Uri Avnery Gush Shalom 13 August 2016
FOR SOME weeks now, I have felt like a boy who has thrown a stone into a pool. Rings of water created by the splash get larger and larger and expand more and more. All I did was write a short article in Haaretz, calling upon Israeli emigrants in Berlin and other places to come home and take part in the struggle to save Israel from itself.
I readily conceded that every human being has the right to choose where he or she wants to live (provided the local authorities welcome them), but I appealed to them not to give up on their home country. Come back and fight, I pleaded.
An Israeli who lives in Berlin, the son of a well-known Israeli professor, answered with an article entitled "Thank you, No!" He asserted that he has despaired of Israel and its eternal wars. He wants his children to grow up in a normal, peaceful country. This started a debate which is still going on.
WHAT IS new about this verbal fight is that both sides have given up pretence. Nowadays, emigrants are not cursed anymore – something that would be hard to do, because many of them are the sons and daughters of the Israeli elite. Must we despair of our state, as do those youngsters in Berlin?
My answer is: not at all. Nothing is foreordained. It all depends on us. But first of all we must ask ourselves: What kind of solution do we want?
THERE ARE two kinds of highly motivated political fighters: those who are looking for ideal solutions and those who will settle for realistic ones. The first kind is admirable. They believe in ideal solutions that can be put into practice by ideal people in ideal circumstances.
I do not underrate such people. Sometimes they prepare the theoretical path for people to realize their dream after two or three generations. I will settle for a realistic solution – a solution that can be implemented by real people in the real world.
The form of the One-state Solution is ideal but unreal. It can come about if all Jews and all Arabs become nice people, embrace each other, forget their grievances, desire to live together, salute the same flag, sing the same national anthem, serve in the same army and police, obey the same laws, pay the same taxes, adapt their religious and historical narratives, preferably marry each other. Would be nice. Perhaps even possible - in five or ten generations.
If not, a one-state solution would mean an apartheid state, perpetual internal warfare, much bloodshed, perhaps in the end an Arab-majority state with a Jewish minority reduced by constant emigration.
The two-state solution is not ideal, but real. It means that each of the two peoples can live in a state it calls its own, under its own flag, with its own elections, parliament and government, police and education system, its own Olympic team.
The two states will, by choice or necessity, have joint institutions, that will evolve in the course of time and by free will from the necessary minimum to a much wider optimum. Perhaps it will come close to a federation, as mutual relations widen and mutual respect deepens.
Once the borders between the two states are fixed, the problem of the settlements will be soluble – some will be attached to Israel by exchange of territories, some will be part of Palestine or be disbanded. Military relations and joint defence will be shaped by realities.
All this will be immensely difficult. Let's have no illusions. But it is possible in the real world, worked out by real people. IT IS for this fight that I call the sons and daughters in Berlin and around the world, the new Israeli Diaspora, to come home and join us again.
Despair is easy. It is also comfortable, whether in Berlin or Tel Aviv. Looking around at this moment, despair is also logical. But despair corrupts. Despairing people create nothing, and never did.
The future belongs to the optimists. [Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1471011030/
Sunday, 14 August 2016
The Creeds
Ian Harris Otago Daily Times August 12, 2016
The great creeds of Christian orthodoxy have outlasted their usefulness, writes Ian Harris. So give them a decent burial.
The clue to a modern understanding of Christianity is tucked away in a comma in one of the creeds, perhaps the most pregnant comma in religious history. And because it’s all in the comma, it’s past time the churches gave the standard creeds of their heritage a decent burial. That would allow the comma to expand into a faith for today.
How so? Well, in many churches the congregation stands every Sunday to recite one of two creeds, the Apostles’ or the Nicene. These statements of faith have stood for centuries at the heart of Christian orthodoxy. Nowadays, however, they are seen to be so flawed that some ministers never ask their congregations to recite them.
