insisting on the right to make them opium addicts, and the dismemberment of China by Japan, assisted by British arms in the 1920s and 1930s. I had seen that Chiang Kai-shek was a disaster and Mao was understandable. I felt that the demonization of Communist China by America was a bit overdone, but was worried about the Christian persecution. It seemed that the projected failure of the Communist economy was probably not going to happen, and that nobody in the United States knew what Communism was anyway. It was obvious that the Vietnam War was about independence from France and the US, not about dominos in the Far East and a Chinese conspiracy.

After Mao, China eased up. It had always been quite non-aggressive, living within its Wall, and it waited a hundred and fifty years to claim back Hong Kong which we had seized as part of our insistence on making them opium addicts. Then we realised that there were fifty million plus Christians in China and it seemed that there was quite a pluralist society there anyway.

Soon it became clear that vast numbers of western capitalist companies were co-operating with Chinese manufacturing using their much cheaper labour and materials. It seemed Capitalism could quite easily work with Communism. Indeed, the Chinese economy was talked of as the leading world economy and they were very good at making all kinds of things on which we sat or travelled. Of course, we blamed it for global warming because it was using vast amounts of energy making all the things which were shipped to us, but then China even began to address global warming.

Then, the present leader took a much more autocratic turn. His attitude to Hong Kong became more autocratic. There was an appalling treatment of Islamic minorities and a totalitarian clampdown on Christians which was sinister. Clearly Xi Jinping was ensconcing himself in power and building an autocratic state. These were serious problems, but even then I did not realise what an enemy China was.

I was critical of US rhetoric. I knew that the US military needed an “enemy” to justify their vast military expenditure, and also that the CIA had to exaggerate by fifty times the “dangers” of various regimes, because their salaries depended on it. I had seen through multiple US threats – the hyping up of Cuba, the USSR, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and many other regimes as threats to keep the US military busy, and now China was the new evil empire, even while it was filling our shops. More recently there was the scare around Huawei. They would control our mobile phone system and the world. I had just read Edward Snowdon’s book suggesting that the States was already doing that anyway through its technology companies, so took that with a pinch of salt, especially when experts said it was no great problem and two Conservative Government voted for the risk. It was probably just US rival companies funding a few MPs to make a stir.

So, of course, a complex picture of the most populous country on the globe emerged, but that was before Coronavirus, and when I recognized how dangerous China is, especially in the area of surveillance. I had seen the face recognition stuff and the mass detention, monitoring and control of the Uyghurs. Now there was the issue of China deliberately starting a pandemic. But do they know everything that is going on? I had not really faced the issue directly until at home I opened the cupboards and found china in every one of them, often queuing up to listen. It was in the living room, bedroom, and all over, different kinds, all listening. So, I’m stepping up to the plate…

General

ONE STANDARD FOR ALL

So, for a short time, world-wide, we are sober and can address ourselves because of Coronavirus. We have tried to preserve life, especially the lives of the old and weak, because we should. Billions of us have re-organised our lives quite drastically to protect one another. We know all lives are important, including our own. The Commandment: DO NOT KILL is obvious. We have seen millions of people doing good to others – care, risking their own lives and providing what is needed, and it is right.

Yet, we live with War. It has killed hundreds of millions. The United Nations has asked for a global ceasefire so refugees and war torn people can survive. But we still do war and arms around the world. We know bombs, guns and missiles kill on vast scale. We know, and back this industry, whether we are in the US, China, Russia, France, Iran or Brazil. We back this industry that only kills and destroys with money, government support and ideology. The Secret Services look out potential conflicts. The best it offers is sweat, blood and tears, and if necessary, nuclear war. All this, because we do not heed, at the beginning, DO NOT KILL.

But we can stop it. We can disarm the world to preserve life, as with Coronavirus. The virus is not really our fault. Militarism is. All states cut military spending and weapons by 20% a year and it’s all gone in five years. We don’t fight or need to fight. We don’t need deterrents, or defence, because the world is disarmed. Technically it is easy both to do and police, far easier than making war machines. It saves trillions, cuts world-wide global warming by 10%, ends much world poverty, gives us fifty million new workers, prevents a similar number of refugees, and we can all be friends. What a wonderful world it can be. Start the process and sign this in less than a couple of minutes:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300818

General

What is Said and Done

Simply because it is the Prime Minister, we have to address the words. I use the Guardian’s account. The prime minister expressed optimism the UK was “making progress in this incredible national battle against coronavirus”. Aside his optimism when he has just recovered, it is not “incredible”, but actual, not “national” but international and not a “battle”, because we are fighting no-one. It is coronavirus and “progress” is containing the virus; it is not progress engendered by the Government. It is a discipline being practised round the world by those who can. There is the rhetoric, but it is not real.

He said the country was mourning “every day those who are taken from us in such numbers, and the struggle is by no means over” but he argued progress was being made “because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset – our NHS”. Yes, we are mourning, and obviously the struggle is by no means over. Who is saying that it is, when hundreds die each day? But what of the human shield? Of course, it is another false war analogy. The NHS is fighting no-one, and we are not putting ourselves between the arrows and the protected NHS. We are not heroes. We are making heavy demands of the NHS staff against a background of real cuts for a decade under the label of Tory austerity leaving them short of resources. Is the NHS our greatest “asset”? Notice the business word. There is a deal planned with the United States to allow greater US market access to its provisions. UK private companies have increasingly participated in it on the basis of profit and the private-public finance initiatives under Major and Brown have and will cost the cost the NHS some £80bn overall and 2% of the annual NHS Budget. So increasingly the NHS has been forced to operating for profit, not love. The rhetoric is empty.

Johnson said he had seen the pressures the NHS was under after seven days in hospital, including three in intensive care. And he had witnessed the “personal courage not just of the doctors and nurses but of everyone: the cleaners, the cooks, the healthcare workers of every description, physios, radiographers, pharmacists”.  Of course, more than a quarter of all doctors and 16% of nurses are immigrants, not exactly welcomed by the Tories. The Conservative Manifesto under pressure from Labour for the failings of the past, promised 50,000 new nurses in this Parliament, from where? 30,000 NHS workers are on zero hours contracts. This is hardly a deeply affirmed workforce, until now, when they save Johnson’s life.

He goes on. “That is how I also know that across this country, 24 hours a day, for every second of every hour, there are hundreds of thousands of NHS staff who are acting with the same care and thought and precision as Jenny and Luis,” he said. “That is why we will defeat this coronavirus and defeat it together. We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.” Ignore, every second of every hour. No. It is not “winning”. It is caring for the sick and dying. It is powered by love, ordinary neighbour love, the Second Great Commandment. It is an extension of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, where need comes before profit. But love has not been funded. But the Conservative Cabinet includes those who are paid £1000 an hour while others are paid £10 an hour, and the Government is run by those who love money. So, the rhetoric is there, but, at present it has nothing in it.

It may be a genuine change of heart, Christian repentance. If so, it will require an apology to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. It will include the recognition of failings in the early months of the Pandemic. It will recognize that we are nothing special. It will involved a recognition of the needs of all, not just Prime Ministers, in addressing sickness, poverty, homelessness and refugees. It will involve a radically different kind of politics for all, the politics of love and not money, a total re-ordering of the Conservative Party since Thatcher. Johnson was recently given over three quarters of a million pounds by his friends, according to the Register of Members interests. His friendship network has now widened.

Bible, Christianity, General

Jesus, Easter and Politics

This Easter many Church services were to have taken place, but they have had to be cancelled. They would have been almost apolitical in content.

Yet, Jesus life, especially during Easter week, death and resurrection were deeply political. He was given, and accepted all the titles of Government – king of the Jews, Messiah, Son of David, Son of Man and Son of God. He rode into Jerusalem in an obvious political act. He converted the chief Roman Tax collector. He overturned the central tax collection system of the Jews, dominated what was effectively the Jewish Parliament for a week with crowds round him, and critiqued all the main parties. The governing group were clear he had to be eliminated for the sake of national politics, or more accurately themselves. He gave clear principles of politics as service, politics as truth and justice based, peace and non-violence, the absence of control and power over people, reconciliation across race and with enemies, and practising what you preach. He asked us to think ahead. His arrest, and trial, were politically orchestrated, and unjust. He met the three biggest politicians of the time – Herod Antipas, the High Priest and Pilate. His death was a Roman crucifixion, designed to keep conquered people servile. He warned about the coming destruction of Jerusalem. On the cross he forgave the ignorance and evil that led to his death. His tomb was unsuccessfully guarded by soldiers and the resurrection was a threat to the Jewish leaders and the failure of their system of control, as it has threatened most regimes through history with goodness, peace and justice. His only sword is the words from his mouth and he is the lamb on the throne. This, and much, much more.

Perhaps, this Easter you can reflect on the political part of your faith and how you can truly be a follower of Jesus in this area too. The need for this thought and obedience round the world is urgent.

General

The Next Stage – we need a new Tax on Bank Deposits

Unless the Government Accounts are to go into total meltdown we will need some more Government revenue through taxes – new taxes. The best one I can think of is a tax on bank deposits, personal and business, say of 2% or more on over £5000, with rules about moving money around or out of the country. They amount to over £2 trillion in the UK. That could be tuned to produce Government Revenue of £40bn plus.

It has many advantages.

First, the banks can largely administer it.

Second, it is using funds not needed at present. It is collected from those with substantial savings and leaves those out who owe or have no money capital.

