Peace Movement Follies: A Proletarian Polemic

' THE MOST SPECTACULAR DISPLAY OF PUBLIC MORALITY EVER'

-Arundati Roy

"Peace" is an abstraction that appeals to everybody from pacifists to generals. Everybody professes horror at the brutalities of war and the suffering of "innocent victims." The White House is not to be outdone by ANSWER in its use of images of sad-eyed Iraqi children. Raising "peace" as a goal is the first mistake of anybody opposed to war. For the causes of war lie precisely in those times that are retrospectively ennobled by the term "peace." This is particularly forgetful in the case of Iraq, as the recent "war" was preceded by over a decade of strategic bombings, starvation sanctions, destabilization efforts, coup attempts, etc. Conflicts of interest and hostilities are the content of "peace."

Some in the peace movement pronounce war to be a "failure" of politics. Or, more radically, that war should not be a means of politics. But war is the final product of the violent business of politics that the state actually practices. By dissociating politics and politicians from war, peace protestors preserve their faith in politics, as if the politicians (and nobody else) who make wars could not foresee the regrettable consequences of their decisions, perhaps out of naivete or stupidity. They see it as their civic responsibility to remind those in power of the human consequences of war. Yet war is a means of politics. The everyday politics between nation-states are characterized by all the viciousness and extortion which leads to the equally political decision to attack another state with force of arms.

What the peace movement objects to is war as a method; its ends - which are political, being the destruction of a foreign state power with weapons prepared in peace time - are given their blessing. They are equally concerned with the search for weapons and terrorists. They only think that these noble ends should be accomplished without war ("win without war"). They refuse to believe the US administration's assurances that its political aims can only be realized through war. Thus they condemn America's warlords before a ridiculous ideal of a charitable world rule.

Bush could not have been clearer about the purpose of the war ("regime change"). The peace movement never passes up the opportunity to express their relief that the evil tyrant of Baghdad is gone. The opponents of the Iraq war are in agreement with the war's organizers that the existence of an Iraqi arsenal of weapons would be an emergency for which something must be done right away. They just don't believe themselves to be threatened by Iraq. Some wits point out that North Korea needs to be disarmed much more than Iraq does, and find the US claims implausible due to inconsistency. Buying into the US's entire construction of the entire matter of rogue states, they express their preference that Bush carry out his mission in reverse order.

The peace movement has critically examined the administration's case for war and found it wanting. This war is not just, they say, and make their lawsuit: No evidence of weapons of mass destruction. This implies that if Iraq had weapons - which are what state power requires - the war would be legitimate. Only the US has the authority to construct an arsenal of destruction and decide which state - like its fascist bloodhound in the region, Israel - has permission to wield them.

Iraq is not to be implicated in the 9/11 attack by Al Qaida. Endlessly and banally repeated by everybody, this is the war opposition's favorite explanation for why so many good citizens favor the war. Yet facts are irrelevant: Saddam and Osama may hate each other, but in the eyes of the US they are united in common hatred for America, so they might as well be on the same team. This argument implies approval of the war on Afghanistan - in which case nobody disputes a connection between the terrorists and the state.

Not believing the official reasons for war, the antiwar movement posits lowly motives: no blood for oil! They refuse to accept the objectively necessary connection between economic interests, political control and military strikes because they would then have to question the entire democratic and free market constitution of the world of states. If they could no longer reject war as an unsuitable exception to the rule of an otherwise peacefully and not-so-horribly organized world they would never get around to their brave "No!" In a world full of reasons for war, control over sources of wealth being not the least significant, they seek to not allow oil to be a reason for war because of its baseness. They really mean: no blood merely for oil! And when the war can't be stopped by these expressions of moral outrage, they inform the democratic authorities that the war is not in our name. It is a matter of personal honor!

The antiwar protest acts at the level of the justifications that politicians owe their nation when they claim its money and put its sons and daughters in harm's way. Politicians adopt a moral sales strategy anyway: the more they use their citizens in the service of their state, the more insistently do they treat them as moral personalities who are all the more supposed to agree to those things about which they have no say. The peace lovers don't come down from this level of publicly paraded political morality. In their true element, they place enormous value on the ideal decision-making competence offered to them as compensation for their practical powerlessness. They see through the hypocritical justifications and disapprove of the base motives, and withdraw their moral allegiance to the leadership. Some even engage in symbolic actions!

All the peace types personalize their case against the war ("Impeach Bush"). Some radicals even portray Bush as the main terrorist threat. Yet all this burning indignation suffers from one problem: it feeds off nothing other than the ideal of a political leadership that is dedicated to the highest moral values and a charitable political world order - that is, off the same ideal picture that the apologists of the current war paint of the US administration. The peace movement wouldn't have any means to disgrace the president without this ideal at hand; and by disgracing them under this standard, the standard itself becomes only stronger. No judgement against the purposes of state ever comes out of the condemnation of the political figures that execute these purposes and represent these purposes in their personality.

The antiwar movement takes a great deal of satisfaction in having foretold of the dangers that exist for an American occupation of Iraq. The anti-war crowd also fears that the Iraq war will lead to more terrorism against Americans. Thus they show their loyalty to the war on terrorism, disputing only whether the use of military power is really suitable to the stabilizing the dangerous Middle East. Unasked is what "stability" consists of. They join the consensus that it is up to the US to control the region. The role of the US as guarantor of the region's stability is the reason for their injunction to "get involved".

It is no wonder that so many who attended the huge antiwar protests that preceded the occupation of Iraq were demoralized by their failure to impact their leaders. They do this because they believe that the state exists to serve them, rather than the reverse: they are manipulable objects who serve the state. The state asks them to be content with moral appeals which may not be to the liking of the intended audience, so they respond with moral objections. But they meet the state on its own grounds and strengthen the unity between themselves and the power which disposes over them. It is a conflict which they avoid and can only lose.

It is disgusting to oppose spending on war with spending on health care, education and jobs. People are forced to work. To make a demand out of a necessity is the most craven submission to the interests of capital over those of our class. The alternative to prisons are not schools: one is the extension of the other. War and wage labor are both conditions of life that are part of the normal, happy functioning of our free market democracy. Any effort to offer constructive solutions to the problems that capitalism generates in an exercise in the management of misery.

As communists we don't seek to solve the "problems" of capitalism, we seek to abolish the conditions that create these problems in the first place.

Peace is the unity of the ruler and the ruled.

-- some materialists

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