For one thing, they begin “I believe” or “We believe in God”. But “believe” in the creeds doesn’t mean what it means in everyday life. It’s not “this is what I think”, which, like much that we believe, may be right or wrong, but “this is where I put my whole trust and confidence”. Thus not an opinion, but a commitment.
Further, the creeds belong to an era quite different from ours. They reflect the intellectual and cultural ferment of a time when Roman emperors reigned supreme. The central question which the learned churchmen of the day set out to answer was the same as for Christians today: Who is this Jesus, and why should we take him seriously?
The creeds answer that by making Jesus identical with all the key aspects of the God of Jewish tradition, filtered through Greek philosophy and metaphysics. In this, they were attesting to their own experience of Jesus – and human experience is basic to all religion.
For most westerners today, that throws up an immediate obstacle. Our thought-world has little or no room for metaphysical speculation, and for 21st-century Christians the answer to that pivotal question about Jesus leaves all that behind. They see Jesus rather as a man whose wisdom, healing, compassion and example were steeped in a Godness so real and immediate that people who knew him felt drawn closer to all they understood God to be.
You won’t find a skerrick of that wisdom and ministry in the classic creeds. The Apostles’ Creed, attributed (wrongly) to the apostles of Jesus’ own day, has a lot to say about Jesus, but blots out everything between his birth and execution. It says “born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate” as if everything in between – the bit represented by the comma – was of little or no account.
The Nicene version is more wordy, but similarly leaps straight from Jesus’ birth to his crucifixion. Yet the bit that’s left out is the core of his teaching: what life would be like in a kingdom ruled by a father-like God, and how to make that real. The focus of the creeds is how Jesus, while fully human, related to a supernatural God.
In the 4th century that relationship was fiercely debated. One party insisted Jesus was identical with God from the beginning of time. The other thought of him rather as a human expression of God, but not God’s whole being. Bishops were deposed, exiled, even killed, depending on which faction held the upper hand.
Enter Emperor Constantine. Ending years of persecution, he recognised that a church spanning his diverse and divided empire could be an invaluable unifying force – yet the churches of the eastern and western Mediterranean were at loggerheads over how to proclaim Jesus. So in 325 he called a conference of bishops at Nicaea, in northern Turkey, to sort it out, himself presiding. The arguments flew back and forth, and in the end Constantine declared the party championing “identical” to be the winner. That was quite a step, considering he wasn’t baptised as a Christian till on his deathbed 12 years later.
Even that didn’t settle the matter, with later emperors upholding first this side, then that. But gradually the Nicene formula prevailed in the western church, and in 380 Emperor Theodosius cemented it in as state law.
Today the squabble seems irrelevant. The supernatural and philosophical categories so central to the debate have largely evaporated. Speculation about supernatural “essences” and “substances” cuts no ice. God is increasingly relocated from a heavenly realm to the midst of life, and Jesus’ appeal lies less in holy otherness than in the completeness of his humanity.
Old creedal affirmations are thus of little help in people’s search for meaning and purpose. So bury them, and let the comma blossom.
The great creeds of Christian orthodoxy have outlasted their usefulness, writes Ian Harris. So give them a decent burial.
The clue to a modern understanding of Christianity is tucked away in a comma in one of the creeds, perhaps the most pregnant comma in religious history. And because it’s all in the comma, it’s past time the churches gave the standard creeds of their heritage a decent burial. That would allow the comma to expand into a faith for today.
How so? Well, in many churches the congregation stands every Sunday to recite one of two creeds, the Apostles’ or the Nicene. These statements of faith have stood for centuries at the heart of Christian orthodoxy. Nowadays, however, they are seen to be so flawed that some ministers never ask their congregations to recite them.
For one thing, they begin “I believe” or “We believe in God”. But “believe” in the creeds doesn’t mean what it means in everyday life. It’s not “this is what I think”, which, like much that we believe, may be right or wrong, but “this is where I put my whole trust and confidence”. Thus not an opinion, but a commitment.
