This is an address John Gray gave to the Reclaim the Enlightenment’s annual Bastille Day event on the 14th July 2024
One can hardly claim that the United Irishmen were pacifists but did they seek war? True that they were inspired by the fall of the Bastille and the French revolution but their original publicly declared objective was no more than securing a reform of the notoriously corrupt Irish parliament, an objective pursued by open democratic means during 1792.
It was rather the English government that declared war and in February 1793 on France, in alliance with other reactionary European powers. Simultaneously they embarked on the suppression of radical movements in England, Scotland and Ireland. The United Irishmen were driven underground.
As late as 1795 during the brief reign of a Whig reformer as Lord Lieutenant there was a possibility that conflict could be avoided, but the Dublin Castle establishment won the support of King George for his early removal. Reaction and oppression was back on the agenda. It was only then that the United Irish leadership agreed to seek French assistance in the cause of revolution and sent Wolfe Tone, himself under threat of prosecution for high treason, via America and then to France to seek that assistance.
That is a world away from modern times and the circumstances in which we now live as arm chair generals go on about the risk of a wider wars. It is just a matter of days ago that General Sir Patrick Sanders who retired as the British Chief of the General Staff a month ago waxed eloquent as the 75th anniversary meeting of NATO leaders assembled warning that ‘Russia, China and Iran were the new axis powers and a 3rd world war could break out within the next five years.’ It was all ‘more of a threat than the Nazis in 1939.’
Generals always want more kit and more expenditure, and arms manufacturers lick their lips. The British arms industry is worth £8.5 billion a year, and it is the seventh largest arms exporter in the world. Its 173,000 often well paid employees have a vested interest in this enterprise, and one supported by their trade unions. Armies too often command blind patriotic allegiance and politicians rarely resist that pressure.
Today indeed the almost universal cry is that countries must increase their defence expenditure. Under American pressure NATO has agreed an objective that all its members should spend at least 2.0% of GDP on defence. If fulfilled that would imply an increase in expenditure of £140 billion per annum across the 26 members.
It is not just those on the left who warn about the dangers of becoming gadderene swine in this race towards armageddon. Remarkably it was Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower who in 1961 warned that;
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
Those words have only been borne out by subsequent developments.
In 2022 global military expenditure amounted to $2.24 trillion a 19% increase since 2013.
What of Britain? In 2023/24 defence expenditure amounted to 2.3% of GDP or £54.2 billion, this at a time when other public services were in a state of collapse. The outgoing Conservative government had pledged to increase this to 2.5% of GDP a commitment that the incoming Labour government has pledged to match.
Both parties seem wedded to the illusion that Britain is still a global player, and that, despite the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, should be able to intervene in wars anywhere. How else to explain the relatively recent expenditure of £6.2 billion on two gigantic aircraft carriers? In the 19th century Britain engaged in gunboat diplomacy but evidently the price has shot through the roof. In the developing age of drones and missiles aircraft carriers are in any case increasingly vulnerable, though ours have mainly broken down of their own accord.
Then there is our totemic independent nuclear deterrent, though as it is dependent on American technology it is not independent. Latterly we have lost sight of the moral argument against this form of weaponry once pursued so effectively by CND or at Greenham Common. If by international law the attempt to ban germ and chemical warfare is made why is there still a let out for nuclear weapons with their far more ghastly potential?
Can we conceive, or can those who rule us, actually conceive of circumstances in which they would use these weapons? I hope not. But if not why, on practical and economic grounds, have them? In fact the die is cast. Renewal of the entire system is underway following cross party agreement at a mind boggling cost of £167 billion over the next thirty years.
Closer to home the kind of rabid thinking beloved by securocrats is well exemplified in a report entitled Closing the Back Door issued by the influential right wing think tank, Policy Exchange as recently as February of this year. The authors were as grand as they come – Former Conservative Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, Former 1st Sea Lord, Admiral Lord West who had also served as an Under Secretary for Defence in a Labour government, and Lord Robertson, former Labour Defence Secretary and until recently Secretary General of NATO.
It may be a right wing think tank but note that two of the three contributors had served in Labour governments. The infection is a cross party one.
The back door they refer to is us, that is Ireland. According to them ‘Ireland constitutes the weak spot of British national security’. They criticise Irish neutrality, a hoary old chestnut in British discourse, and argue that Ireland’s minimal expenditure on defence leaves it unable adequately to defend itself. Indeed Ireland’s current expenditure on defence is just 0.5% of GDP though it is scheduled to increase to 1%. True too that Ireland has no airforce or navy of significance. But then what does Ireland need to defend itself against?
