By the time I got around to being active in CND 1991, its membership was probably in decline, which had a number of effects on its atmosphere. The people still actively involved were kind of a hard core of members who were particularly committed to the cause, and took a deeper, more philosophical approach to the ideal of peace, something which I hadn’t seen so much in FoE, Greenpeace or the Green Party. I found this quite impressive, and it’s also the case that with CND, people were more prepared to take direct action against things and go to prison for their beliefs, although this is obviously also true in other situations as with animal liberation. Sarada’s experience begins much earlier than mine, and she may be aware of how the organisation had been in its heyday.
Speaking of Sarada, at the time our relationship was still in the future and a misunderstanding occurred which I didn’t clear up definitively until many years later. Many Leicester CND members were leaving the organisation because of our opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 as I got involved, one of whom was Sarada, officially speaking. Much later I found out that this was nothing to do with her, but that he partner had resigned instead as she was not in the country at the time. However, before this was resolved this temporarily placed her in the “outer darkness” for me because it appeared to me that she had supported the war.
1991 was the best and the worst of years for me. It was extremely traumatic to see the whole country so enthusiastically support the war, and it also seemed very much to me that we’d made no progress since 1914, as the rhetoric used I found strongly reminiscent of that time. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn spoke of the “short twentieth century”, which he saw as stretching between those two years and ending with the breakup of the Soviet Union. I don’t know the details of his analysis, but it struck me that the progress one associates with that period was utterly trashed from the end of the 1970s onwards in this country and that this became starkly demonstrated in the outrage of that war, and even more in its popular support. My reaction was one of utter despair.
But I want to focus on CND itself. Due to the rather depleted membership, I found myself becoming office manager and later chair of Leicester CND, and at the same time I was translating German papers and articles for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) and the Trust for Research and Education into the Arms Trade (TREAT). I also became newsletter editor, regularly staffed the stall and and just generally did a lot for them, although it must also be observed that I didn’t do it particularly well. Clearly I had my strengths but the trouble with being in a declining organisation is that you can’t necessarily stick to the areas you do best in and I found myself having to do a lot of stuff which I wasn’t much good at. I stayed because they seemed to be the one organisation whose perspective went deeper than just the activism, but this, as I’ve said, may be an artifact of being in decline, as there was not much of popular `οι πολλοι one might find in a larger group such as the Labour Party or Greenpeace Supporters at the time. However, I also think there’s a stronger tradition of this in CND and the peace movement generally than there is in other pressure groups. There is a stronger religious component to the membership than elsewhere, and also there are more Marxists, which is a good thing. However, they are to some extent in conflict with anarchists, who tend to consider them too moderate. In particular, Quaker involvement is very strong. All of this means that they are more intellectually-oriented, as can be expected of an organisation whose president was Bertrand Russell. Just briefly, and this deserves more discussion elsewhere, Bertrand Russell is rather a paradoxical figure in his involvement with progressive causes because his motivation was clearly conscience-based, but as a philosopher he was practically an ethical sceptic, i.e. he didn’t really believe right and wrong had any meaning, entailing that had he lived his life authentically he would be a sociopath, but definitely wasn’t. This is extremely odd and is worth going into in greater depth at some stage.
CND has a number of broader involvements than just the issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. For instance, it supports the Hibakusha (被爆者), i.e. the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. As I once ranted on the megaphone in Leicester City Centre, “people not yet born are still dying”, which was one of those things which comes out of your mouth when you’re trying to keep the flow going, but it is kind of true. Damage to chromosomes from ionising radiation to one generation of organisms can increase in future generations even though they’ve never been exposed to that dose, meaning that some of the children and grandchildren of the Hibakusha will be dying of cancer, for example, even if they were born outside Japan. In 1976, one of my teachers said that “fifty years from now there will be children born who will die of cancer from Hiroshima”. This will be true unless some other cataclysm wipes us all out. As OMD said of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb, “that kiss you give is never ever gonna fade away”.
