Imperial Party forum

thomas davison · Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 7:38 pm Post subject: WAR FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN

War Without End, Forever and Ever, Amen

Today (Monday 21st January) is the anniversary of the death of George Orwell (Eric Blair) in 1950, at the painfully early age of 46. One does wish so very much that he had lived on to see Suez, the Hungarian uprising, the Chinese Cultural revolution ( and its pale British imitation), the coming of the European Union and the speech codes of political correctness.

But today we should remember, above all, �Nineteen Eighty-Four� and one of its central (and least noted) predictions about the modern state�s need for a permanent war against someone.

As I�ve said before, Orwell was completely wrong about the future, and above all about sex. He was so annoyed by the repression and inconvenience of his own age that he decided that a future IngSoc tyranny would include an anti-sex league and a general loathing of sexual liberty. This is nonsensical. Slaves have often been allowed to copulate, but seldom to marry. The Nazi elite were sexually libertine and had little respect for marriage, especially Goebbels. One of the Bolsheviks� earliest actions (then considered shocking) was to make marriage about as easy to dissolve as it is in modern Britain. There is no connection that I know of between sexual licence and liberty of thought, and rather a strong connection between sexual self-discipline and puritanism, and political liberty (see the Roundheads and the original American Pilgrims).

Actually Orwell partly contradicted himself by predicting that this would only apply to the Party elites. The non-party proles would be bombarded with fool and the sort of trashy �bread and circuses� rubbish we are very familiar with : �There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section � fool, it was called in Newspeak � engaged in producing the lowest kind of fool, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.�

Julia, Winston Smith�s lover and companion in rebellion, has actually worked in this dingy part of the Ministry of Truth: �There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls� School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. �What are these books like?� said Winston curiously. �Oh, ghastly rubbish. They�re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.��

Men are believed by the Party to be in greater danger of corruption, so most of the work is done by unmarried women. But I digress. Actually, as Aldous Huxley warned, a truly repressive modern state would happily encourage untrammelled sex, while destroying marriage and parenthood , as part of its general effort to make men ( and women) love their own servitude.

But Orwell got closer to the truth when, from Goldstein�s secret book, the mysterious text which he is given in the course of being entrapped by the Thought Police, he learns in Chapter III (�War is Peace�) that war between the three great states of the world is permanent . In 1984 this war has an economic purpose (Which I suspect comes from James Burnham�s works, now I think shown to be fallacious) but also a political one .

�All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires

of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared

ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.�

Readers of the book will remember that one of the most oddly worrying passages in it concerns the huge amount of work needed in the Ministry of Truth when Oceania , having been at war with Eurasia, suddenly switches sides and goes to war against Eastasia instead. The whole Ministry is in turmoil as every single published work needs to be altered to pretend that this has always been the case. The canteens work day and night, exhausted people, shattered by the ignoble effort of inserting lies into every file and archive in the country, and deleting the truth from them, sleep on mattresses in the corridors.

�In so far as he had time to remember it, he [Winston Smith]was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the Speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.�

Despite the utter squalor of the work, there is a sort of warm comradeship � the comradeship of shared adversity, very hard work and wartime, well evoked, thanks to the intensity and urgency of the task. It is one of the paradoxes of the book that this wicked episode should be one of the few more or less innocent moments of the narrative.

How very fitting that we should remember the author of this mighty book on the day that our Prime Minister is recorded in most of the newspapers as declaring that we shall now begin a new war in North Africa, which, he warned, could last for decades. It is a �new front�. I am told that some media in France are describing the Algerian episode as �Europe�s 9/11�.

Well, I yield to nobody in my disgust and loathing for murder, and for the individuals and organisations responsible for murdering workers at the Algerian gas plant.

But haven�t we taken leave of our senses here, just a bit?

Two weeks ago, I doubt if David Cameron could have found Mali on a map, or that he had heard of the one-eyed cigarette smuggler, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whom we are now invited to regard as the very embodiment of wickedness and a Major Threat to our Way of Life (whatever that is, apart from eating too much, driving about in cars, watching too much TV and voting for politicians who despise us ) .

We are told repeatedly that this individual is �linked to Al Qaeda� or �Al Qaida� or �Alky Ada� (as Gordon Brown used amusingly to call it, in the long tradition of British politicians pronouncing foreign words so hopelessly badly that it was almost magnificent, as in Churchill�s reference to the Nazi - or, as he would say �Narzee� - secret police as �the Jesterpo� and Ernie Bevin�s frequent request for �A Bottle of Newts� when he desired to drink a few glasses of Nuits St George).

As a statement, this claim that someone is �linked with Al Qaeda� automatically arouses suspicion. To the extent that Alky Ada exists at all, which is a murky area of epistemology, it lacks a central secretariat, a treasury, an address, a telephone number, a membership list, a headquarters, a constitution or a leadership structure. I don�t know how anyone could prove he was *not* linked to it, if enough people said he was. Some people in the Arab world have taken to using the name mainly to annoy and challenge the West. I don�t think men with briefcases turn up demanding a fee from those who seek to use it. There are many fast food franchises which are more coherently organised.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar is �linked to� Alky Ada largely by the fact that dozens of newspapers and 24-hour TV channels have linked him to it. Also he looks sinister and is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work. I would have thought that the late Osama bin Laden, or indeed any serious Islamist, would have been pretty sniffy about associating with a cigarette smuggler. But what do I know?

