Info War (2021)

Book Review from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi, Richard Nil, Donna Mulhearn. Massachusetts Press, 2019.

In 2016, the city of Fallujah in Iraq, with a population of around a third of a million, was utterly destroyed. It was the third time that it had been under sustained military assault as a consequence of the United States’ invasion of that country. This book looks not at the military tactical ‘war porn’ side of these pacifications, but at the human cost, and the ways in which power was inflicted on that city.

A large chunk of the book is spent defending the right of the population of Fallujah to take up arms in resistance to the invading forces. It also spends some time distancing them from the fighters of ISIS (according to the authors, although ISIS fighters were present for the third battle of Fallujah, they had interposed themselves in the conflict, rather than the Fallujans particularly seeking to join the cause of the Islamists).

Some of the details of how the US fought in Fallujah are instructive. The first battle of Fallujah was shaped by classic counter-insurgency problems. The US had laid siege to the city, creating the prospect of a humanitarian disaster (they also blamed insurgents for using the civilians as human shields, despite the fact that the US themselves had locked them in). Pictures beamed around the world meant the battle was one of propaganda as much as bullets.

This can be illustrated by the fact that as part of the second attack coalition forces took control of the hospital, because they considered the staff there to be ‘terrorist sympathisers’ who put out claims of casualty numbers that conflicted with the coalition’s own announcements. Uncontrolled journalists were barred from the zone. They were determined not to lose the image war a second time.

The book spends a great deal of time discussing information warfare, and the supposed firewall between the psyops and info war that US forces use abroad, as compared to the image management they use at home. Given that they specifically chose to treat independent journalists as a war enemy, it is interesting to note that that was precisely the tactic later adopted by the Trump regime as part of its propaganda operations. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the skills and techniques of info war are unlikely to be brought home, especially when the info warriors get demobbed. They note that one Associated Press photographer ended up being held for two years for unstated ‘security’ reasons.

The second battle involved intense bombardment and house to house fighting. Although civilians had been warned to leave, and many did, it’s thought around 50,000 remained, caught in the crossfire. The authors note that the US soldiers themselves didn’t know much about who they were fighting and why, they simply went into the meat grinder, where many died.

After the second battle, the city was in a ruined state, riven with resentment. The largely Sunni city soon became embroiled in the factional tensions the US (and to an extent Iran) were fomenting in Iraq as part of the ongoing struggle for control of the country post-invasion.

As US forces drew down, the Fallujans rebelled again, and this time their struggle was caught up in the battle against ISIS. It was the turn of the Iraqi government to lay siege to the city, and once again, civilians were forced out into camps, and bullets and bombs laid waste to whatever hadn’t been destroyed in previous assaults.

The clearances of the city, the disruption of services – water, electricity, medicine – were a health crisis within a war. The book deals also with the potential fact that the war has led to ongoing health crises, of high infant mortality, birth defects and cancers. The book is even-handed over the precise cause of these observed trends, but clear that they do exist, and must surely be chalked up to the horrors of modern war being inflicted on that delicate system that is modern urban living.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Michael Foot – An example of principles? (2010)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

A handy tool for a balanced assessment of obituaries of the Great and the Good is to be aware that the more fanciful the praise for the deceased the greater the relief that they are no longer around to cause any trouble. Consider, for example, the tributes to Michael Foot on his death, at 96, last month. This is Gordon Brown, overlooking that during Foot’s life he would have been one of his consistent opponents: “…a man of deep principle and great idealism…one of the most eloquent speakers the country has ever heard … An indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs…” Here is Tony Blair, the intensity of whose antagonism towards Foot would have rivalled that of Brown: “…a giant of the Labour movement, a man of passion, principle and outstanding commitment…” Finally, still dealing with Prime Ministers, this is Margaret Thatcher “…a highly principled and cultivated man…if I did not think it would offend him, I would say he is a gentlemen…” Except that that was not a comment by Thatcher after Foot had died; it was what she thought at the time she had crushed him in the 1983 election. Principle? Idealism? Passion? The fantasies about Foot live on, like a virus infecting those who promote themselves as successors.

