At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review November 1971

At Home

Emperor Hirohito of Japan has been in and out of favour with the British ruling class so much that his life has resembled that of the man and woman in the barometer. Before the last war he was awarded the Order of the Garter, which is supposed to be a recognition of a person’s “chivalry” but which is actually one of the gaudy medals our rulers exchange like little boys with cigarette cards. Then in 1941, as his country was fighting against the British ruling class, he was stripped of the order. In April he got it back—and the whole episode serves to underline the true purpose of these decorations and ceremonies which are thrown around and which the popular press make such a fuss about. Hirohito is now, of course, a friend of British capitalism, at any rate for the time being and his visit to this country was designed to ram the fact down the throats of the British workers. Some of them were unwise enough to protest, in memory of the atrocities which parts of the Japanese army were responsible for in the last war. Apart from the fact that these protests were not aimed at atrocities as such but only those committed by the enemy, there was also the fact that the protesters were acting in the customarily naive fashion of supporters of capitalism. The alliances of international capitalism change as the pattern of opposing interests change, so that yesterday’s enemy is the friend of today. It is not stretching matters too far to say that, had Hitler in some way survived the war and the trials which followed, he may have been paraded through the streets of London to display the new solidarity between the two capitalisms. For capitalism does not know principles other than its own sordid motives, which erect no obstacles in the way of one set of murdering bandits embracing another.

Abroad

A recent United Nations report has told us that unless a “mammoth” relief operation is mounted, there will be some 40 million starving in East Pakistan by Christmas. We have grown so familiar to this kind of warning that the report passed by almost unnoticed, as another example of the world’s inadequate resources or its inability to organise such an operation smoothly and in time. That has always been the official excuse, for tragedies such as in East Pakistan, or in natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, typhoons. Yet at the same time as the U.N. report came out, a comparatively short distance away from East Pakistan the evidence was accumulating, that the excuses for inaction are nothing more than lies. In the middle of a desert, among the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis, the Shah of Persia briefly held court to a gathering of the representatives of world capitalism in conditions of unprecedented luxury. The assembled dignitaries camped out in tents as sumptuous as a palace. They ate food exotic into the realms of fantasy. The whole show, which lasted only a couple of days, cost some £40 million. To get all that stuff out to the ruins in the desert, convoys of lorries rolled out from the Continent every day for months. And the object of it all was simply to show the world that, among the minor powers of international capitalism, Persia has a place. Whether or not that point was made, what was clear was that it is possible to move vast amounts of supplies into difficult places—but that capitalism does not care to do so. When the deaths are counted up in East Pakistan, or in any other similarly needy place, nobody who remembers the junketings at Persepolis should be content with the excuse that it is all an unavoidable accident.

Politics

That strange, light headed feeling we always get at this time of year is relief at the end of the boredom of the party conferences. This year’s were splendid examples of the art of conference trickery. Labour desperately tried to paper over its splits, revealed briefly the flash of knives in the shadows and ended with a marvellously unrealistic list of industries to be nationalised by a future Labour government. Sometimes they mentioned the word Socialism but for all they understood it, or mentioned it in correct context, they might as well have said rhubarb.

The Tories were also in excellent form. This year, remember, they are in power, so the speeches have to be rather different in tone if not in basic content. When they were in opposition we were all being threatened with imminent disasters; now we are all being threatened with imminent prosperity. Barber and Heath both told us all about the golden future which is about to be served up to us and the Chancellor dug up an explanation for unemployment which has been out of use for long enough to sound really fresh. It was all, he said, due to wage demands. The Tories also had their customary hunt for the blood of the criminal, and of course the hats made a wonderful showing.

When capitalism is no more, there will be a good case for keeping these conferences going, for how else will we know what cynicism meant to the people it now deceives and suppresses?