Miners and Airmen. A Contrast in Tragedies. (1930)

From the November 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

The manner in which the R.101 eclipsed the Walsall miners provides an object lesson in the function of the capitalist press. The scandalous waste of miners’ lives in the production of coal-owners profits makes a mine explosion a tit-bit of little value in the way of news. Of course, there is always “the Royal message of sympathy,” and for two or three days “the disaster arouses the feeling of the whole community”—then it is quietly dropped. In this case, the dropping was rendered quick and certain by the occurrence of a first-rate space-filler.

It was not the immense risk they ran nor the horror of their deaths which made them heroes. Nor yet the fact that they were British. In these respects their case did not differ from that of the miners, for whom there was no military funeral, no flags flying half-mast, no ornate pomp and ceremony, to draw tens of thousands to see their coffins.

The R.101 was bound for Egypt and India. Its mission was professedly a peaceful one; but it belonged to an arm of the State which exists to destroy human lives whenever capitalist interests so dictate. Had the voyage proved a success its next trip might not have been so peaceful.

One journalistic defender of capitalism appeared to have an inkling that its working class readers were not altogether blind to these facts. The Daily Express on October 11th, commented on the necessity for remembering the members of “that large industrial army who died in the performance of their duty.”

Is it duty, then, that sends miners down the pit or the engineers and riggers up in the air? Listen to one of the survivors, Mr. Sinks, of Sheffield. “Shall I fly again? Most certainly ! It is my living !” And any miner would say the same. The workers the world over are driven to risk their lives in order to fill their stomachs and provide shelter for their skins. Their inspiration is not patriotism, but want; and this same want is the modern equivalent of the slave-driver’s lash. By its aid are constructed edifices more mighty than the pyramids, more dreadful than Nero in their capacity for destruction.

To the British master-class the loss of the R.101 was more than mere material, for expensive experts shared the fate of their cheap subordinates. But as the present scribe is no expert, he does not intend to pronounce upon the hotly-debated question of lighter versus heavier-than-air-machines. Suffice it to point out that it is difficult to imagine the natives of tropical dependencies sharing their grief. Whether they are to be bombed from ‘planes or gasbags will, no doubt, appear in their eyes to be a matter of purely academic interest ; and in the eyes of Socialists also. What is of the greatest importance is that the workers of the world should understand that it is not in their interests that these giant war-weapons are being developed. Empires and trade routes do not provide them with fortunes, and (apart from the relatives of the immediate victims) it is not they who have suffered a loss in this “national calamity” ; but it is in the interests of the master-class that they should be led to think so. Hence the whole machinery for the manipulation of the “mass-mind” has been set in motion with a thoroughness reminiscent of 1914.

Eric Boden