I’m not writing this primarily to propagandise although I inevitably will, but I do want to say this. We often think of the Japanese nation as the only direct victims of nuclear weapons, but this is not so. Test sites around the world such as Bikini Atoll and the Nevada Test Site mean that the Marshallese and Western Shoshone nations, for example, are also victims. Whereas they may not have been killed by the blasts of nuclear bombs themselves, their lives have been devastated by them and deaths have resulted. The Western Shoshone found themselves in the ironic position of not being able to find paid employment except in organisations which were destroying their nation, and many of them therefore chose to boycott employers globally.
Another aspect of this is arms conversion. As the Cold War ended, there was supposed to be a peace dividend resulting from the end of the colossal sums of money spent on the likes of Trident. This was not forthcoming because the political system needs us to imagine we have enemies, but trade unions and other organisations investigated the opportunities for manufacturing other products than the subs, warheads and the like which they were oriented towards producing up until the end of the 1980s and found that it was eminently feasible to do so. It was also found, by CAAT, that the efficiency of investment into healthcare and education produced several times the number of jobs investment in arms companies yielded. For instance, four times as many jobs are produced by the equivalent sum of money paid into a school than into the defence industry, where the money mainly goes on expensive equipment. It’s also worth observing at this point that the price of components provided by defence companies to the UK military is vastly inflated, often beyond the realms of reason. This is true across NATO. There are cases of single bolts for sale at retail for less than a dollar going for $5000.
CND is also opposed to fission power, as am I. There is a constant effort to chip away at public opposition to nuclear power which has to be continually renewed when accidents occur. In my opinion the solution to our energy problems is orbital solar power. This has the drawback of the beams being sent back to this planet being very dangerous if they miss their targets and also of the technology for these beams being used for nefarious purposes, but there are straightforward engineering solutions for the former and the latter assumes that human behaviour as it is now is something we’re stuck with. I’m not here to persuade you though.
One of the brutal things members of the public have said to us about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that two bombs weren’t enough, and that the whole of Japan should’ve been bombed. This assumes that everyone in the country was complicit in the imperialism, torture and other atrocities, and it’s notable that I’ve never heard the same suggested as action against those nicely “Aryan” Germans. In other words, this is nothing but racism. It penetrates far into the alternative community too, as I’ve heard the same sentiments expressed by ageing hippies. I’ve also been called a “traitor”, which is like water off a duck’s back because to me, I just happen to be born in this country and am like everyone else coerced by a monopoly of force to obey the government, so how could I owe anything to my “nation”? The only people I owe that kind of allegiance to is the human race as a whole.
While I’m on the subject of being shouted at in the street, as we all know the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Before that time, shouting “get back to Russia!” made a minimal bit of sense, but this was still shouted at us well into the twenty-first century, and I think the last time I heard it was probably about twenty years after the end of the Cold War. It isn’t clear to me what someone means when they say this more recently, and to me it advertises that they are not putting any thought into their political position.
The internal machinations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are broadly similar to those of any organisation, and it’s remarkable that the same kinds of dynamics and interactions occur across the political spectrum. You might just as well be in the Conservative Party as far as that’s concerned, and it occurs to me that if we are to invent a new way of relating to each other, that might be expected to be reflected in the organisations committed to doing that. It’s no longer an option, and hasn’t been for over six dozen years now, to continue in the same vein as before. To be fair, there are people dedicated to relating differently within such organisations. There’s an elusive political idea in my head which I’ve had for a number of years that the interactions and behaviour we don’t politicise but seem to assume are universal could in some way be extended into the overtly political realm in order to come up with an entirely new form of politics, but as I say I’m very hazy about the nature of this.
Unilateralism is one of those doctrines which appears superficially to be left wing because of tribalism and the adoption of such a policy by the Left. However, if you go back far enough there used to be a Conservative branch of CND and Enoch Powell was a unilateralist. Conversely, if you consider Stalinism to be left wing, the pro-Soviet communist parties in NATO countries would clearly have supported the Soviet Union and its weapon stockpiles. Even the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain supported retaining nuclear weapons, and their slogan was, famously, “neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism”. It is not fundamentally a left-wing idea.