Third, real investment opportunities will be sparse for a year or more. Many with savings will be lending to Government, and this offsets the massive debts building up from the funds of the relatively rich.

Fourth it draws money partly from the mature/old who are also the ones on whom the coronavirus costs fall, if they have money.

Fifth, it makes the vast bank wealth of the massive companies with idle assets available.

Sixth, it will not hurt anyone vulnerable and few would notice it over a number of years.

It looks a strong candidate for the best fiscal response to the present crisis, which must be addressed soon nationally and globally. It makes more acute the handling of off shore banking wealth. This is the only viable response to skyrocketing fiscal debt. We could call it the “I don’t need it now tax”

General, War or Peace?

The Journey to 1945

 

How industrial militarism got underway – the pioneers.

Becoming a militarized world did not happen by accident. As industrialization took place, it was planned by those who wanted to make and sell manufactured weapons. The early figures like Krupp and Armstrong were pioneer entrepreneurs and engineers out to forge a business. Profits came with economies of scale and they set out to increase scale. The first book looked at the growth of arms manufacturing companies in the 19th century selling arms initially at home and then throughout the world. From Japan to Paraguay, states were persuaded by political vanity, bribery and scares to purchase arms. Then their neighbours could be persuaded to buy some as well. Politicians were taught that force was the name of the game, force against national force. Autocratic leaders had long surrounded themselves with soldiers, but these did not melt away with democracy, but democracy was managed to continue militarism. Usually this involved pushing people towards nationalism and patriotism. States built up their armed forces, went looking for countries to control as colonies like Alexander the Great or Caesar, and then probably went to war. The British elite learned Latin and looked at Rome in their public schools and went out and ran a similar empire with British made weapons. The arms companies ran the show and then provided the wherewithal with industrial scale arms production and profits.

The Great War was about weapons, not territory.

Companies like Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider, Mauser, Skoda, BSA,  Nobel, Du Pont and Remington became among the biggest industrial companies on the planet. They conversed with Prime Ministers and Emperors, and promoting arms to big and small nations. Arms “races” and wars became normal, and by 1914 there were four great arms races pushing Europe to the edge. Each state was watching the others, and their military build-up, for a decade. Arms companies and warship manufacturers stoked fear. They developed propaganda machines and pushed their agenda in newspapers and through pressure groups. Then, military competition pushed over the edge, into the greatest war of all. Austro-Hungary‘s Skoda had tried to sell arms to Serbia, but failed. It was miffed. Serbia would not buy Skoda arms because Austro-Hungary was her most likely enemy. Then the so-called Pig War ensued between 1906-08, and with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand the Austrian Empire was ready to issue an ultimatum and then invade. This was the starting gun for all those other arms races to start – France-Germany, Germany-Russia, England-Germany and Russia/Serbia-Austro Hungary. The Great War saw the production of arms explode in the greatest output of weapons the world had ever seen, many times over. After the Great War with four years of maximum production and growth, these companies controlled the biggest industry in the world.

The Buried History of Disarmament.

There were many before the Great War who understood the danger of the arms industry and militarism. They included Gladstone, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, Bertha von Suttner, Frédéric Passy, Jeanette Rankin, Ramsey McDonald, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Maude Roydon, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Fried, Jane Addams and many more. They had waged a widespread and articulate war against war, militarism and the arms trade. At this time Britain was seen as an unprincipled imperial aggressor, side-stepping the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to fight the Boer War. Arms companies had sold weapons to Japan, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and many other countries priming them for conflict.  During the early years of the century the pacifists named the escalation of arms, pointing out the stupidity of teaching mass murder, the destructiveness of war and the arrogance of rulers and the armaments industrialists. They were right; if murder was wrong, mass murder did not suddenly become patriotic. There was no way round that argument, but the argument did no win. Jingoism, a stirring up of popular warlike patriotism won the day. Jean Jaures was shot to get rid of his opposition. Keir Hardie, the Labour Leader, became a hate figure because he opposed the war, and everybody went off to fight in a euphoria of presumed success. When the War came its horrors mounted month on month. They promised it would be over by Christmas, and the Pope suggested a Christmas Truce which looked like holding with the troops, but it was broken and the carnage went on and on with millions of shells, and then gas, crossing the front to kill and maim.

The Reality of the Great War.

Superficially, the War was about who won, and the patriotic stuff was there on all sides. But soon no-one had won. Everyone was bogged down in the trenches with young soldiers dying at about six thousand a day. The War Poets said it, but everybody knew it. Oh what a lovely War! “Up to your waist in water, Up to your eyes in slush, Using the kind of language, That makes the sergeant blush.” And it was worse than that. Russia collapsed with about three million deaths. Germany eventually ran out of equipment and the people and its fighting collapsed in 1918. The United States had moved from supplying weapons and explosives to engagement. It had it relatively easy, because it only had 117,497 deaths and 204,002 injured, a light burden compared to other countries. Overall, some twenty million died and a further twenty million were injured. The United States partly entered the War because the Britain and France (and Russia, who defaulted) owed so much that the US had to make sure they would repay their debts. They in turn needed Germany to pay reparations in order to pay the Americans. The debts of the War crippled the economy of the world through to Hitler.

Yet it was the personal reality of it which bit. People had seen themselves killing and being killed. The reality of War was horrific with bodies in mud and craters across the horizon. Murder destroys you.  The German High Command invented the myth that the Jews had stabbed them in the back to disguise the fact that they had pursued the War and they had lost. The biblical idea of the scapegoat, the one who would carry the sins, was vested in the Jewish race to get the military off the hook. Really, everyone knew that this was the travesty of civilization. It was the War to End All Wars. It must never happen again. Yet, it was worse than that. The returning soldiers carried flu around the world and at least fifty million more people, weakened by the war, died all across the globe. Two great tidal waves of grief traversed the globe touching all those mourning a hundred million dead and injured. Then, there were those suffering PTSD – full of rage, silent, sleepless, raw at the inhumanity they had seen. Often, they took it out on their women – another brutal undercurrent to the War. Then, frozen winters without food, resources, young people, fuel, shelter in Russia and Eastern Europe. The suffering cannot be imagined. So, millions just tried to cope, but underneath they knew War must be addressed and ended. The statesman of the era were chastened. They had often bought into chauvinism and the arms trade, and knew that the sale of weapons was the underlying problem. As Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary in the decade before the War said, “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” There was widespread repentance at this false trust in militarism. The Tragedy is that is clear understanding was defeated in a mere twenty five years; and few  understand how it was defeated and the militarists have hidden it…

Postponing the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.  

Alongside the great pre-war pacifists, another generation emerged who knew war was wrong because they were in it. Vera Brittain, Lord Robert Cecil, Clem Attlee, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, R.H.Tawney, Charles Raven, Philip Noel-Baker, the explorer Nansen, Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson  and even the main architect of Britain’s War effort,  Lloyd George, saw the problem of militarism and were determined to do something about it. Pacifists including Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, In France the ex-servicemen, the anciens combattants, shared pacifism with a primary school movement in which children understood how militarism was wrong.  There was a massive world-wide popular movement which involved tens of millions of people, still perhaps the biggest in human history. The movement grew. Key was the Catholic Church which under Benedict XV had opposed WW1 throughout. He described it as a “useless massacre” which did not endear him to the fighting statesmen. The Catholic Church mobilized millions for peace. There were rallies of thousands of women well before Hitler thought of mass rallies.  The Anglican Church also woke up. People saw the problem was arms and wanted to end the power of the Merchants of Death, as they came to be known. They had pushed arms, naval confrontation and military rivalry; millions lay dead while the arms manufacturers made their profits. Their weapons were undeniably evil. Statesmen and millions of ordinary people sought and worked for world disarmament to make the Great War the War to end all Wars.

But the British Conservative Government, the key one at this stage, did not co-operate. The Coalition Conservatives learned to prevaricate on disarmament until 1924. In the 1924 second election, a minority Labour Government was overthrown in unusual circumstances. A fake telegram, purporting to come from the USSR Minister, Zinoviev, was acquired by the Conservative Party and published in the Daily Mail four days before the election purportedly telling Socialists to rise up and have a revolution. Labour was actually resolutely democratic, and distrusted the Soviets, but the mud stuck and Labour lost enough seats to face a new Conservative Government. This Government, with Churchill as Chancellor buckled down against disarmament. It did as little as it could between 1924-9 and successfully held off the Disarmament Conference. This delay was crucial. It allowed the arms companies to organize themselves. In 1927 an arms company paid William Shearer $20,000 for six weeks work on disrupting the 1927 Coolidge Naval Conference on reducing warships. He and others were successful. Lord Cecil resigned from the Government over its failure to agree naval reductions. Britain wanted to hang on to its navy and was in rivalry with the States. The arms companies were now in control behind the scenes. But the public was for the League of Nations and against the Conservatives and in June 1929 Labour was returned with twenty seven more seats than the Conservatives in a minority Government. So again the momentum for the Disarmament Conference speeded up.

They continued through a decade, an amazing programme of persistence. This now-ignored disarmament movement came to a head in the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932, backed by organisations representing nearly half of the world’s population, especially Christian and women’s organisations, along with  most of the world’s statesmen. It had been planned since 1925 and was a long time coming, but come it did, backed in Britain by the King, Archbishops, Prime Ministers, military leaders. Sadly, before it started Nansen, the explorer and humanitarian and Stresemann, the key German politician, was also dead of a stroke.