They describe occasional reports of Russian submarines lurking off the Irish coast but what does this amount to? They admit that ‘the risk of conventional attack (on Ireland) is low’.
They are reduced to complaining that Ireland is in no position to contribute to the defence of the western approaches or to protect the three quarters of all northern hemisphere undersea cables that run through Irish territorial waters. Furthermore they paint a fantastical picture of an Ireland bereft of adequate intelligence services and riddled with Russian, Chinese, and even Iranian agents who may infiltrate the UK through the soft Irish border.
One might note that despite their assumption of huge competence by the British intelligence services there is considerable evidence of Russian infiltration in Britain and not least into the Conservative Party.
In order to deal with all these problem they go for broke and re-interpret the Good Friday Agreement. The statement that Britain has ‘no selfish strategic interest’ in Northern Ireland does not mean for them that she has no strategic interest. Far from it; the authors recommend the re-establishment of a major naval base in Derry and an airforce base possibly at Aldegrove.
It is though we are back in World War 2 when bases in Northern Ireland did play an important role but times have changed – for one thing planes fly faster and more reliably. The western approaches are perfectly adequately covered by bases in Scotland.
But the military re-occupation of Northern Ireland is just too tempting. Blithely unaware of the Irish political implications of any such development they ensure that the prospective offence is maximised by declaring that ‘The United Kingdom must articulate a full-throated defence of the Union.’
Nor is this proposal simply a defensive one. An ‘Additional forward presence in Northern Ireland would facilitate offensive maritime manoeuvres against Russia.’ So much then for the notion that the role of NATO is a purely defensive one!
All this would, so they say, help ‘to uphold the US led world order’.
One cannot help thinking that the highly tendentious analysis here, and the provocative proposals, arise because there are still those in military circles who resent the fact that the British Army didn’t actually win in Northern Ireland, and that their political masters wisely settled for the Good Friday Agreement.
Thankfully the Tory government has received its just deserts, but would uber patriotic and Union Jack waving Labour deviate significantly from Tory militarism. I think we will be spared that Derry naval base, but in other respects jingoistic prancing on the world stage will still rule. Those aircraft carriers will still sail to far of seas to bombard luckless natives, that is when they don’t break down, the so-called nuclear deterrent will be retained at enormous expense, and defence expenditure will increase.
Morally one cannot of course ignore the crises of the moment, but one can warn against wilfully anticipating a new world war. One can regret that Irish neutrality prevents this country from assisting beleaguered peoples militarily, but the upside of neutrality should be that the country can play a significant role in supporting international agencies such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and also in wider peace making. After all all conflicts must eventually end in peace settlements.
What should an enlightened position on two of the most horrendous conflicts of the moment be? Inevitably I am offering a personal view here.
I support the claim to self-determination of the Ukrainians and their right to resist invasion and oppression. I do so even though I believe that Russia had reason to fear the expansionist tendencies of NATO. I do so even though there have been reactionary elements within Ukraine though these have not been dominant. All European countries harbour rabid right wing elements within their democracies, and particularly so at the moment, but no one, not even Russia, suggests that they all deserve to be invaded as a consequence. No, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine cannot be justified.
I reflect that in 1792 the United Irishmen marching through Belfast celebrated the free nations of the world. One of them was Poland which was subsequently invaded by Russia. Different times but the wrong done then is paralleled by what Russia is attempting to do in Ukraine today.
Of course the picture becomes clouded when some of Ukraine’s western supporters portray the conflict as part of a more generalised struggle against Russia, and when President Zelensky reciprocates, but he has little choice in his country’s struggle for survival. A few days ago at that NATO summit it was agreed that Ukraine’s progression towards membership was ‘irreversible’. Given that the NATO threat was one of Russia’s casus belli this can only make an eventual peace settlement more difficult to achieve.
But I do support the supply of armaments to Ukraine to provide for its defence, and this rather than for an assault on Russia. I know that many will say that we should remain neutral. I would call to mind the experience of the Spanish Civil War when the western powers declared their neutrality and enforced it leaving the legitimate and democratic Republican government defenceless to be overthrown by the vile dictator, Franco, largely thanks to the intervention of the fascist powers who flouted any neutrality constraints.
What then of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Never forget the British role in creating the nightmare. It was the Balfour Declaration of 2017 that gave the green light for the creation of a Jewish state on Arab lands and then under the British mandate redundant Black and Tans from the Irish conflict were given free reign to oppress the Arabs.