Journalism

He was swept into Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1945, when the votes showed that the lies about a safer, healthier world emerging from that greatest ever human crisis had been gratefully absorbed. Foot’s constituency was Devonport in Plymouth, where his comfortably powerful family (his father had been an MP, one brother was an MP, another became Governor of Cyprus) had their affluent home. Before that he had worked as a journalist on the New Statesman and Tribune. Aneurin Bevan, whose reputation as a viperous left-wing orator had not been an obstacle to him forming a close friendship with the Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, suggested that Foot (“…a young bloody knight-errant…”) would be a useful employee for one of the unconventional lordship’s newspapers. Perhaps because of Beaverbrook’s seeming vulnerability to those he saw as fellow rebellious misfits Foot was placed in a job which refreshed him with regular pay rises until he became editor of the scandalously strident Evening Standard. In 1945 Foot transferred to the Daily Herald, part-owned by the TUC but later transmogrified into Rupert Murdoch’s Sun with its Page Three girls and screeching headlines.

Guilty Men

By that time Foot’s reputation as a rebel had been cemented into place, although it was typically impulsive rather than consistent. In the 1940s one of his most successful projects had been as the co-author, with two other journalists, of the book Guilty Men. Published by the Left Book Club, this was a best-selling polemic against the Conservative government’s apparent preference for negotiating about – or appeasing – Nazi Germany’s expansionism instead of building up British forces. Guilty Men does not spare Foot’s political allies: “Up to the arrival of Hitler on the scene, the Labour Party officially went through all the antic motions of ‘resisting militarism‘. This consisted of adopting pretty well every half-baked disarmament proposition that was drawn up, and annually voting against the Service estimates”. But effective a rant though that is, it takes no account of the fact that Foot had not always opposed disarmament. In 1933, when the Geneva talks, aiming at multilateral disarmament, broke down he came out in favour of unilateral disarmament . His election address in 1935, when he stood unsuccessfully for Monmouth, attacked the Tory Prime Minister Baldwin for his policy of re-armament, stating that “…the armaments race in Europe must be stopped now”.

Falklands

More recently, Foot has presented himself as “an incessant and inveterate peacemonger” – which was not taken seriously by anyone with so much as a passing acquaintance with his history. Among other attitudes, he supported the formation of the US dominated NATO military alliance and the American policy of propping up the dictatorship in South Korea before the war began there. The audacious cynicism demanded by this was starkly exposed over the Falklands war. In an emergency debate in the Commons on 3 April 1982 the rage of the Tory hawks left Thatcher, in the words of one observer, “humiliated” and of another “strangely halting and subdued”. But Foot changed the course of the debate with a passionately belligerent speech demanding that there was “…a moral duty and political duty and every other kind of duty” to send in the task force to eject the Argentinian occupiers. This “peacemongering” was pleasing to a number of remarkable allies for Foot. Like Edward du Cann whose chairmanship of the Lonrho conglomerate was memorable for Ted Heath’s description of it as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. Like Julian Amery, a leading light of the Monday Club. Like the late Alan Clark, an “historian” whose pitiless egocentricity and human aversion found expression in his excusing the wartime atrocities of the Waffen SS as “heroic cruelty”. Later, in the controversy over the torpedoing of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano when it was sailing away from the battle zone, Foot was in favour of the attack, even if it did cost hundreds of lives. And this was an opinion which he steadfastly held to.

Principles 

Was Foot trying to re-assure his admirers, as well as his antagonists, when he greeted his election as Labour Party leader in 1980 with the bold declaration “I am as strong in my socialist convictions as I have ever been”? He did not offer any clear definition of the word, which encouraged the assumption that his “socialism” was the kind of confused, panicky responses to capitalism’s crises, notable for the depression of workers’ life standards, which he had been closely involved in during his time as a minister under Callaghan. This had reached its nadir with the Winter of Discontent and, no matter how compulsively Foot wheedled and manipulated at resuscitation, the end of that government in 1979. Among other problems for the Labour Party then there was the exposure of the fact that Foot’s “principles” were as worthlessly malleable as they needed to be in capitalism’s abrasive politics. 

Ivan

Just war (1999)

Book Review from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Face of War. By Martha Gellhorn. Granta, £7.99

To commemorate the author’s death last year Granta reissued Gellhorn’s collection of war correspondence. Covering most of the twentieth century’s wars, from the civil war in Spain to the US invasion of Panama, this is an impressive record. However most of us have heard the old “war is hell” stuff ad nauseum. What will be of interest is Gellhorn’s general explanation for conflict: “leaders make wars” and also her conclusion that there can be a “just war'”—that is one against exceptionally bad or aggressive leaders.

