Don't Mention the War

By David Simmons

The longest war of the world's greatest warmonger, the United States, is lost. The Taliban, whom the Afghan war was meant to destroy, are gaining strength by the day, now ravaging Kabul itself.

Most people in the West originally thought the US invasion of Afghanistan was justified, as it was allegedly harbouring al-Qaeda, blamed for the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and the Pentagon. That justification was shored up by the fact that the Taliban regime was extremely nasty, even though (or because) it had in effect been installed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in its campaign against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the leftist regime Moscow supported.

Now, of course, hardly anyone thinks the war is justified, not even the Americans themselves. About the only supporters left are the private contractors that have got fat off of bogus "reconstruction" projects, the arms industry, and the heroin traders. But all this was completely predictable, and not just because this war, and its twin in Iraq, was hatched by the neo-conservative puppetmasters of the George W Bush administration.

The fact is every war is a blood-soaked amalgam of lies and fraud. War is the ultimate evil, full of sound and fury and accomplishing nothing but even more evil. Apart from the death, pain and destruction it directly causes, its effects on surviving societies far outlive "victory", with wrecked economies, ruined families, and usually the installation of a dictatorship, puppet regime or outright kleptocracy that inflicts even more havoc, while the "victor" itself suffers from a reinvigorated culture of violence.

My father fought briefly in World War II, in the Royal Navy, until he was stricken by tuberculosis. My mother, meanwhile, served in the Women's Land Army, and survived the London Blitz. Neither spoke much about their experiences, and I never pressed them, or learned much about how they were shaped by that period. Both were very gentle people, and it's only in retrospect that I can imagine how surreal the horror of war must have been to them.

That war, my generation was brought up to believe, was far better than the alternative. But it, like all wars, was shrouded in secrecy and outright lies. Could it have been avoided? Many tried, most famously Neville Chamberlain, responsible for the redefinition of the word "appeasement" into something bad (much like "protectionism" today, or "socialist" in the US). Adolf Hitler was a tough nut to be sure, and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia by the British and French difficult to defend, now. But Hitler made it clear from the outset that he never wanted war with Britain, and in the end was defeated not so much by the deaths of millions of soldiers but by his own megalomania.

On the other side of the planet, the war with Japan seemed even more avoidable; it was after all not a noble battle to save Asia (about which no one in the West cared a hoot) but a clash of two Western empires against an Oriental one. It was the US attempt to cut off Japan's oil supply that triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor, not (as it would probably be spun today) Japan's "hatred of American freedoms".

We'll never know the whole truth of what happened in Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s. Maybe the Western version of history is right, and those conflicts really were justified, and accomplished lasting benefits not otherwise seen.

But the preponderance of evidence is that total, not conditional, pacifism is the only philosophy not imperilled by dishonesty, hypocrisy, or recycled violence and misery.