It was not that Britain was enthusiastic about Jewish ambition. Permitting Jews to settle in Palestine prospectively reduced the Jewish problem at home. Remember that one of the reasons that German Jews found it so difficult to escape on the eve of the holocaust was because of anti-semitism elsewhere in the west including Britain and Ireland leading to the widespread refusal to accept Jewish refugees.
Of course we should never forget the holocaust, which still stands out as probably the most systematic attempt in history to exterminate an entire people.
It became the justification for the partition of Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state. Western guilt about the holocaust played a part, but those western powers came to see an emerging Israel as a bulwark against more hostile Arab states.
Thus even at the outset the west ignored the Nakba, in English ‘the catastrophe’, or the expulsion of 700,000 Arabs from their lands and homes and never subsequently compensated or allowed to return.
The tragedy of Israel is that those who were the most persecuted became persecutors themselves. Again and again they have had to defend themselves, a legitimate right, but again and again they have responded with persecutions on a grander scale which mock the term defence .
Israeli society is not homogenous – there were attempts to achieve a settlement with the Palestinians as in the Camp David Accord of 1978 and the Oslo Accords of 1993. Agreement on a two state solution seemed a possibility, but increasingly dominant Israeli political forces have for long sought to wreck any such possibility.
They are in denial of any such thing as a Palestinian state preferring instead to live up to their own origin myth by which the whole of Palestine was originally Jewish. It is like our Unionist Cruithin myth by which those who undertook the plantation were merely returning to their homeland, only much more serious.
And if you have an overweening belief in your own self righteousness it becomes all to easy to dismiss the demands of international law. Thus Israel has ignored numerous United Nations resolutions seeking to curb their expansionism,
In practical terms, and just as the west belatedly returns to the two state solution, Israel has rendered it a faint shadow of what might have been possible. In the face of illegal Israeli settlements what is left for the Palestinians is a mere patchwork quilt of beleaguered fragments.
And now we have to witness the war of extermination in Gaza. I don’t know whether the number killed there is 35,000 or 40,000 – numbers begin to lose their meaning. What we do know is that virtually the whole of the infrastructure that once supported a million and a half people has been destroyed, that hospitals and schools have been attacked, that amongst those who have been targeted are aid workers, doctors, and journalists. We also know that at an early stage the Israeli authorities announced their intention to cut off supplies of water and food, and in practice that has largely been the case. Famine now lurks. And still as I speak the massacre goes on.
Following the Hamas attack on 7 October and the horrendous and indiscriminate massacre of Israelis, western powers quite legitimately affirmed Israel’s right to self defence but put no constraints on what that might involve. As we soon knew that quickly involved a wholescale invasion of Gaza undertaken with the avowed intention to eliminate Hamas and to release the hostages captured by them. That was an objective that many military experts viewed as unrealisable at the outset. And so it is proving. While an early short lived truce enabled the release of a significant number of hostages the subsequent military efforts to rescue additional hostages have actually led to the deaths of more than have been released.
As the colossal and indiscriminate assault on Gaza got under way numerous parties including the United Nations called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of the hostages seized by Hamas. Israel took not a blind bit of notice bolstered by the continued support of Britain and the United States. In Britain that included the support of the then leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer. Materially they continued to supply the bombs that were falling on Gaza. True that both countries expressed increased concern about what was happening. Jo Biden laid down red lines which were promptly crossed by the Israeli’s in lines of blood.
Late, late in the day the Americans have come forward with more worthwhile ceasefire proposals and ones backed by the United Nations, but while Britain and the United States continue to supply bombs why should the Israeli’s engage in good faith?
In the short term a couple of things need to happen. Britain and the United States should cease supplying arms to Israel so long as the conflict continues. Britain should withdraw its opposition to the reference of Benjamin Netanyahou to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
In the longer term Israel must withdraw from Gaza as a prelude to internationally supported reconstruction there. The Israeli hostages must be released but so also must the almost 10,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel – they hold hostages too! If indeed the western powers wish to resurrect the two states solution, they need to apply pressure on Israel to make it a plausible reality. That must mean not just an end to further illegal settlements on the West Bank but the reversion to the 1967 border which would mean that many existing illegal Israeli settlements would come under Palestinian rule.
So long as Israel continues on its present course the case for a boycott becomes ever more compelling. Until recently such advocacy was all too easily smeared as anti-semitism. No it is what you do with rogue states. It is what had to be done with apartheid South Africa. Let us hope, and somewhat against the odds, for a reformed Israel. Unfortunately, all powerful though Israel may seem, they currently imperil their own very existence.
JOHN GRAY
JULY 2024
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