The reason the “U”K has nuclear missiles is not in fact to do with defence, or even attack, but because it keeps the country on the UN Security Council. I’ve never understood why the Conservative Party aren’t honest about this because although I don’t agree with it, it does seem to be more defensible than the idea that we have them against a nebulous enemy when suitcase and dirty bombs can easily be used against this country whether or not we have them, and also provide the materials to make them. Although I initially corralled myself into agreement with CND from a left wing position, their policy doesn’t actually have a close connection to left wing politics per se, and in a way it’s odd that a right wing government is happy to throw countless billions of pounds at the defence industry, because that’s the kind of thing you might expect a left wing government to do. But I find myself propagandising again.
Editing the newsletter was a very useful enterprise. At the time, desktop publishing wasn’t the kind of thing most CND members felt willing to wrestle with and there were problems with scale, so this involved spraymounting the edited articles onto boards for reproduction at a local printer. As I was committed to using unbleached paper, the printers used to complain about the colour. We did it all on a typewriter for quite some time and only very slowly did we begin to word process it. You might think that editing would’ve cured me of verbosity and for a while it did, but I find it creeping back in recently and most of what you see me write today will have that flaw. I don’t know why this is but I worry it may be linked to cognitive decline, as the word:idea ratio climbs with the risk of dementia. Very soon after I began, I abandoned spraymount as a potentially nasty sticky stuff which did goodness knows what if you inhaled it and replaced it with Prit Stick. There was an issue with people being rather attached to the way things had always been done, and also problems associated with rather simplistic world views. For instance, some people in the group were opposed to almost any kind of scientific or technological change and often saw it as part of a conspiracy to maintain the status quo. Sometimes it is, but not always.
CND is also something Sarada and I have done together, although Sarada’s attitude has been much more relaxed than mine. One of the biggest difficulties she encountered was when she became treasurer and discovered that her predecessor, who seemed notably disengaged with the whole thing at the best of times, had simply bunged all the receipts for the previous year into a plastic bag which she then had to go through to get the books into an auditable condition. The post of treasurer is always an unpopular one, in that nobody ever wants to do it, and given Sarada’s experience it’s easy to see why.
At times, CND seemed to turn more or less into my “day job” except of course that I wasn’t paid. By this I mean that once you are involved in campaigning, or more broadly working, with something much of the time for years on end you can lose sight and enthusiasm for the cause. Although I still support the cause of unilateral nuclear disarmament, I also find the task of advocating for it quite tedious and tend not to bother much nowadays. It isn’t that I don’t believe in it so much as that all the arguments, responses and counter-arguments have become very routine and tiresome to me, which is a great pity because they are of course vitally important life and death matters. This is a strange juxtaposition because it superimposes apathy and passion. I imagine many people feel this way about what they do.
There is also a question of priority. There’s a sense in which the abolition of weapons of mass destruction trumps all other political issues because it would also be ecocide and there isn’t any point in campaigning for more unionisation or a better NHS if it could all be reduced to cinders at any moment, but likewise there isn’t much point in ignoring civil liberties either since their curtailment could prevent one from standing in the way of a nuclear holocaust either. Most of the time, though, there is a broad consistency across these issues. Voluntary Human Extinction, for example, might sound like a movement which would positively welcome nuclear destruction but in fact the reason most people in VHEMT are in favour of the end of the species is to protect the environment from us, which nuclear war obviously wouldn’t do. I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to come up with a sentence which says something like “nuclear weapons kill without a shot being fired”, which in that form makes no sense, but the very existence of nuclear weapons means that the NHS and all other public projects in this country and around the world are less well-funded and the régimes relying on their existence either economically or directly are not friendly places to live. Mordechai Vanunu comes to mind as a particularly obvious human rights issue here.
It’s probably been roughly a decade since I was involved with CND or the peace movement directly, although I do still go to the Hiroshima vigils. I’m not today, but it’s Friday and my life is rather limited anyway. If you want to think of it as parallel to a career, I ended up on the board of East Midlands CND and might have got further if certain other issues hadn’t impinged, notably the “Labour” government’s attack on home education and complementary medicine at the end of the ‘noughties. Consequently I haven’t done much in recent years, but it’s impossible to be involved so heavily in something for two decades without it having an impact on one’s life and being significant.
Naturally the reason I’m blogging about this today is that it’s the seventy-sixth anniversary of Hiroshima, and we must never forget that atrocity. This must never happen again:
A Box Of Chocolates 