No, Appeasement is Different.

You are now entering a historical black hole. The history of disarmament has been covered up and papered over by those who want it to disappear. Mainly, one word has done it – “appeasement”. Churchill was against Appeasement and Disarmament is appeasement – End of Discussion. This is a travesty of history. “Appeasement” was British leaders running the Conservative Government in 1938-9 who were pro-Nazi even when war was likely, because they were against socialism. Britain was rearming fast at the time, so it was not about not arming.

Churchill saw Hitler coming, but so, too, did everyone at the Disarmament Conference, even Sir John Simon, and knew disarmament would sideline him and the Nazis for ever. Churchill, of course, was against disarmament and for the Navy, and was one of the British politicians undermining the Conference. Later, he was fighting members of his own party who were appeasers and in the Conservative Government. They were the “Big Four”, Chamberlain, Simon, Hoare and Halifax, the same Simon who had scuppered the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.. So, Appeasement was not disarmament. They were different in time and focus. Churchill had great respect for the disarmers like Lord Cecil and Clem Attlee, and the attempt at World Disarmament occurred in 1932 before Hitler came to power. Appeasement came five years later from Fascist Sympathizing Conservatives, a group who for obvious reasons later tried to disappear..

Airbrushing Disarmament out of History.

World Disarmament has been covered up because it makes sense, it nearly happened before Hitler came to power and the arms companies do not want us to even think about it as a possibility. It is also covered up because British Conservative  politicians prevented it. We did so because we were jealous of the United States as the new world superpower and wanted a big Navy so that we could control the Empire. It was that pathetic. The whole world was waiting on the acceptance of President Hoover’s plan, and we Brits were jealous, and put it into treacle. They discussed treacling in Cabinet. Sir John Simon funked it. Lloyd George said that “Sir John Simon sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul” Eden expressed his contempt for him, and Harold Nicholson, an ally of Churchill, just called him “a toad and a worm”. It was an appalling event in British history which opened the way to the Second World War before Hitler came to power. So we try to blot it out.

The Conference was also undermined by the Japanese invading Manchuria, the arms companies using agents to prevent it working, and the various military people at the Conference, but mainly it was the British. If we had worked with Hoover and the United States disarmament would have happened. All aggressive weapons – bombers, howitzers, tanks and submarines – would have been closed down, and the rest cut by a third immediately. Hitler storming about the unfairness of the Versailles outcome, would have had nothing to rant about and could show his armpits to the doctor. When in January 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “This House would not fight for King and Country” it was voting its contempt at the handling of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Ordinary people the world over did not understand what had happened, because the Conference just stalled. They continued to believe disarmament must take place, because all of this was done in secret, in committees by politicians committed to doing nothing. The Conservative Party said it was a peace party when we were rearming and then went for appeasement. The arms companies had won and soon they would be quietly back in business.

American Corporatist Capitalism.

By 1918 the American economy was several times bigger than Britain’s and the dominant economy in the world as immigrants poured in, resources were opened up, oil became abundant and the Midwest prairies produced their crops. But American capitalism had been turned by the Great War in two respects. First, the arms companies had grown faster than the others and were quite dominant among the New York Capitalist elite. They were used to running the show and running Washington. In the twenties they controlled both political parties, dominated the world economy and knew only expansion, even while Europe still struggled.

Then in 1929 American capitalism faced the crisis of the Wall Street Crash. Often the big capitalists like Du Pont had got out in time and had vast amounts of capital. They bought up other businesses, like General Motors in the case of the Du Ponts. Much of their capital could not easily be used in the domestic US economy in recession. They were already deeply engaged in financing the German economy and had Fascist sympathies, so money flowed to Germany and its rearmament, and also similarly to the USSR. They were still running the show internationally. But in December 1932 they faced Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of their own class who had turned to attack, “the money-makers in the Temple” in his inaugural address and was deeply critical of their capitalism and prepared to act for the public good. They actually tried a US Fascist coup attempt in 1934 against the “Socialist” Roosevelt, but it failed thanks to the whistle blowing of General Smedley Butler. That is another suppressed bit of history. Then they tried to turn elections, but were again defeated by Roosevelt.

The Pro-Nazi Americans

But the US capitalist elite had no constraints on their international business and they moved  to support Hitler. The Harriman Bank had long been lending funds to Thyssen, Hitler’s patron, and as Hitler moved to power, they became the conduit for heavy US loans funding Nazi economic development and rearmament. We ask how Germany moved from an economy on its knees in 1932/3 to one able to defeat and subdue Europe in 1939, the answer is mainly that the Nazis were enabled by finance and munitions from the United States, channeled especially by the Harriman Bank and its key representative Harriman Bush.. The help of banks and munition companies, often with Fascist sympathies, made the Nazis able to fight the Second World War. The munitions companies also encouraged and funded Fascism in many other countries, helping create the chaos that supposedly required arms to sort them out. The War between Japan and China and the Spanish Civil War got the arms gravy train going again. Thus, the process of funding and promoting arms sales defeated the great peace and disarmament movement of the early 1930s. Both World Wars had the same main cause – those who pushed munitions and made money out of them and profited from war. The Second World War was thus formed against large populations in most major countries avid for peace and disarmament. Few people understood how capital and the arms companies had undermined disarmament and opened the door to World War Two. American funding of the Nazis carried on right up to Pearl Harbour.

The World’s Biggest Ever Industrial Complex.

            The Allies eventually won the Second World War in the greatest military drama in human history. The actual victory over Hitler and Fascism was such a dominant story that winning the War dominated the munitions transformation of the years 1935-45; it was vast. In fact, of course, military manufacture and finance mushroomed in Germany, France for a while, Italy, Japan and especially in the USSR and the United States. The military machine amounted to perhaps more than a quarter of the entire world economy, the biggest industrial complex the world had ever seen. The Second World War created a militarized world with mega arms companies, enormous armies, bases throughout the world and a generation whose business was fighting. It is the elephant in the room and we ignore it.  A massive organizational change took place in the five to ten years of the War and its preparation. During this period arms companies, defence departments, scientific research, technological direction, the military establishments, transport, information gathering and many other areas of life were all integrated into the military machine. Such a vast establishment was not going to disappear, especially in the victorious nations, without serious planning. It was to drive for its place in the continuing post-war world, and it won.

          World War Two and the Construction of Peace.

But it faced a mighty, uphill task. The Great War had been a horror beyond imagining, and tens of millions were determined to fashion disarmament, and now another twenty one years later one even worse had taken place. Militarism had a dirty name, personified in the frog-marching Fascists. Many people remembered the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 had been defeated. A War of unimaginable proportions had been loosed on the world with atrocities and genocide in the Holocaust, the far East, the vast spaces of Eastern Europe and around the globe. Some seventy million had died. Millions were walking around with PTSD, or still living with charred flesh and bombed houses. Millions more were mourning husbands, sons, daughters and colleagues. They faced the poverty of rationing small bits of food, queuing for necessities and shivering through cold winters with no fuel because War Lays Waste. There were some 1.9 billion soldiers serving in World War Two, and for most their deepest conviction was not about who won or lost. They knew War was wrong, wrong, wrong. The United Nations was formed largely by Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace, before Roosevelt died. It was set up with some commitment to peace and disarmament. Although this was quickly dissipated, millions hoped for something better. More than this, Fascism had fought the war and Socialism had been attacked. Now socialists would have to rebuild the world. So, when the British Election took place there was no question that Clement Attlee should be in charge in July 1945 even before the war ended, because Churchill the War Leader and the old militarist, was not the man for the job. The nation was grateful to Churchill as war leader, though millions still hated him, but they were not going to have a militarist in charge. So, Churchill looked for allies across the pond.

 Thus, after the War, while hundreds of millions of people were trying to get back to ordinary living, a titanic battle was going on for the shape of the post-war world around the military. At one level the Government in Britain were clearing streets, repairing buildings and roads, getting soldiers back to work, putting together a national health service, nationalized industries, rationing, the Welfare state, prefab housing, milk and orange juice for kids, addressing shortages of food, clothes, furniture, caring for distressed families and getting coal distributed for the winter, and at another level the post-world war world had to be addressed. Immediately, it was easy. The Government was bankrupt and, provided the armed forces were treated well, economies in the military had to be made. But, in this theatre Britain did not count. It was intent on its domestic recovery with a clapped-out Empire.

The United States and the Truman Era.

The United States dominated the world. In 1945, as a result of the devastation in Europe, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere the US accounted for an amazing half of the world monetized economy. It was owed money by the other Allies and had a buoyant economy through war production. What the United States did would sway history. Its internal politics would be played out across the globe. Here, too, millions were trying to put together their lives again after serving in the military or undertaking arduous war work, but something else was going on in Washington, the Pentagon and among what was soon to be known as the military-industrial complex. It was working at its own survival, and the continuation of the war machine it had constructed. The people who were in a position to do this were hard, knew what they wanted and knew how to run the American system. Often, as with John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, James Forrestal, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, Douglas McArthur and others they had been part of the American financial elite dealing with the Nazis and their sympathies were there and against Socialism.. During the War events they were often in charge inside Government and strategically placed. Of course, some quick footwork was needed. The Fascist sympathizers melted into top posts and sought to turn the West against the Socialist USSR, the real heroes of the fight against Hitler. The US Right Wing was forming things their way long before Roosevelt died, fighting him for control of the United States Government. They got rid of Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Wallace, who had a strategic international perspective and replaced him with a little man, Truman, who would largely do their bidding. That did not fully work out, but in the big scheme of events their agenda won and the world eventually rearmed. We look at this process.

