Blue murder
Why is it that in wartime there are so many objections when the other side does its job and kills people to further its own cause?
In the last war, for example, the Allied propaganda machine treated every one of its own casualties as a massive tragedy, while it encouraged the idea that the only good German was a dead German. Blue murder was screamed when German aircraft attacked Britain, but the Allied raids on Germany — far, far worse than anything the Luftwaffe managed over here — were praised as acts of heroism with a central streak of humanity.
A similar situation — although on a lesser scale — exists now in Ireland. The IRA say they are at war with Britain and the British government have responded by sending troops to Northern Ireland to wipe out the IRA.
And of course people are going to get killed. When this happens to a member of the IRA there is a chorus of approval in the British press; good riddance, we are told, to another murdering terrorist. So it was in Palestine just after the war, in Cyprus, Aden, Malaysia . . .
But the reaction is very different when a British soldier meets his end at the hands of the IRA. When this happens the incident is usually described as an 'outrage’, as a ‘murder’ carried out by ‘cold-blooded cowards’. This was the response when the IRA operation at Warrenpoint killed an unusually large number of British paratroops.
If the IRA were really no more than a bunch of cold-blooded, bungling and cowardly murderers it is very doubtful if they would have lasted so long in their guerilla campaign. The attempt to convince us otherwise is another example of the truth falling as the first casualty in war.
The great tragedy of Ireland gets no mention in the media, nor from the respective propaganda machines. Once again it is members of the working class who are dying on both sides. They die not in their own interests, nor to build a world fit for human beings, but in the interests of their own ruling class.
In the wars of capitalism, every working class death is an outrage, and in the war in Ireland, as in every one before it, all workers should refuse to take part. They have a bigger job; to live to build a new society in which war will be a black memory.
Not what it was
If we are to believe the press, there was not exactly a desperate rush to take on the job of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Two bishops were up for consideration; one of these had already declared that he disliked the prospect of being Archbishop, and the other—Robert Runcie, who got the post — took a fortnight to decide, changing his mind several times in the process.
Now why should there be this reluctance to take on the job of head of the Anglican church? Was it because being Archbishop is too strenuous a way of getting a living?
Perhaps it is hard work, trying to persuade millions of people to accept meekly their inferior, degrading position in capitalist society while you have two palaces at your disposal and are having to get by on £12,500 a year.
Then there is the matter of having to churn out all that old, discredited religious mumbo-jumbo, always under pressure to justify itself against the expansion of human knowledge. There is the realisation that day after day religious taboos in sexual and social relationships are being treated with open contempt. They simply don’t fit in with material experiences.
And of course the job is just not what it used to be. Although ranking, in theory, immediately below the Queen and above the Prime Minister, the Archbishop can have no illusions about the real extent of his powers. It is, for example, a long time since the contents of the Book of Common Prayer was a hot political issue.
It can be small consolation that the Archbishop has the occasional get-together with his fellow purveyors of nonsense in other religions to decide how religious ideas can best survive in a hostile intellectual environment. And even less, that he must sometimes intervene in the sexual and marital problems of the royal family.
The new man has been written up as an attractive person who is a clever negotiator and who wants to make his church a more open institution. And he is said also to be very brave; during the war he was a good Christian in the tanks and he got a medal for his contribution to killing people.
A lot of rubbish has been talked about the man and about the appointment and about the Church of England. This is entirely appropriate; religion is itself a nonsense, one which workers should reject in favour of working for the best possible existence in the only life they have.
Striking fallacy
Among the many durable fallacies which do their bit towards sustaining property society is the notion that strikes are indulged in only by ‘blue collar’ workers — the lower paid industrial or manual workers who are persistently selfish and disruptive.
Blue collar workers, as is well known, lounge amid forests of parked cars on sumptuous council estates. They bleed the Welfare State dry, and when, in the rare intervals between being on strike or pretending to be ill, they are at work, they spend their time playing cards out of sight of the foreman.
Meanwhile, the Germans and the Japanese are hard at it, turning out cars and radios and cameras which capture the traditional British markets.
Last winter this notion was revived when there was the inevitable backlash against the Labour government’s long campaign to hold back wages. There was then a number of strikes which, receiving disproportionate publicity, were blamed for the fall of the Callaghan government.
But of course strikes and other industrial action are not confined to any particular type of worker. Among the other sort — ‘white collar’ workers — they are now common enough not to cause any surprise. One recent example was the unprecedented action by staff at magistrates’ courts who were forced into strike action by an intransigent negotiating attitude from the Home Office.
Another group showing a remarkable tenacity are the television technicians, whose strike blacked out all ITV programmes. While nobody is starved as a result of this strike, there were rumours of serious withdrawal symptoms among addicts of Crossroads and News at Ten — and of even graver cases sitting for hours watching the unblinking apology on the screen for the break in transmission.
Now many of these technicians are high up in the wages league. Theirs is not a dispute over low pay; it is an example of workers using all their muscle to resist a lowering of their standards.
Whatever job a worker does, and whatever the pay for it, does not change the facts of their class position in capitalist society. Capitalism is divided; on one side are the workers, who sell their abilities for a wage, and on the other the capitalists, who buy those abilities.
The interests of those two groups have always been opposed, and that will stay as long as capitalism lasts. Only a basically different society can bring us social harmony.
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