Further, the creeds belong to an era quite different from ours. They reflect the intellectual and cultural ferment of a time when Roman emperors reigned supreme. The central question which the learned churchmen of the day set out to answer was the same as for Christians today: Who is this Jesus, and why should we take him seriously?
The creeds answer that by making Jesus identical with all the key aspects of the God of Jewish tradition, filtered through Greek philosophy and metaphysics. In this, they were attesting to their own experience of Jesus – and human experience is basic to all religion.
For most westerners today, that throws up an immediate obstacle. Our thought-world has little or no room for metaphysical speculation, and for 21st-century Christians the answer to that pivotal question about Jesus leaves all that behind. They see Jesus rather as a man whose wisdom, healing, compassion and example were steeped in a Godness so real and immediate that people who knew him felt drawn closer to all they understood God to be.
You won’t find a skerrick of that wisdom and ministry in the classic creeds. The Apostles’ Creed, attributed (wrongly) to the apostles of Jesus’ own day, has a lot to say about Jesus, but blots out everything between his birth and execution. It says “born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate” as if everything in between – the bit represented by the comma – was of little or no account.
The Nicene version is more wordy, but similarly leaps straight from Jesus’ birth to his crucifixion. Yet the bit that’s left out is the core of his teaching: what life would be like in a kingdom ruled by a father-like God, and how to make that real. The focus of the creeds is how Jesus, while fully human, related to a supernatural God.
In the 4th century that relationship was fiercely debated. One party insisted Jesus was identical with God from the beginning of time. The other thought of him rather as a human expression of God, but not God’s whole being. Bishops were deposed, exiled, even killed, depending on which faction held the upper hand.
Enter Emperor Constantine. Ending years of persecution, he recognised that a church spanning his diverse and divided empire could be an invaluable unifying force – yet the churches of the eastern and western Mediterranean were at loggerheads over how to proclaim Jesus. So in 325 he called a conference of bishops at Nicaea, in northern Turkey, to sort it out, himself presiding. The arguments flew back and forth, and in the end Constantine declared the party championing “identical” to be the winner. That was quite a step, considering he wasn’t baptised as a Christian till on his deathbed 12 years later.
Even that didn’t settle the matter, with later emperors upholding first this side, then that. But gradually the Nicene formula prevailed in the western church, and in 380 Emperor Theodosius cemented it in as state law.
Today the squabble seems irrelevant. The supernatural and philosophical categories so central to the debate have largely evaporated. Speculation about supernatural “essences” and “substances” cuts no ice. God is increasingly relocated from a heavenly realm to the midst of life, and Jesus’ appeal lies less in holy otherness than in the completeness of his humanity.
Old creedal affirmations are thus of little help in people’s search for meaning and purpose. So bury them, and let the comma blossom.
Sunday, 31 July 2016
Father Jacques Hamel died as a priest, doing what priests do
Giles Fraser Guardian/UK 28 July 2016
The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay.’
When I was first ordained a priest, I would say my prayers every morning in front of three undistinguished stained-glass windows. And every morning, I would argue in my head with the theology those windows were promoting. On the left, Abraham held up a curly knife, preparing to cut the throat of his son who is strapped to an altar. In the middle, Christ hanging on the cross, dripping blood. On the right, a priest, in full liturgical kit, stood behind an altar, hands outstretched over bread and wine. The coloured glass was insisting that these three scenes were intimately connected, that the mass/holy communion/eucharist, whatever you call it, is essentially a sacrifice – and not just some stylised community get-together.
As Pope John Paul II put it in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the eucharist is “the sacrifice of the cross perpetuated down the age. This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ … left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there”. Catholic Christianity, like that of temple Judaism before it, is a religion of blood and altars.