Demonizing the USSR.

Military systems need enemies and the only one available was the USSR. It was the West’s greatest ally against Hitler. Indeed, on most impartial reckonings, the USSR took the brunt of fighting the Nazis and defeated the German War machine; they turned the War. It was an awesome, courageous victory in which the costs were enormous; the USSR lost 25 million people in the Second World War, while the United States and Britain lost half a million each. We in Britain crow about defeating Hitler, but the Russians can crow ten times louder. Many USSR villages, towns and cities were destroyed by the fighting and bombing which the USSR suffered while the West delayed opening a second front. The scale of that devastation we cannot imagine, or the long-term cost of putting it right. Yet soon the Brits and the Americans “Won The War” and within months the USSR had been marginalized, denied aid, and was the new enemy, while the Nazi sympathizing groups became the new establishment within the Truman Presidency. Aid was even given to Germany and denied to the USSR. The speed of this transition was amazing. In August 1945 Stalin was supporting the US attack on Japan, as he promised Roosevelt he would, with forces in Manchuria and in October was strongly supporting the formation of the United Nations.  Then suddenly in the four months or so before Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech on 5th March, 1946 the Soviet Union had become the enemy to be armed against. This transition needs a massive re-evaluation. Churchill, the War leader, was part of setting up another war against his hated USSR and receiving adulation for it, but he was exactly fitting the needs of the old pro-nazi brigade. Suddenly, Fascism and the Far Right’s militarism which had caused both World Wars was no longer the problem but Communism, even as Socialists and Communists were being elected to governments throughout eastern and western European.

From 1945 a big propaganda machine kicked in. Churchill and the Truman Americans were discussing nuking the Soviets. It was not practicable, mainly because the US was very short of atomic bombs, but the temptation was there. Stalin found out what was going on and international relations were soured. We make a fuss about the “traitor spies”, but Stalin needed spies; we were nasty allies. Soon, before the second Red Scare and the McCarthyite Movement, it was Socialists, not Fascists who were the traitors who needed hunting down. Within months the Nazi and Fascist sympathizers were rehabilitated and Socialism was the scapegoat. The “Iron Curtain” was put in place by Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech of 5th March, 1946 and there were “reds under the bed”. Forrestal’s two Atomic tests in July 1946, supposedly to test how battleships stood up to nuclear bombing, showed the USSR that the US was backing arms and the Cold War was on.

Of course, Stalin is supposed to be the bete noir of these events, trying to dominate Eastern Europe. He had carried out evil mass purges in the 30s, the horrific Gulag, and he was a paranoid dictator. But this too had a background, though not a justification. The Tsarist regimes were autocratic and often violent. The Great War led to Germany’s brutal defeat of Russia and chaos with the Revolution. When the Great War ended Churchill as Minister for War led a personal attack on Red Russia which together with a war with Poland until 1921 led to a devastating war in which Bolsheviks were inured to fighting. Lenin was indeed violent. The challenge of holding the USSR together was vast. Stalin came to power without trust and knew as soon as Hitler came to power that Russia would be attacked. He armed for the inevitable fight against the Nazis and the USSR’s defence against the Nazis was magnificent and the most costly in history. At the end of the War he had a massive war machine, which he, too, set about downsizing. He was scavenging for anything that could improve the lot of his hungry, war-weary, devasted people. The USSR armed forces fell from 13-2.8 million while the US forces fell from 12.2-1.6 million.   

 A Recap -The Journey to 1945.

How industrial militarism got underway – the pioneers.

Becoming a militarized world did not happen by accident. As industrialization took place, it was planned by those who wanted to make and sell manufactured weapons. The early figures like Krupp and Armstrong were pioneer entrepreneurs and engineers out to forge a business. Profits came with economies of scale and they set out to increase scale. The first book looked at the growth of arms manufacturing companies in the 19th century selling arms initially at home and then throughout the world. From Japan to Paraguay, states were persuaded by political vanity, bribery and scares to purchase arms. Then their neighbours could be persuaded to buy some as well. Politicians were taught that force was the name of the game, force against national force. Autocratic leaders had long surrounded themselves with soldiers, but these did not melt away with democracy, but democracy was managed to continue militarism. Usually this involved pushing people towards nationalism and patriotism. States built up their armed forces, went looking for countries to control as colonies like Alexander the Great or Caesar, and then probably went to war. The British elite learned Latin and looked at Rome in their public schools and went out and ran a similar empire with British made weapons. The arms companies ran the show and then provided the wherewithal with industrial scale arms production and profits.

The Great War was about weapons, not territory.

Companies like Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider, Mauser, Skoda, BSA,  Nobel, Du Pont and Remington became among the biggest industrial companies on the planet. They conversed with Prime Ministers and Emperors, and promoting arms to big and small nations. Arms “races” and wars became normal, and by 1914 there were four great arms races pushing Europe to the edge. Each state was watching the others, and their military build-up, for a decade. Arms companies and warship manufacturers stoked fear. They developed propaganda machines and pushed their agenda in newspapers and through pressure groups. Then, military competition pushed over the edge, into the greatest war of all. Austro-Hungary‘s Skoda had tried to sell arms to Serbia, but failed. It was miffed. Serbia would not buy Skoda arms because Austro-Hungary was her most likely enemy. Then the so-called Pig War ensued between 1906-08, and with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand the Austrian Empire was ready to issue an ultimatum and then invade. This was the starting gun for all those other arms races to start – France-Germany, Germany-Russia, England-Germany and Russia/Serbia-Austro Hungary. The Great War saw the production of arms explode in the greatest output of weapons the world had ever seen, many times over. After the Great War with four years of maximum production and growth, these companies controlled the biggest industry in the world.

The Buried History of Disarmament.

There were many before the Great War who understood the danger of the arms industry and militarism. They included Gladstone, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, Bertha von Suttner, Frédéric Passy, Jeanette Rankin, Ramsey McDonald, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Maude Roydon, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Fried, Jane Addams and many more. They had waged a widespread and articulate war against war, militarism and the arms trade. At this time Britain was seen as an unprincipled imperial aggressor, side-stepping the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to fight the Boer War. Arms companies had sold weapons to Japan, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and many other countries priming them for conflict.  During the early years of the century the pacifists named the escalation of arms, pointing out the stupidity of teaching mass murder, the destructiveness of war and the arrogance of rulers and the armaments industrialists. They were right; if murder was wrong, mass murder did not suddenly become patriotic. There was no way round that argument, but the argument did no win. Jingoism, a stirring up of popular warlike patriotism won the day. Jean Jaures was shot to get rid of his opposition. Keir Hardie, the Labour Leader, became a hate figure because he opposed the war, and everybody went off to fight in a euphoria of presumed success. When the War came its horrors mounted month on month. They promised it would be over by Christmas, and the Pope suggested a Christmas Truce which looked like holding with the troops, but it was broken and the carnage went on and on with millions of shells, and then gas, crossing the front to kill and maim.

The Reality of the Great War.

Superficially, the War was about who won, and the patriotic stuff was there on all sides. But soon no-one had won. Everyone was bogged down in the trenches with young soldiers dying at about six thousand a day. The War Poets said it, but everybody knew it. Oh what a lovely War! “Up to your waist in water, Up to your eyes in slush, Using the kind of language, That makes the sergeant blush.” And it was worse than that. Russia collapsed with about three million deaths. Germany eventually ran out of equipment and the people and its fighting collapsed in 1918. The United States had moved from supplying weapons and explosives to engagement. It had it relatively easy, because it only had 117,497 deaths and 204,002 injured, a light burden compared to other countries. Overall, some twenty million died and a further twenty million were injured. The United States partly entered the War because the Britain and France (and Russia, who defaulted) owed so much that the US had to make sure they would repay their debts. They in turn needed Germany to pay reparations in order to pay the Americans. The debts of the War crippled the economy of the world through to Hitler.

Yet it was the personal reality of it which bit. People had seen themselves killing and being killed. The reality of War was horrific with bodies in mud and craters across the horizon. Murder destroys you.  The German High Command invented the myth that the Jews had stabbed them in the back to disguise the fact that they had pursued the War and they had lost. The biblical idea of the scapegoat, the one who would carry the sins, was vested in the Jewish race to get the military off the hook. Really, everyone knew that this was the travesty of civilization. It was the War to End All Wars. It must never happen again. Yet, it was worse than that. The returning soldiers carried flu around the world and at least fifty million more people, weakened by the war, died all across the globe. Two great tidal waves of grief traversed the globe touching all those mourning a hundred million dead and injured. Then, there were those suffering PTSD – full of rage, silent, sleepless, raw at the inhumanity they had seen. Often, they took it out on their women – another brutal undercurrent to the War. Then, frozen winters without food, resources, young people, fuel, shelter in Russia and Eastern Europe. The suffering cannot be imagined. So, millions just tried to cope, but underneath they knew War must be addressed and ended. The statesman of the era were chastened. They had often bought into chauvinism and the arms trade, and knew that the sale of weapons was the underlying problem. As Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary in the decade before the War said, “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” There was widespread repentance at this false trust in militarism. The Tragedy is that is clear understanding was defeated in a mere twenty five years; and few  understand how it was defeated and the militarists have hidden it…

Postponing the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.  