But whether he and his fellows are really an �existential� threat to our civilisation (whatever that means) has to be open to doubt, as is the idea that Britain or its people should care in the slightest about what goes on in Mali. As for this episode committing us to decades of conflict, perhaps we should be asked if we actually desire this, and have it explained to us why we should. I am afraid I have long had this feeling that incompetent and unsuccessful political leaders enjoy having ( and magnifying the importance of) frightening foreign foes, because they think it will make us trust them more. It also takes our minds off more inconvenient subjects, such as our total inability to control arrivals from Bulgaria and Romania, itself the result of our membership of the EU, a fact which Mr Cameron would love to be forgotten.

Spies and �security� agencies also love this sort of thing, a new villain menacing us from afar, as it is good for their expenses and their budgets. So do the rather sad journalists who become the mouthpieces of these outfits.

In any case, if we are really so appalled by �Islamists�, as we endlessly say we are, then why have we given them so much help, in terms of BBC cheerleading , diplomatic encouragement and logistical help, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria, where the main actors in the �Free Syrian Army� are generally acknowledged to be fiercely militant Islamists.

I might add that, as Mark Almond cogently pointed out in the Mail on Sunday this week, Algeria loathed the �Arab Spring� which was so much praised and supported here. Why? Because the Algerian state crushed a (democratically backed) Islamic revolution of its own, and with quiet but firm Western support, some years ago. And having done so, its leaders were highly alarmed to see their neighbours being given over to the na�ve hopes of Hillary Clinton and William Hague � who must be two of the least qualified foreign ministers ever to have headed the policies of their respective countries.

Mark Almond (who I should note does not share my complacency/ studied calm( you choose which it is) about the dangers of North Africa to us ) wrote :� Unlike Gaddafi, the rulers of Algeria are not a flamboyant lot. They are mainly generals in and out of uniform. They regarded the Arab Spring as a threat to their regime. To them democracy is a bad idea not just because people might vote them out of power, but because it could mean chaos.

�In 1990, when fundamentalist candidates looked set to win, the generals stepped in to stop the elections. A decade of horribly brutal civil war followed.

�This explains why there was such a disconnect between Whitehall and Algiers over how to handle the hostage crisis. Our Government was bewildered by the Algerian decision to open fire without consulting us or other foreign leaders.

�But the Algerian army had - and still has - three simple reasons for cracking down at once: it wanted to stifle the crisis quickly and to destroy the terrorists; they wanted to show their own people that the regime is still firmly in charge and they were also desperate to avoid any chance of Western special forces getting to play a role on their territory.�

He added: �From Afghanistan via Iraq to Libya, the West has shown it can knock down tyrannical Humpty-Dumpties, but putting the societies back together again has eluded us - which is why Algeria sees the Arab Spring as part of the problem, not part of the solution.�

In the �Independent on Sunday� the astute Patrick Cockburn wrote : �The speed of the jihadi retaliation [to France�s intervention in Mali] has led to doubts that the two events are connected, but the likelihood must be that French action in Mali precipitated a pre-planned assault on this target. It is a typical al-Qa'ida operation, in the tradition of 9/11, geared to attract maximum worldwide attention by a suicidal act of extreme violence.

�Foreign leaders were swift to back the French action and pledge to pursue the perpetrators of the hostage-taking to the ends of the earth.

�This is the sort of reaction al-Qa'ida intends to provoke, whereby a small group of gunmen is presented as a threat to the rest of the world. Recruits and money flow in.

�Local disputes - in this case between the Tuareg of northern Mali and the government in the capital, Bamako - become internationalised. Foreign military intervention may restore order and even be welcomed by the local population in the short term. But the presence of a great power can be destabilising.�

He also wrote, with that depth of knowledge which is so important in these affairs: �Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM [(Al Quai�da in the Islamic Maghreb)] doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists.

�For all the French rhetoric about AQIM being a threat to Europe, the group made no attacks there over the past decade, being more interested in raising money through hostage-taking and smuggling cigarettes and cocaine. Algeria's links to AQIM are cloudy, but not so the movement's past connection with the Malian government. The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa'ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.�

Patrick also notes that 'The latest Tuareg uprising of 2012 was precipitated by the fall of Gaddafi in Libya a few months earlier. He had long kept a sort of order in the states in and around the Sahara. His defeat also meant the region was awash with modern weapons. Tuarge in the Libyan security forces, who knew how to use them, were coming home'.

Given that the whole history of the Western world since September 11th 2001 is the history of supposedly adult governments rushing off into what are now almost universally recognised as doomed conflicts in largely irrelevant countries (Iraq anyone? Afghanistan, anyone?), I really do urge caution on this matter. I�d add that the paradox of Algeria, where the �democratic� countries silently acceded to the very cruel suppression of a democratically legitimate, but very unwelcome, Islamist movement, makes a complete nonsense of our policy in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and above all, Syria.

Finally, this gives me another opportunity to recommend one of the best films ever made, which anyone who is at all interested in the subject of terrorism really has to see - �The Battle of Algiers� , Gillo Pontecorvo�s 1966 account, very close to the facts, of the failed French attempt to keep hold of Algeria between 1954 and 1962. Nobody is romanticised. Anyone who sees it will be immune ever afterwards to the rhetoric of any side in such a conflict. War is hell, and don�t you forget it. It is readily available on DVD.