Father Jacques Hamel’s throat was slit as he said morning mass, murdered by a teenager claiming allegiance to Islamic State. The sacrificial imagery is unavoidable. And soon after his killing, #JeSuisPretre – I am a priest – began trending on social media, employing the now familiar “I am” prefix as an expression of digital solidarity with yet another victim of global terrorism. It felt unusually fitting in this instance. “I am the bread of life,” says Jesus in the first of a series of eight so-called “I am …” passages in John’s gospel. And the bread of life was precisely what Father Jacques believed himself to be distributing that morning on the outskirts of Rouen. He died, as he believed, on his knees – not in supplication to his spotty murderers, but to the author of life itself to whom he was about to return.
Rouen itself is a town soaked in the blood of martyrdom. It was here that another 19-year-old, believing herself to have received visions from God, and believing God to have called her to war, was burned at the stake by the English as a heretic. To some, Joan of Arc was a witness to the one true faith. To others she was a deluded fantasist, using God to inspire acts of violence.
It’s not just Islam that has a problem with violence. Indeed, arguably, the Bible has more violence in it that the Qur’an – though I have never thought the presence of violence in the scriptures a problem per se, because I have never read my scriptures as an instruction manual from God. More a reflection of a historic real-world human struggle for faith, in which faith is discovered. And the difference between good religion and bad religion – like the difference between good and bad people – has little to do with who is right and who is wrong about God and absolutely everything to do with how each religious tradition manages its own propensity for violence.
And it is here that the language of sacrifice is especially tricky. I have no time for the idea that Jesus is sacrificed on the cross to appease an angry God. If that’s true, then God becomes the enemy of humankind and I am against him. No, Jesus absorbs the violence that comes from us not from God. He receives our blows, our punishments, our disdain. And, despite his innocence – or, rather, precisely because of it – he refuses to answer back in kind. No more an eye for an eye.
In other words, the sacrifice of the cross is the non-violent absorption of human violence. The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay. This is what makes the eucharistic sacrifice life-giving and not some historical death cult. And this is the sacrifice that Father Jacques was celebrating as he died. He died as a priest, doing what priests do. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/28/father-jacques-hamel-died-as-a-priest-doing-what-priests-do
The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay.’
When I was first ordained a priest, I would say my prayers every morning in front of three undistinguished stained-glass windows. And every morning, I would argue in my head with the theology those windows were promoting. On the left, Abraham held up a curly knife, preparing to cut the throat of his son who is strapped to an altar. In the middle, Christ hanging on the cross, dripping blood. On the right, a priest, in full liturgical kit, stood behind an altar, hands outstretched over bread and wine. The coloured glass was insisting that these three scenes were intimately connected, that the mass/holy communion/eucharist, whatever you call it, is essentially a sacrifice – and not just some stylised community get-together.
As Pope John Paul II put it in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the eucharist is “the sacrifice of the cross perpetuated down the age. This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ … left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there”. Catholic Christianity, like that of temple Judaism before it, is a religion of blood and altars.
Father Jacques Hamel’s throat was slit as he said morning mass, murdered by a teenager claiming allegiance to Islamic State. The sacrificial imagery is unavoidable. And soon after his killing, #JeSuisPretre – I am a priest – began trending on social media, employing the now familiar “I am” prefix as an expression of digital solidarity with yet another victim of global terrorism. It felt unusually fitting in this instance. “I am the bread of life,” says Jesus in the first of a series of eight so-called “I am …” passages in John’s gospel. And the bread of life was precisely what Father Jacques believed himself to be distributing that morning on the outskirts of Rouen. He died, as he believed, on his knees – not in supplication to his spotty murderers, but to the author of life itself to whom he was about to return.
Rouen itself is a town soaked in the blood of martyrdom. It was here that another 19-year-old, believing herself to have received visions from God, and believing God to have called her to war, was burned at the stake by the English as a heretic. To some, Joan of Arc was a witness to the one true faith. To others she was a deluded fantasist, using God to inspire acts of violence.