Alongside the great pre-war pacifists, another generation emerged who knew war was wrong because they were in it. Vera Brittain, Lord Robert Cecil, Clem Attlee, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, R.H.Tawney, Charles Raven, Philip Noel-Baker, the explorer Nansen, Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson  and even the main architect of Britain’s War effort,  Lloyd George, saw the problem of militarism and were determined to do something about it. Pacifists including Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, In France the ex-servicemen, the anciens combattants, shared pacifism with a primary school movement in which children understood how militarism was wrong.  There was a massive world-wide popular movement which involved tens of millions of people, still perhaps the biggest in human history. The movement grew. Key was the Catholic Church which under Benedict XV had opposed WW1 throughout. He described it as a “useless massacre” which did not endear him to the fighting statesmen. The Catholic Church mobilized millions for peace. There were rallies of thousands of women well before Hitler thought of mass rallies.  The Anglican Church also woke up. People saw the problem was arms and wanted to end the power of the Merchants of Death, as they came to be known. They had pushed arms, naval confrontation and military rivalry; millions lay dead while the arms manufacturers made their profits. Their weapons were undeniably evil. Statesmen and millions of ordinary people sought and worked for world disarmament to make the Great War the War to end all Wars.

But the British Conservative Government, the key one at this stage, did not co-operate. The Coalition Conservatives learned to prevaricate on disarmament until 1924. In the 1924 second election, a minority Labour Government was overthrown in unusual circumstances. A fake telegram, purporting to come from the USSR Minister, Zinoviev, was acquired by the Conservative Party and published in the Daily Mail four days before the election purportedly telling Socialists to rise up and have a revolution. Labour was actually resolutely democratic, and distrusted the Soviets, but the mud stuck and Labour lost enough seats to face a new Conservative Government. This Government, with Churchill as Chancellor buckled down against disarmament. It did as little as it could between 1924-9 and successfully held off the Disarmament Conference. This delay was crucial. It allowed the arms companies to organize themselves. In 1927 an arms company paid William Shearer $20,000 for six weeks work on disrupting the 1927 Coolidge Naval Conference on reducing warships. He and others were successful. Lord Cecil resigned from the Government over its failure to agree naval reductions. Britain wanted to hang on to its navy and was in rivalry with the States. The arms companies were now in control behind the scenes. But the public was for the League of Nations and against the Conservatives and in June 1929 Labour was returned with twenty seven more seats than the Conservatives in a minority Government. So again the momentum for the Disarmament Conference speeded up.

They continued through a decade, an amazing programme of persistence. This now-ignored disarmament movement came to a head in the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932, backed by organisations representing nearly half of the world’s population, especially Christian and women’s organisations, along with  most of the world’s statesmen. It had been planned since 1925 and was a long time coming, but come it did, backed in Britain by the King, Archbishops, Prime Ministers, military leaders. Sadly, before it started Nansen, the explorer and humanitarian and Stresemann, the key German politician, was also dead of a stroke.

No, Appeasement is Different.

You are now entering a historical black hole. The history of disarmament has been covered up and papered over by those who want it to disappear. Mainly, one word has done it – “appeasement”. Churchill was against Appeasement and Disarmament is appeasement – End of Discussion. This is a travesty of history. “Appeasement” was British leaders running the Conservative Government in 1938-9 who were pro-Nazi even when war was likely, because they were against socialism. Britain was rearming fast at the time, so it was not about not arming.

Churchill saw Hitler coming, but so, too, did everyone at the Disarmament Conference, even Sir John Simon, and knew disarmament would sideline him and the Nazis for ever. Churchill, of course, was against disarmament and for the Navy, and was one of the British politicians undermining the Conference. Later, he was fighting members of his own party who were appeasers and in the Conservative Government. They were the “Big Four”, Chamberlain, Simon, Hoare and Halifax, the same Simon who had scuppered the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.. So, Appeasement was not disarmament. They were different in time and focus. Churchill had great respect for the disarmers like Lord Cecil and Clem Attlee, and the attempt at World Disarmament occurred in 1932 before Hitler came to power. Appeasement came five years later from Fascist Sympathizing Conservatives, a group who for obvious reasons later tried to disappear..

Airbrushing Disarmament out of History.

World Disarmament has been covered up because it makes sense, it nearly happened before Hitler came to power and the arms companies do not want us to even think about it as a possibility. It is also covered up because British Conservative  politicians prevented it. We did so because we were jealous of the United States as the new world superpower and wanted a big Navy so that we could control the Empire. It was that pathetic. The whole world was waiting on the acceptance of President Hoover’s plan, and we Brits were jealous, and put it into treacle. They discussed treacling in Cabinet. Sir John Simon funked it. Lloyd George said that “Sir John Simon sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul” Eden expressed his contempt for him, and Harold Nicholson, an ally of Churchill, just called him “a toad and a worm”. It was an appalling event in British history which opened the way to the Second World War before Hitler came to power. So we try to blot it out.

The Conference was also undermined by the Japanese invading Manchuria, the arms companies using agents to prevent it working, and the various military people at the Conference, but mainly it was the British. If we had worked with Hoover and the United States disarmament would have happened. All aggressive weapons – bombers, howitzers, tanks and submarines – would have been closed down, and the rest cut by a third immediately. Hitler storming about the unfairness of the Versailles outcome, would have had nothing to rant about and could show his armpits to the doctor. When in January 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “This House would not fight for King and Country” it was voting its contempt at the handling of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Ordinary people the world over did not understand what had happened, because the Conference just stalled. They continued to believe disarmament must take place, because all of this was done in secret, in committees by politicians committed to doing nothing. The Conservative Party said it was a peace party when we were rearming and then went for appeasement. The arms companies had won and soon they would be quietly back in business.

American Corporatist Capitalism.

By 1918 the American economy was several times bigger than Britain’s and the dominant economy in the world as immigrants poured in, resources were opened up, oil became abundant and the Midwest prairies produced their crops. But American capitalism had been turned by the Great War in two respects. First, the arms companies had grown faster than the others and were quite dominant among the New York Capitalist elite. They were used to running the show and running Washington. In the twenties they controlled both political parties, dominated the world economy and knew only expansion, even while Europe still struggled.

Then in 1929 American capitalism faced the crisis of the Wall Street Crash. Often the big capitalists like Du Pont had got out in time and had vast amounts of capital. They bought up other businesses, like General Motors in the case of the Du Ponts. Much of their capital could not easily be used in the domestic US economy in recession. They were already deeply engaged in financing the German economy and had Fascist sympathies, so money flowed to Germany and its rearmament, and also similarly to the USSR. They were still running the show internationally. But in December 1932 they faced Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of their own class who had turned to attack, “the money-makers in the Temple” in his inaugural address and was deeply critical of their capitalism and prepared to act for the public good. They actually tried a US Fascist coup attempt in 1934 against the “Socialist” Roosevelt, but it failed thanks to the whistle blowing of General Smedley Butler. That is another suppressed bit of history. Then they tried to turn elections, but were again defeated by Roosevelt.

The Pro-Nazi Americans

But the US capitalist elite had no constraints on their international business and they moved  to support Hitler. The Harriman Bank had long been lending funds to Thyssen, Hitler’s patron, and as Hitler moved to power, they became the conduit for heavy US loans funding Nazi economic development and rearmament. We ask how Germany moved from an economy on its knees in 1932/3 to one able to defeat and subdue Europe in 1939, the answer is mainly that the Nazis were enabled by finance and munitions from the United States, channeled especially by the Harriman Bank and its key representative Harriman Bush.. The help of banks and munition companies, often with Fascist sympathies, made the Nazis able to fight the Second World War. The munitions companies also encouraged and funded Fascism in many other countries, helping create the chaos that supposedly required arms to sort them out. The War between Japan and China and the Spanish Civil War got the arms gravy train going again. Thus, the process of funding and promoting arms sales defeated the great peace and disarmament movement of the early 1930s. Both World Wars had the same main cause – those who pushed munitions and made money out of them and profited from war. The Second World War was thus formed against large populations in most major countries avid for peace and disarmament. Few people understood how capital and the arms companies had undermined disarmament and opened the door to World War Two. American funding of the Nazis carried on right up to Pearl Harbour.

The World’s Biggest Ever Industrial Complex.

            The Allies eventually won the Second World War in the greatest military drama in human history. The actual victory over Hitler and Fascism was such a dominant story that winning the War dominated the munitions transformation of the years 1935-45; it was vast. In fact, of course, military manufacture and finance mushroomed in Germany, France for a while, Italy, Japan and especially in the USSR and the United States. The military machine amounted to perhaps more than a quarter of the entire world economy, the biggest industrial complex the world had ever seen. The Second World War created a militarized world with mega arms companies, enormous armies, bases throughout the world and a generation whose business was fighting. It is the elephant in the room and we ignore it.  A massive organizational change took place in the five to ten years of the War and its preparation. During this period arms companies, defence departments, scientific research, technological direction, the military establishments, transport, information gathering and many other areas of life were all integrated into the military machine. Such a vast establishment was not going to disappear, especially in the victorious nations, without serious planning. It was to drive for its place in the continuing post-war world, and it won.

          World War Two and the Construction of Peace.

