Letters to editor, Aug 1995

• Censoring what the war is about *
• Business as usual
• The useless arsenal

Censoring what the war is about *

The problem of conscience that I have is that I am willy-nilly mixed up in the profiteering sense, if I so much as catch a public bus: the price of petrol is part of the price of a ticket. The guilt, in a word, is collective.

Yet the complete abandonment of principle epitomised by Colin Archer functions to keep me--and how many others? -- in isolation. The real conscientious objector, the real work of resistance to war is thereby forced underground--and with it the imagination.

Easy to go mad that way. Since they refuse adamantly to address the total problem--the universal scale of violence, the global character of the war--I am bound to assume, sad to say, that the defence of bourgeois interests and class privilege actuates the UK peace establishment.

from Jeremy Beatty, Peckham, London

Business as usual

Janet suggests that we remain silent until after the main business of the meeting and then raise our points "where they might be listened to". Sadly, from experience I know that is highly unlikely to happen--BAe aren't listening. The company desperately wants to bury itself in the minutiae of business as usual--auditors, accounts, dividends, and so forth--and ignore the real issues: that their products maim and kill.

AGMs are usually the one chance in the year to address those who actually profit from those deadly products: the shareholders and directors. By disrupting this "business as usual" atmosphere, we can communicate that their business is unacceptable.

Don't get me wrong; dialogue is vitally important. However, if one side refuses to listen, it helps no one to stay silent.

from Chris Cole, London

The useless arsenal

Western nuclear weapons enthusiasts will not be impressed by arguments that it was not nuclear weapons but the civil society of Eastern Eurnpe that brought down the Berlin Wall. Although such power-worshippers may not admit as much when talking to pacifists, they do not believe in "civil society". They believe that the Eastern bloc was brought to its knees by the threat of NATO nuclear missile strikes on Soviet military installations and communications centres followed by the threat of ICBM attacks on Soviet cities in the event of any attempted Communist retaliation. They perceive the anti-Communist citizenry of Eastern Europe as a subsidiary factor, as the well-meaning dupes of the equation.

The real lesson from the end of the Cold War is that of the uselessness of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal: of the absurdity of Khrushchev's over-estimation of the power he thought he was acquiring from nuclear weapons and of the added horror of Brezhnev's drawing exactly the wrong conclusions from Khruschev´s humiliation in the Cuban missile crisis.

To call the Soviet nuclear arsenal useless understates the reality: NATO's counterforce strategy, which in the aftermath of the Berlin crisis tended to replace the no-longer-viable scenarios of nuking enemy cities, was possible only because of the existence of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The only contribution of Soviet nuclear weapons was to provide a target for NATO's post-`60s missile technology and political credibility for its nuclear warfighting strategies.

The ineffectuality of the American and European hi-tech war machine in the face of more modest opponents was shown in Vietnam and is being shown again in former-Yugoslavia.

I think it is good for anti-militarists to recognise that what was most self-defeating about Soviet Communism were the characteristics that it had most in common with its Cold War enemy. This is also the insight that can send the clearest message to the Chiracs of today.

from Wayne Hall, Athens