It’s not just Islam that has a problem with violence. Indeed, arguably, the Bible has more violence in it that the Qur’an – though I have never thought the presence of violence in the scriptures a problem per se, because I have never read my scriptures as an instruction manual from God. More a reflection of a historic real-world human struggle for faith, in which faith is discovered. And the difference between good religion and bad religion – like the difference between good and bad people – has little to do with who is right and who is wrong about God and absolutely everything to do with how each religious tradition manages its own propensity for violence.
And it is here that the language of sacrifice is especially tricky. I have no time for the idea that Jesus is sacrificed on the cross to appease an angry God. If that’s true, then God becomes the enemy of humankind and I am against him. No, Jesus absorbs the violence that comes from us not from God. He receives our blows, our punishments, our disdain. And, despite his innocence – or, rather, precisely because of it – he refuses to answer back in kind. No more an eye for an eye.
In other words, the sacrifice of the cross is the non-violent absorption of human violence. The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay. This is what makes the eucharistic sacrifice life-giving and not some historical death cult. And this is the sacrifice that Father Jacques was celebrating as he died. He died as a priest, doing what priests do. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/28/father-jacques-hamel-died-as-a-priest-doing-what-priests-do
The Orange Man
Uri Avnery Gush Shalom 30 July 2016
SO HERE we are. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president. "Our"? I am not a US citizen, and have no desire to be one. But I live in a world in which the USA is the sole superpower, in which every decision of the US administration has an impact on the lives of every human being.
FOR ME AS a citizen of Israel, this impact is much greater than for most and much more immediate. I just saw a cartoon showing both Trump and Hillary crawling on the ground and licking the boots of an Israeli soldier. This is not too much of an exaggeration.
Both candidates claim to be unwavering supporters of "Israel". But what does that mean? Do they support all sections of Israeli society? Certainly not. They support one certain part of Israel: the ultra-right-wing government of Binyamin Netanyahu, which is supported by the American Jewish billionaires who contribute to their coffers.
Supporting Netanyahu and his even more right-wing coalition partners means acting against me and millions of other Israelis who can see that Netanyahu is leading our state to disaster.
I have a clear interest in this election. So I want at least to express my opinion. Right at the beginning, I wrote that Donald Trump reminded me in some ways of Adolf Hitler. Now, after all the primaries and conventions, I must repeat that terrible assessment.
Of course, there are huge dissimilarities. Different times. Different countries. Different circumstances. And, first of all, different media. Hitler was a product of the radio. It was his voice, a unique instrument, that conquered the German masses. Trump is a creation of the TV era. He dominates the small screen. He beat all his rivals on TV. He will easily beat Hillary on TV. If the battle were fought only on TV, it would already have been decided for good.
THE SIMILARITY between Trump and Hitler exists on a different level. In the center of Trump's entire campaign there stands one word, indeed one letter: "I". There is no "We". No normal ideology. No real program.
It is all about "I", about Trump. Trump will come. Trump will fix everything. That was the essence of Hitlerism, too. The man had no real program. This was also true of Mussolini, Hitler's teacher in many ways, who did not know the word "we" either. The absolute centrality of the Leader is the hallmark of fascism. Trump's program is Trump.
THIS BEING so, all of Trump's declarations and policy statements are totally unimportant. Statements are made on the spur of the moment because they suit Trump at that moment. They are forgotten the next, sometimes to be replaced by the opposite. This is why it is so easy to catch Trump uttering a lie. I have seen lists of dozens of them, one more blatant than the next.
There again we have the example of Adolf Hitler. In his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") he speaks about this openly. The book itself is quite boring, the product of a third-rate mind, but it includes several chapters about "propaganda" which are fascinating.
As a front-line soldier throughout the four years of World War I Hitler was immensely impressed by the British propaganda effort aimed at the German lines. Hitler admired the British slogans, which to him were a pack of lies. One of his conclusions was that the bigger the lie, the bigger its chances of being believed, since a simple person cannot imagine that anybody would dare to lie so much.