But it faced a mighty, uphill task. The Great War had been a horror beyond imagining, and tens of millions were determined to fashion disarmament, and now another twenty one years later one even worse had taken place. Militarism had a dirty name, personified in the frog-marching Fascists. Many people remembered the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 had been defeated. A War of unimaginable proportions had been loosed on the world with atrocities and genocide in the Holocaust, the far East, the vast spaces of Eastern Europe and around the globe. Some seventy million had died. Millions were walking around with PTSD, or still living with charred flesh and bombed houses. Millions more were mourning husbands, sons, daughters and colleagues. They faced the poverty of rationing small bits of food, queuing for necessities and shivering through cold winters with no fuel because War Lays Waste. There were some 1.9 billion soldiers serving in World War Two, and for most their deepest conviction was not about who won or lost. They knew War was wrong, wrong, wrong. The United Nations was formed largely by Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace, before Roosevelt died. It was set up with some commitment to peace and disarmament. Although this was quickly dissipated, millions hoped for something better. More than this, Fascism had fought the war and Socialism had been attacked. Now socialists would have to rebuild the world. So, when the British Election took place there was no question that Clement Attlee should be in charge in July 1945 even before the war ended, because Churchill the War Leader and the old militarist, was not the man for the job. The nation was grateful to Churchill as war leader, though millions still hated him, but they were not going to have a militarist in charge. So, Churchill looked for allies across the pond.

 Thus, after the War, while hundreds of millions of people were trying to get back to ordinary living, a titanic battle was going on for the shape of the post-war world around the military. At one level the Government in Britain were clearing streets, repairing buildings and roads, getting soldiers back to work, putting together a national health service, nationalized industries, rationing, the Welfare state, prefab housing, milk and orange juice for kids, addressing shortages of food, clothes, furniture, caring for distressed families and getting coal distributed for the winter, and at another level the post-world war world had to be addressed. Immediately, it was easy. The Government was bankrupt and, provided the armed forces were treated well, economies in the military had to be made. But, in this theatre Britain did not count. It was intent on its domestic recovery with a clapped-out Empire.

The United States and the Truman Era.

The United States dominated the world. In 1945, as a result of the devastation in Europe, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere the US accounted for an amazing half of the world monetized economy. It was owed money by the other Allies and had a buoyant economy through war production. What the United States did would sway history. Its internal politics would be played out across the globe. Here, too, millions were trying to put together their lives again after serving in the military or undertaking arduous war work, but something else was going on in Washington, the Pentagon and among what was soon to be known as the military-industrial complex. It was working at its own survival, and the continuation of the war machine it had constructed. The people who were in a position to do this were hard, knew what they wanted and knew how to run the American system. Often, as with John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, James Forrestal, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, Douglas McArthur and others they had been part of the American financial elite dealing with the Nazis and their sympathies were there and against Socialism.. During the War events they were often in charge inside Government and strategically placed. Of course, some quick footwork was needed. The Fascist sympathizers melted into top posts and sought to turn the West against the Socialist USSR, the real heroes of the fight against Hitler. The US Right Wing was forming things their way long before Roosevelt died, fighting him for control of the United States Government. They got rid of Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Wallace, who had a strategic international perspective and replaced him with a little man, Truman, who would largely do their bidding. That did not fully work out, but in the big scheme of events their agenda won and the world eventually rearmed. We look at this process.

Demonizing the USSR.

Military systems need enemies and the only one available was the USSR. It was the West’s greatest ally against Hitler. Indeed, on most impartial reckonings, the USSR took the brunt of fighting the Nazis and defeated the German War machine; they turned the War. It was an awesome, courageous victory in which the costs were enormous; the USSR lost 25 million people in the Second World War, while the United States and Britain lost half a million each. We in Britain crow about defeating Hitler, but the Russians can crow ten times louder. Many USSR villages, towns and cities were destroyed by the fighting and bombing which the USSR suffered while the West delayed opening a second front. The scale of that devastation we cannot imagine, or the long-term cost of putting it right. Yet soon the Brits and the Americans “Won The War” and within months the USSR had been marginalized, denied aid, and was the new enemy, while the Nazi sympathizing groups became the new establishment within the Truman Presidency. Aid was even given to Germany and denied to the USSR. The speed of this transition was amazing. In August 1945 Stalin was supporting the US attack on Japan, as he promised Roosevelt he would, with forces in Manchuria and in October was strongly supporting the formation of the United Nations.  Then suddenly in the four months or so before Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech on 5th March, 1946 the Soviet Union had become the enemy to be armed against. This transition needs a massive re-evaluation. Churchill, the War leader, was part of setting up another war against his hated USSR and receiving adulation for it, but he was exactly fitting the needs of the old pro-nazi brigade. Suddenly, Fascism and the Far Right’s militarism which had caused both World Wars was no longer the problem but Communism, even as Socialists and Communists were being elected to governments throughout eastern and western European.

From 1945 a big propaganda machine kicked in. Churchill and the Truman Americans were discussing nuking the Soviets. It was not practicable, mainly because the US was very short of atomic bombs, but the temptation was there. Stalin found out what was going on and international relations were soured. We make a fuss about the “traitor spies”, but Stalin needed spies; we were nasty allies. Soon, before the second Red Scare and the McCarthyite Movement, it was Socialists, not Fascists who were the traitors who needed hunting down. Within months the Nazi and Fascist sympathizers were rehabilitated and Socialism was the scapegoat. The “Iron Curtain” was put in place by Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech of 5th March, 1946 and there were “reds under the bed”. Forrestal’s two Atomic tests in July 1946, supposedly to test how battleships stood up to nuclear bombing, showed the USSR that the US was backing arms and the Cold War was on.

Of course, Stalin is supposed to be the bete noir of these events, trying to dominate Eastern Europe. He had carried out evil mass purges in the 30s, the horrific Gulag, and he was a paranoid dictator. But this too had a background, though not a justification. The Tsarist regimes were autocratic and often violent. The Great War led to Germany’s brutal defeat of Russia and chaos with the Revolution. When the Great War ended Churchill as Minister for War led a personal attack on Red Russia which together with a war with Poland until 1921 led to a devastating war in which Bolsheviks were inured to fighting. Lenin was indeed violent. The challenge of holding the USSR together was vast. Stalin came to power without trust and knew as soon as Hitler came to power that Russia would be attacked. He armed for the inevitable fight against the Nazis and the USSR’s defence against the Nazis was magnificent and the most costly in history. At the end of the War he had a massive war machine, which he, too, set about downsizing. He was scavenging for anything that could improve the lot of his hungry, war-weary, devasted people. The USSR armed forces fell from 13-2.8 million while the US forces fell from 12.2-1.6 million.   

The militarists had to destroy the possibility of peace. They also had to develop a collective amnesia where the fifteen years struggle against the merchants of death to prevent the preconditions of the Second World War was forgotten under the mantra – “Of course we had to fight Hitler”.  Meanwhile, those in Britain, France and the United States, who had backed Fascism and the Nazis – the militarists, arms companies, financiers and members of the aristocracies – washed themselves down and redressed themselves as Fighting for Democracy. The military-industrial complex was able to perpetuate their position and succeeded in making a continual arming world in which the munitions business would flourish and grow. The western propaganda machine fostered by the military-industrial complex was the main architect of the Cold War for the next half century. Its dishonesty has never been owned. Here we look at the construction of that fully armed world system, against the good will of many. Those who wanted an end to war and create a world of peace were sidelined and defeated again.

The militarists had to destroy the possibility of peace. They also had to develop a collective amnesia where the fifteen years struggle against the merchants of death to prevent the preconditions of the Second World War was forgotten under the mantra – “Of course we had to fight Hitler”.  Meanwhile, those in Britain, France and the United States, who had backed Fascism and the Nazis – the militarists, arms companies, financiers and members of the aristocracies – washed themselves down and redressed themselves as Fighting for Democracy. The military-industrial complex was able to perpetuate their position and succeeded in making a continual arming world in which the munitions business would flourish and grow. The western propaganda machine fostered by the military-industrial complex was the main architect of the Cold War for the next half century. Its dishonesty has never been owned. Here we look at the construction of that fully armed world system, against the good will of many. Those who wanted an end to war and create a world of peace were sidelined and defeated again.

General

WE SHALL DISARM THE WORLD

NOT SWALLOWING CAMELS.

War, militarism and the arms trade probably account for more than half the world’s injustice and evil. Jesus warned us about straining out gnats and swallowing camels. This is perhaps the world’s biggest camel and we swallow it like morning cereal. So, let’s face the camel of militarism which we have been made to assume is necessary and normal. The full evidence is devastating, but this is the fast version.

MILITARISM IS IN CONTROL.

World disarmament is off the menu, and has been except for a brief flurry around the end of the Cold War when it was quickly shut down. We cannot think disarmament because the military and arms people have run the show most of the time since 1900 and always tell us we need arms. A string of wars, big and small, have been accompanied by arming. Arms produce wars and arms, we are told, save wars. Blessed be the arms trade. They profit from conflict and are inside governments in Washington, Moscow, London and most of the capitals of the world, though they have learned to keep a low profile. Scares occur nearly every day to keep us in fear. Enemies are talked up. You need to be armed is conveyed as a moral imperative. Arms purchases increase, military dictators and militarised democracies abound, and disarmament is unthinkable as some kind of treason. You have been taught to rule out disarmament, to unthink it.

JESUS MAY HAVE A POINT.