According to Gellhorn there were several “just” wars this century including the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Vietnam war (Vietnamese side) and the Israeli-Arab wars (Israeli side). The reasoning is fairly obvious: atrocity-mongering dictators have to be prevented, small nations deserve independence. What is being played here is the “good war, bad war” game. Choose your war and let your prejudices decide which side is the “goodies” (i.e. “morally right”). Ignore anything that gets inconveniently in the way. The 1939-45 war for example was apparently a war against fascism (despite the existence of neutral Spanish and Portuguese fascisms), and for democracy (despite totalitarian Russia being on “our” side). The idea that “this war was made to abolish Dachau and places like (it) forever” is equally absurd given the continued existence of concentration camps first in Russia and now in the Balkans.

And apparently in a just war anything goes. The “bad side” gets a hammering but that’s okay because they’re the “bad guys”. Thus the Germans in the 1939-45 war deserved everything they got. So it’s okay to roast folk alive in air raids if they’re on the “‘wrong side” (“You can’t really learn to like those people—unless they’re dead”, p. 184). Similarly Gellhorn has the audacity to say that Palestinians are better off as refugees (p. 309). So much for Gellhorn’s alleged “humanity, compassion and wisdom” (blurb on back).

No matter what the real or alleged atrocities of the “bad” side however, wars are quarrels over control of territory and resources between different sections of the capitalist class—business rivalry by other means. The working class can have no interest in such matters. The result of a “just” war is the same as a “bad” war—we get the hammering. The only “worthwhile” war is the class war—the fight against war.

KAZ 

War Exposures (2018)

Book Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Vest Pocket Kodak & the First World War.' By Jon Cooksey (Ammonite £7.99)

The first war photograph dates from 1846, and there were further photos of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. But the technology was cumbersome, and the scenes often had to be staged. Then in 1912 Kodak produced a smaller portable camera, the Vest Pocket Kodak or VPK (‘vest’ being American for ‘waistcoat’). This became extremely popular, including among those in the armed forces in the First World War. Never one to miss a marketing trick, the company advertised it as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak’.

Soldiers photographed scenes from the trenches and of actual fighting with their VPKs, but of course it was never going to be an uncontroversial or straightforward activity. The first action shot published, in November 1914, was doctored with a bursting shell added to increase the apparent danger to soldiers who were under shrapnel fire. In June 1915, a private from the Liverpool Scottish Regiment photographed soldiers advancing on a captured German trench near Ypres. When it was published the following month, an image of a German soldier (lying apparently dead) replaced that of a dead or wounded British soldier.

The Christmas Day truce of 1914 was depicted in some blurred photos of soldiers from both sides chatting and exchanging cigarettes. This did not go down well with the powers that be, as it made the Germans look human, and a limited ban on cameras was extended in March 1915 to cover all operational theatres, though it was not enforced as strictly as it might have been.

Cooksey also includes a photo (of unknown date and location) of ‘what appears to be the summary execution of a suspected spy by two British army officers with service revolvers.’ 

Paul Bennett

Exhibition Review: 'No Man’s Land - Women’s Photography and the First World War' (2018)

Exhibition Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The simple view of the First World War in gender terms is that men did the fighting while women, who were not allowed to fight, took many of their places on the ‘Home Front’. But an exhibition ‘No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War’, seen at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford, shows that this is only part of the story. The Bradford exhibition closed at the end of December, but will be touring this year and next to Bristol, Leigh and Bishop Auckland.

The work of three women photographers during and shortly after the war is featured. Florence Farmborough was working as a governess in Russia when the war broke out. She volunteered for the Red Cross and was assigned to a mobile military unit of the Russian army; her photos are among the few of the Eastern Front taken by a woman. Olive Edis was the first officially-commissioned British woman photographer sent to a war zone, in Northern France and Flanders, though this was only in 1919. Mairi Chisholm set up a first-aid post in Flanders and took many photos throughout the war using a small snapshot camera.

All three depicted women who were employed in war zones, mainly as nurses, but also in other roles, such as ambulance drivers and welders. They variously showed men and women relaxing behind the lines, playing on swings, for instance. There are no photos of combat, but there are a number showing corpses and ruined buildings; as Chisholm noted, ‘One sees the most hideous sights imaginable, men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated’.

There are in addition photos by three contemporary women photographers. The most powerful of these are by Chloe Dewe Mathews, showing locations where WW1 Belgian, British and French soldiers were shot (or imprisoned prior to being shot) for cowardice or desertion; in many cases they were in reality suffering from shell shock. The photos are taken in the same season as the original events and at the same time of day. The scenes are bleak and extremely moving.    

Paul Bennett