HILLARY CLINTON is a good, ordinary politician. You can, with fair assurance, imagine what a Hillary Clinton presidency would look like. She is dependable, predictable. More of the same, though without the charm of Barack (and Michelle!) Obama.
No one can predict a Trump presidency. Every prediction is a leap in the dark. One thing seems real: his admiration for Vladimir Putin. Though he is the very opposite of the cool, calculating, bold but cautious former KGB apparatchik, Trump seems to admire him.
There is not much evidence that the admiration is mutual, but it seems certain that today's successors of the KGB are interfering actively in the American election, doing their utmost to help Trump and sabotage Hillary.
A US-Russian rapprochement may be a good thing. The present American knee-jerk enmity towards everything Russian is a remnant of the Cold War and bad for the world at large. I don't see why the two powers cannot cooperate in many fields.
Towards the third power, China, the Trump attitude is the opposite. He wants to annul the trade agreements and bring the jobs back home. Even I, a non-economist, can see that this is nonsense.
And so forth. It's all like seeing a man about to jump from the roof out of sheer curiosity.
The Germans who voted in April 1933 for Adolf Hitler and his party did not dream about World War II, though Hitler was already resolved to conquer Eastern Europe and open it up for German colonization. They were hypnotized by Hitler's personality. I HATE the choice of the Lesser Evil. In twenty Israeli election campaigns (except the four in which I was myself a candidate) I have voted for parties I did not like very much and for candidates I did not trust at all.
But this is a fact of life. If there is no candidate you can root for, you take the one who can cause the minimum damage. In 1933 my father voted for a German conservative party, because he believed that they were the only ones who had a chance of stopping the Nazis. As Pierre Mendes-France once said: "to live is to choose".
I want to say to all my American friends: Go out and vote for Hillary, whether you like her or not. Liking does not really come into it.
Don't stay at home. Not voting means voting for Trump. Well, Hillary Clinton is not awful. She is an acceptable candidate. But compared to Donald Trump, she is an angel. [Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1469744450
Monday, 25 July 2016
Theresa May is lying over Trident. Or at least I hope she is
Giles Fraser Guardian/UK 23 July, 2016
In one of her first acts as prime minister, Theresa May sat down to write to the commanders of our four nuclear submarines, laying out what she would like them to do in the event of a nuclear attack. These handwritten instructions are locked in the boats’ safes, only to be opened if an attack has knocked out all contact with government. No one has ever opened one.
On Wednesday night, on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war – so no bleeding-heart liberal – said that he thought it would be the moral duty of commanders not to fire, even if Mrs May had instructed them to do so. It was astonishing to hear a senior military figure urging fellow officers to disobey a direct order from the PM.
The general was not being squeamish – he was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Rather, he was making the point that if Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack, then the game was already up and there would be little left for us to defend. Firing in such circumstances would be tactically pointless. Indeed, it would be murderous revenge, nothing more. And who wants their last action on earth to be one of mass genocide?
Speaking in the House of Commons during the Trident debate, Mrs May said she was perfectly prepared to order her commanders to fire. She has to say that, of course. There’s no point in having a deterrent if the PM indicates in advance that she wouldn’t use it. Even so, locked inside those safes, what the top-secret letters actually say is a totally different matter. Remember, the only reason to open them would be if deterrence had failed. And there would be absolutely no point in firing. In other words, given her commitment to the idea of deterrence, the only moral thing would be for Mrs May to tell the world she has written “fire” when, in fact, she has written something else entirely. And that, we might reasonably suppose from subsequent comments, is precisely what Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher did. It should come as no surprise: this is poker and everybody lies.
So parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.
Tories voted for Trident out of some backward sense of patriotism, still pretending the UK is a big player in the politics of global power, and New Labour voted for it as an act of non-virtue signalling, still deliberately distancing themselves from the electoral kryptonite of those pacifist hippies of the 1970s.