But is this correct? Jesus is obviously the world’s greatest teacher. He backs peace and asks us to make it. He turns down the temptation of power over all the kingdoms of the world, unlike Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and ‘itler. He requires us to love and understand our enemies and make peace. He spreads peace and asks us to pass it on. He deconstructs rows and turns away from any aggression. This is God’s way for us and it means the reconciliation of peoples; nation will speak peace unto nation. He fulfils what is spoken in the prophets. Isaiah says God will hammer swords into ploughshares and nations will never again go to war or prepare for battle. Psalm 46 talks of stopping wars all over the world. Jesus in one devastating sentence dismisses the military enterprise. “Those who take the sword will perish by the sword”, a prediction fulfilled in every decade of modern history. He is the Lamb on the world throne, bringing the rule of gentleness and not might. Paul replaced the Roman armour which ruled the world in the first century after Christ with peace, justice, truth, faith and the word of God as the “weapons” to fight with. Christianity is for peace and Christians say so in church every Sunday, and actually the Church manages quite well without an army. American Christians who say Christianity and guns go together are brainwashed out of Christianity. My peace, says Jesus, I leave with you.

But, say the militarists, this is just unrealistic. Christianity is out of touch with our age. It is a vague ideal, divorced from realpolitik. In reality we have to have armed forces, secret services, deterrents, military bases and keep ahead in the arms race and the technology of weapons. Terrorism is real, and the threats from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran cannot be avoided. Peace is for Christmas cards. Mostly, the churches have come round to accepting this.  Now services bless our continuous at sea nuclear deterrent and we are safe. Every time peace comes up now, it is nice but not part of real politics. But is this the last word?

THE MILITARY SUCCESS OF THE UNITED STATES?

The United States is the world’s leading military power and its military success. Except, the US lost another war last week – in Afghanistan. Trump blustered but the US lost, after eighteen years and spending a trillion dollars. It has lost in Iraq in seventeen years of fighting after “Mission Accomplished”. That cost two and a half trillion dollars, and the mission was not accomplished since there were no weapons of mass destruction and it has spawned another generation of terrorism as Camp Bucca birthed ISIS. The US and the UK are losing in Syria, which is not surprising since it was unclear which side we were fighting. The War in Libya left a failed state in a mess with democracy not in sight. US and UK weapons in Yemen have produced horror upon horror. So, the US has spent six plus trillion dollars on failed wars which have killed a million, displaced some 10 million refugees, and produced five big failed states in the middle east. Really, Iran and Saudi Arabia are also unstable. US military policy is a shambles. Its wars do not work. Soon the world will wake up to this. Something has got to replace US militarism.

MILITARISM DOES NOT WORK.

Really, however, militarism has not worked for a century. Its costs dog world history. Since 1914 two hundred million have died through war. Even more have been injured. The trauma among soldiers and civilians in all wars is probably over a billion, but covered up. Arms produce war. Four arms races sparked into WW1. The sabotage of the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932 allowed the arms companies and Hitler back in to start WW2. The Cold War was a useless forty year waste. Militarism has cost the world between five and ten per cent of total world income, often destroyed democracy, absorbed much of the most advanced science and technology and all for the purpose of destruction. It is the biggest failed experiment on the planet. Anyone allowed to think can see that, but usually we are just fatalistic. History is one damned war after another. We no longer ask Why? After all very few people profit from war. People die and are injured. Cities are destroyed. Economies collapse. Debts mount up. The young next generation is wiped out. Wars are difficult to sell when no-one profits from them. So why do we have them?

WHO NEEDS WAR?

The one group who need war are the arms manufacturers. They profit from wars and the rumour of wars. Their gear is used in war. Millions understood this between the wars in the biggest peace movement ever. Krupp worked on the Kaiser. Armstrong and Vickers had groomed the British Government for the Boer War and the Great War. Schneider-Le Creusot had the gun which would this time beat the Germans and were arming Russia. Skoda worked up Austro-Hungary against Serbia. Britain and Germany armed the Turks. There was the hyped “Dreadnought Crisis” and four arms races fanned by newspaper propaganda. Nobel was making a killing. . Belgian arms kept the Congo in subjugation and came in handy at Sarajevo. British battleship manufacturers sold battleships to Japan, with a bit of bribery, to help them beat the Russians in 1904-5. That upped sales around the world. As arms sales grew, often financed by debt, it needed only a spark to set off World War One. Who needs wars? The arms companies need wars, and by and large they get them.

THE PROBLEM SEEN, BUT TOO LATE.

After World War One most people saw the arms problem. There were cartoons of fat arms traders. Lord Grey, Foreign Secretary in the decade up to 1914 summed it up. “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war…” They wanted to make it the War To End All Wars. Disarmament was written into the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations, not just for Germany, but for everybody. For a time, the arms companies were on the back foot. All the Churches got behind disarmament in a big way. But the Conservative Government of 1924-9 was able to stall the big disarmament Conference. Lord Cecil, leading its planning, fell out with them and nothing decisive happened except public support for disarmament around the world grew. Then in 1929 with a Labour Government and Arthur Henderson as Foreign Secretary the pace picked up again. In 1932, at last, the Great Disarmament Conference arrived, supported by petitions with tens of millions of signatures. President Hoover’s Plan to cut out all aggressive weapons like bombers, subs and howitzers and the rest of arms by a third received a warm welcome from almost all the countries of the world, including the USSR, France, China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Brazil, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Austria, Norway, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, Mexico, Sweden, Estonia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Roumania, Persia, Venezuela, Argentina, the Netherlands Luthuania, Afghanistan, Colombia, Latvia, Portugal, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and others. They enthusiastically welcomed the possibility of a disarmed world.  Japan was missing because it was invading Manchuria (armed by Britain and other states). Key was the British response. It was lukewarm, noncommittal. It welcomed the proposal but said that it would submit its own proposal, but there was a problem. Most Conservatives in the House of Commons were against disarmament. There were links to the Navy. Eyres-Monsall, First Lord of the Admiralty wanted to keep all his battleships and aircraft carriers. Douglas Hogg, secretary of state for War wanted to keep his tanks and heavy mobile guns. Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air wanted to save the bomber, and the arms companies were applying pressure in the background. The British put forward a counter-plan which allowed her to control her Empire, keep her Navy on the 8th July, 1932 and really it killed the Hoover Plan without saying so. It spoke words of further negotiation, but the proposal for Full World Disarmament was dead. Cabinet minutes of those weeks show that one of the main motives of the Cabinet was jealousy of the United States as the new dominant economic world power. It was that pathetic.

People knew that no world disarmament would mean German rearmament. It had waited thirteen years for other states to do something. The failure of Geneva gave more power to Hitler and six months later he came to power. Most people did not know the Conference had failed. Britain talked about more negotiations and it struggled on into 1933. Roosevelt could not revive it. British politicians clamped down on what Britain had done, and the public still hoped that disarmament could happen. In 1934 the book, “The Merchants of Death” opened up the role of the arms companies, and the US Nye Commission did it further, but by now they were too late and US companies were queuing up to arm Hitler funded by US banks. World War Two was on its way. After World War Two the militarists made sure disarmament was buried without trace and so it has largely remained since. The arms companies are in the business of war and the major reason why they continue happening.

KEEPING THINKING AT BAY

Although the evidence for the failure of war and competitive arming is everywhere, people are kept from thinking about it by fear. Jesus attacked fear, because militarism’s real power comes through fear. Do this or I will kill you. Militarism sells fear most days. Ironically the most powerful are the most fearful. The militarists have re-created the enemies they need for their business. Russia, anxious for co-operation after the Cold War has been pushed into antagonism, especially by NATO action in Ukraine. China actually quite restrained in its international relations is being portrayed as a threat, like North Korea, also threatened by the US. Iran the useful adversary for the Iraqi arms gravy train. On top of this, trashing much of the middle east obviously generates the terrorism we are also scared of. A world-wide threat system is designed to keep the military system in business and to stop us from thinking.

THE FRAGILE WORLD CONTROL SYSTEM FOR MILITARISM.

So, the militarist hegemony keeps the show on the road. New contracts. New weapons. Replace the unusable nuclear weapons. US military budgets boom. 2% minimum military expenditure for any civilised country. All the members of the UN Security Council are the heaviest armed and the biggest arms exporters. New wars are being stoked. We must keep the show on the road. But it is unreal. It is the Judy and Punch show for the masses, the soap opera which will keep us servile.

                But it is not real. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and we had multiple sources of information that that was so, even though the world media were fed the opposite. The Arab Spring for Democracy was killed by western and Russian arms, and we are busy again supplying the military dictators in Egypt. The outrage about the Crimea was fake. Of course, the Crimea was going to join Russia. The US/UK seize an Iranian tanker in international waters at Gibraltar and then bluster when the Iranians do a tit for tat in the Straits of Hormuz. The US fulminates about the Chinese Navy in the China Sea, when it has bases all around the world. North Korea, scared stiff of the US and with an economy half the size of Lancashire, becomes a major world threat. The secret services do James Bond to keep us watching. But it is a show. The armour has no body, no meaning, no purpose. It is a washed up, self-promoting industry. Like the god, Dagon, it is a statue ready to fall. Militarism is really dead; we have to bury it successfully. More than this, it is mainly a western show. The arms production of the West, and its arms, dominate the world. We say, Peace, peace, but there is no peace, and now we do not even bother to say it.