The old argument for nuclear weapons during the cold war was simple. We didn’t have the conventional forces to resist the Russians if they drove their tanks into Germany. If they invaded, we could only stop them with tactical nuclear weapons. This nuclear option was primarily envisaged as a first-strike option. But does anyone seriously imagine that we would do the same today if the Russians invaded Latvia? MPs are still going on about a deterrent even though any plausible scenario for this to be employed has disappeared. Deterrent is an empty threat, a retro tactical theory, marooned by totally different geopolitical circumstances.
Sitting opposite General Cordingley in the Moral Maze studio was Michael Portillo, who used to be the hawkish secretary of state for defence before he retired to play with his trains. Like Cordingley, he too is against the renewal of Trident, seeing our few hundred or so nuclear warheads as irrelevant in a world in which the Russians and the US have several thousand nukes each. The world has changed since the cold war, but too consumed with internal politics, the House of Commons has failed to notice. [Abbrev]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/21/theresa-may-is-lying-over-trident-or-at-least-i-hope-she-is#img-1@giles_fraser
In one of her first acts as prime minister, Theresa May sat down to write to the commanders of our four nuclear submarines, laying out what she would like them to do in the event of a nuclear attack. These handwritten instructions are locked in the boats’ safes, only to be opened if an attack has knocked out all contact with government. No one has ever opened one.
On Wednesday night, on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war – so no bleeding-heart liberal – said that he thought it would be the moral duty of commanders not to fire, even if Mrs May had instructed them to do so. It was astonishing to hear a senior military figure urging fellow officers to disobey a direct order from the PM.
The general was not being squeamish – he was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Rather, he was making the point that if Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack, then the game was already up and there would be little left for us to defend. Firing in such circumstances would be tactically pointless. Indeed, it would be murderous revenge, nothing more. And who wants their last action on earth to be one of mass genocide?
Speaking in the House of Commons during the Trident debate, Mrs May said she was perfectly prepared to order her commanders to fire. She has to say that, of course. There’s no point in having a deterrent if the PM indicates in advance that she wouldn’t use it. Even so, locked inside those safes, what the top-secret letters actually say is a totally different matter. Remember, the only reason to open them would be if deterrence had failed. And there would be absolutely no point in firing. In other words, given her commitment to the idea of deterrence, the only moral thing would be for Mrs May to tell the world she has written “fire” when, in fact, she has written something else entirely. And that, we might reasonably suppose from subsequent comments, is precisely what Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher did. It should come as no surprise: this is poker and everybody lies.
So parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.
Tories voted for Trident out of some backward sense of patriotism, still pretending the UK is a big player in the politics of global power, and New Labour voted for it as an act of non-virtue signalling, still deliberately distancing themselves from the electoral kryptonite of those pacifist hippies of the 1970s.
The old argument for nuclear weapons during the cold war was simple. We didn’t have the conventional forces to resist the Russians if they drove their tanks into Germany. If they invaded, we could only stop them with tactical nuclear weapons. This nuclear option was primarily envisaged as a first-strike option. But does anyone seriously imagine that we would do the same today if the Russians invaded Latvia? MPs are still going on about a deterrent even though any plausible scenario for this to be employed has disappeared. Deterrent is an empty threat, a retro tactical theory, marooned by totally different geopolitical circumstances.
Sitting opposite General Cordingley in the Moral Maze studio was Michael Portillo, who used to be the hawkish secretary of state for defence before he retired to play with his trains. Like Cordingley, he too is against the renewal of Trident, seeing our few hundred or so nuclear warheads as irrelevant in a world in which the Russians and the US have several thousand nukes each. The world has changed since the cold war, but too consumed with internal politics, the House of Commons has failed to notice. [Abbrev]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/21/theresa-may-is-lying-over-trident-or-at-least-i-hope-she-is#img-1@giles_fraser
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