THE TIME HAS COME.

This is no vague issue, but urgent. The Middle East is in chaos. There are 66 million refugees fleeing military activity world-wide. Fascism – always the link between big money and arms – is stalking the world again. In the US, Russia, China, UK and many other states, strong arm governments are in power. The position of the United Nations has been deeply challenged by the United States, and the military/arms/security systems are developing new technology systems every day which make us more vulnerable. More than this we cannot afford militarism. Armed forces mean people poverty. Wars destroy twenty years of economic development. Military spending brought down the USSR. It has and will bankrupt us. Militarism also moves to its own crescendo. Talk war and weapons and sooner or later you walk the talk. There is a slow train coming round the bend. So, we must act now. Jesus insistently says, “Be ready. Read and understand the times you live in.”  We must be ready.

THE WORLD IS HEATING UP.

One more point is also decisive. Making weapons is one of the most energy intensive forms of manufacturing. Running the military is similar – planes, ships, bases, subs eat it up day after day. Wars are energy rampant  – vast movements of troops and equipment, explosions of bombs, shells and the rebuilding and replacing of all that is destroyed. The military system and wars waste something like 5-10% of total human CO2. The planet is heating up. This must be stopped fast. It is imperative. Closing down this energy use gives us a chance of saving the planet from runaway global warming, perhaps our last chance.

WORLD MULTILATERAL DISARMAMENT IS FAR EASIER.

 So, it turns out that world militarism, far from being realistic, is stupid beyond measure and we have been swallowing camels and ignoring Jesus for far too long. The 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference was nearly ninety years ago.  World Disarmament needs to be done. It must be done. There are two red herrings which need to be pickled. First, we nail the “unilateral” word. Unilateral disarmament is dangerous; what if you do it and nobody else does? So, normally, disarmament (unilateral) is ruled out. But why disarm unilaterally? Everyone should do it, as occurs with mot states other than the US which still insists on citizen’s rights to shoot one another. Why form the Basingstoke Disarmament Society when you can do it in the whole UK? We need Multilateral Disarmament and can have it.

Second, there is the disarmament has failed and will always fail mantra. A little bit of study shows that disarmament fails, partly because it is partial and not full, allowing all kinds of arguments, but mainly because the military insist on being in charge of it. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and the military screw up disarmament. Well, they would wouldn’t they? What is needed is a clear, decisive plan that helps the military and arms companies through the process, and then it can be done. World Multilateral Disarmament is far EASIER than any ongoing military development and wars would be.  It is time to quit war and act as grownups. We need no threats, no weapons, but just law-abiding living and productive and useful business.

THE WORLD DISARMAMENT PLAN.

It requires a clear plan that everybody can understand, abide by and enforce. Yes enforce. This is not cosy wish fulfilment. If Fred has a machine gun in the garage, the police move in. It is a plan backed by the UN, international law and the UN member states. The power base for this transition is popular world-wide support. The world Christian community, which has not yet acted together, is over two billion. If they can be mobilised, conscripted, then we are nearly half way there. We will discuss that strategy shortly. The key issue is for us all to see where we are going. There are six points.

  1. CLOSE DOWN ALL MILITARY SYTSTEMS TOGETHER. Every state cuts military expenditure and all weapon types by 20% a year until it is all gone in five years. Weapons are destroyed or recycled to peaceful use. Disarmament is policed by a combined UN force which shrinks as the military system does.
  2. ARMS PRODUCTION STOPS. Arms manufacturers stop production immediately and are given 80%, 60%, 40% and 20% subsidies on previous arms revenue while they convert to civilian production.
  3. DEMOBILIZATION OF ARMED FORCES. Members of the armed forces are given similar payments in addition to their pensions while the military systems are closed down.
  4. TOTAL SURVEILLANCE AND ENFORCEMENT. There is open inspection of all possible arms sites by anybody at any time to ensure full compliance. Those most fearing states can require compliance.
  5. CLOSE DOWN TERRORISM. Terrorist (non-state) weapons are offered buy-back terms for a limited period of time, and then military teams move in to confiscate.
  6. LAW, JUSTICE AND ORDER. A UN Council and Courts System of International Law handles disputes as we do within nations. International law.

Everybody understands arms are eliminated in five years and all states do it. Penalties for failure are decisive. Military dependent rulers are given exit routes and democratic elections take over, and international relations become non-oppositional. Many states will have to forgive past aggressions but all international relations become and remain peaceful to the blessing of us all. It can be done, as long as the military are not put in charge. We could in six years’ time have a disarmed and warless world, end refugees and much world poverty and save 10% of the world CO2 generation. It is sensible, practical, Christian and good for all of us. So, what do we have to do to get it on the world stage.

THE NEXT MOVES.

TEN THOUSAND SEEING THE MILITARIST  LIE AND UNDERSTANDING WORLD DISARMAMENT IS POSSIBLE AND EVEN EASY.

There are three keys to turn. The first one you may already have done. It is seeing that WMD makes sense when everybody else is not thinking about it and that it can be implemented. There is nothing special about the arguments here, but if you are reading this you probably have some idea of the problem and how disarmament makes sense. If you do not, just think about gun ownership in the United States… The conclusion can be obvious for people of all faiths and none.  This is not a sectarian policy. We need to be a hundred, a thousand and then ten thousand reasonably articulate people who see the point and spread it, an active community of faith and conviction, each one a self-starter prepared to open things up. Groups like CAAT are already working in the field, some people are pacifists, but the big agenda needs to be on the table and understood by each of us. Getting to a thousand quickly is not difficult. Some people get there in ten minutes. The ten thousand figure is probably the critical one. Once the issue is fully on the public agenda, it will explode, just as it has been suppressed. So are things roughly as laid out here. You’ve read it. What do you think? The old have too much thinking shaped by the military orthodoxy and lived under Cold War rhetoric for much of their lives and maybe cannot change quickly, so the young may be decisive. It is not just having a view but making a movement for full-disarmament-pacifism and taking on intellects like Trump. It’s that difficult.

THE WORLD-WIDE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY WAKES UP.

Second, the challenge is to get Christians worldwide to see the integrity and point of Christian teaching about arms and Christian peace. Frankly, a lot of Christians have sentimentalized peace, or made it an individual person issue. In some areas it is not difficult. Pope Francis is already saying most of these things. Often Christians are too nice to confront and have fitted in with the militarism of their governments and side-lined obvious Christian teaching. Peace with God, peace in our hearts, but we forget that nation shall speak peace unto nation stuff. We do not believe peace can work. That is the tragedy of the present Christian Church. Peace is real – the way we all actually live our lives, work, trade, play and learn. Peace is ordinary and good. The military pie in the sky – “home by Christmas”,  “Mission Accomplished”, “Only weapons keep us safe” is the false religion; it needs calling out. So, there is some kind of spiritual change needed here. Opening up Christian groups has hitherto not been a fast operation. Here something drastically different needs to occur. How it might happen is anyone’s guess. God continues to wait.

Another Christian change is moving to the worldwide Church. Churches are strongly national, aside the Catholic Church, and the whole Church has never acted together, although perhaps nearly in 1932. This time round, we must all agree and push in the same direction. For US gun owning Christians that seems unthinkable, but the underlying Christian argument cannot be assailed. You Shall Not Kill obviously entails not producing millions of killing instruments. If abortion is wrong, militarism and arms is too. So the sanctity of life before God is seamless and all Christians should support it in international affairs. There are 2.3 billion Christians world-wide and if they act, each with a tiny bit of faith, in concert, World Multilateral Disarmament will be unstoppable/

PETITIONS WORLDWIDE

The main weapon of disarmament, as it was in the early 30s is Petitions. Petitions are without aggression. They state what people believe and ask governments to act. They are faster than elections, which have a long drift of policy change. They are specific, addressing one issue. Governments have promised responses and by and large the response depends on the number of votes behind the petition. They are a lever. In recent times there have not been international petitions. This one aims to be replicated and grow in all countries. Of course, multilateral disarmament is a threat to no-one, because no-one disarms until we all do. The military lobby will scream that it is impractical, unthinkable, dangerous, unpatriotic, like the gun lobby in the States, but we have seen through weapons and war. So, we move petitions. That is largely work. Emails, tweets, facebook, media, talks, discussions. Some will be good at it. We all can work at it. We do not want media primadonnas, just ordinary people who will move the mountain. The numbers are needed to make it democratically irresistible. Ten million here, twenty million in the US, China, Russia, India and the momentum is worldwide and the UN takes over. It will be a fight, but not against anybody, but only for them.

So, we are on the road. I’ve just opened a Parliamentary Petition on 13/3/2020 and it must be up to 10,000, but preferably tens of millions in six months time. It needs to move fast and that is mobile/phone/computer and contacts for an hour or two a day from us all The principle is interesting. Jesus said, “Faith can move mountains” but he probably meant in buckets, thousands and then millions of individual commitments adding up. In 1932 some petitions had tens of millions of signatures. We should do better than that now with the technological ease. So, what do you think? Does it chime with your faith? Do you agree? Can you be a growth point so that we can disarm the world. We have martyrs and people of peace down through history whom it has cost dearly. Surely our generation can do better than this. A million peace petition signatures fast and the UN in 2022.. Get out your bucket. Somebody needs to set up websites, get links going, and do the business. I try incompetently. Over to you.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300818

alan@storkey.com

main webpage