Testing to Destruction (1987)

Book Review from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poisoned Reign. French Nuclear Colonialism in the Pacific by Bengt Danielsson and Marie-Therese Danielsson (Penguin Books 1986)

On 10 July 1985 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was blown up in Auckland harbour by two French agents. This act might appear to be surprising, considering the fact that both France and New Zealand are members of the "free world". This book tells the story of how successive French governments, including the "socialists" who changed from opposition to support, have been determined to use French Polynesia for nuclear weapons testing and not let any opposition get in the way.

The post-war years saw the great European empires in decline. When the French were being kicked out of Algeria, they were on the lookout for an alternative nuclear testing site to the Sahara. French Polynesia seemed the best bet — its islands are spread over an area the size of Europe and the 120,000 inhabitants were easy-going and the French had been manipulating them for years. The fact that the South Pacific is rich in food, metals and oil was another reason to maintain French dominance.

Other countries at this time were also testing nuclear weapons — the British at Christmas Island, the Americans in the Marshall Islands, the Russians in Siberia, and the Chinese in parts of Mongolia and Tibet. None of them showed much concern for the effects this would have on the local population.

When the French nuclear testing programme was announced in the early sixties the local people were mostly opposed to it. But this opposition was ineffective — the islands were run from France and the various institutions available to the islanders, to have a say in their affairs, were powerless. The authorities used various methods, devious and oppressive, to neutralise this opposition.

On 2 July 1966 the first French nuclear bomb was exploded above Moruroa Atoll. The French President, de Gaulle, was there to observe. He had made many flowery speeches claiming a great regard for. and affinity with, the Polynesian people, who were the first overseas territory to recognise the Free French during the war and who had sent a battalion to two world wars.

The French nuclear authorities, when dismissing the dangers of the tests, had said that the bombs would only be exploded when the wind was blowing east, away from the inhabited areas. This was despite the fact that winds in the South Pacific can blow in many different directions during the same day. However, when de Gaulle was there the wind kept blowing straight towards inhabited areas. Rather than keep the General waiting, the bomb was exploded anyway. The fall-out reached as far west as Fiji and Samoa. Islanders in the vicinity of Moruroa were given advice on how to protect themselves They were told not to drink rain water or eat fish for a while. This advice was not particularly helpful as this is precisely what the islanders exist on.

The nuclear programme had other effects on the islanders. Many of them were needed to work on the project. They were enticed to Tahiti by high wages only to end up in slums around Papeete, the largest town. They had to endure filthy conditions and crime, prostitution and drunkenness all increased sharply. As most of the work was needed at the start of the programme, when this finished they found themselves unemployed and unable to get back to their islands, as they had been promised.

By 1974, 42 French nuclear bombs had been exploded in the Pacific skies. Due to pressure from other Pacific countries and environmentalists the French government decided to continue its testing underground. They still used Moruroa. despite the fact that a Pacific atoll is one of the worst possible sites. The rock is thin and brittle and the many tests carried out almost certainly caused radioactive leakage and contamination of fish, plankton, shells, dams and squid regularly eaten by the local population.

The extent of the pollution caused by these tests and their resulting effect on the population can only be guessed at, as the authorities engage in the usual practice of secrecy and cover up. No reliable health figures are published and safety standards certainly appear lax. Much of the nuclear waste was dumped on the north of the atoll and washed away by several cyclones and tidal floods which have become more common in recent years. Some of these tidal waves will have been caused by explosions blowing out the side of the atoll, spilling out its radioactive muck. The fact that by 1985, 115 French nuclear devices had been detonated in the Pacific along with 106 American and 21 British, does not bode well for the future health of the islanders.

The authors tell the story of the French nuclear programme well, but their analysis of why it took place, with stories of politicians' duplicity and pride is weak. They clearly disapprove of French attempts to keep up with the superpowers and be independent and are sad that French public opinion doesn't seem to care. Unfortunately, the fact that any capitalist government exists to defend its national interest, and will develop whatever weapons it can to do this, with scant regard for the effects on people, escapes them.

There was a statement recently from a French government spokesman that they might stop nuclear testing at Moruroa as even they think that the atoll cannot take any more blasts. The underground rock is apparently in a very fragile, unstable condition. This will come as a relief to the people in the Pacific, although others had better watch out — the spokesman said they were searching the North Atlantic for an alternative.

Ian Ratcliffe

Editorial: Blessings! (1940)

Editorial from the November 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main object of life is surely to be happy. Yet there are quite a number of people in the world to-day who forget this obvious fact or are so distorted in outlook that the mere being happy appears to them as a sign of weakness.

For instance, Dean Inge, in an article on the present war entitled “Blessing in Disguise" (Evening Standard, October 31st, 1940), opens up as follows: —

Every nation that has remained strong and healthy has been obliged periodically to light for its life. This is not an agreeable conclusion for a Pacifist, but such, I am afraid, must be the verdict of history. . . . The amiable but feckless Polynesians are descended from hardy mariners who performed the astonishing feat of crossing half the Pacific in open boats.

There is a fatal flaw in both of the above statements.

Let us, in the first place, glance at the nations that fought for their lives.

The Athenians, at the summit of their wealth and power, fought for their existence against the Spartans. They went down and never recovered. The Romans, at the time their frontiers were most extensive, found their existence challenged by the barbarians upon their borders. The latter over-ran the Empire and Rome went down never to rise again. The same story is true of the succeeding Empires of the Arabs and the Turks. France, under Napoleon, fought for its existence and went down, and in recent years Czechoslovakia and Finland have shared the same fate.

No, it is something else than lighting that is necessary to keep a nation permanently strong and healthy.

Turn now to the “feckless Polynesians." When first visited by the white man they were free of disease, long-lived, and healthy and happy. All travellers who visited them in the early days bear witness, without exception, to the fine physique, beauty, and happiness of the Polynesians. They have been described again and again as childlike in the joyousness of their lives, which were chiefly occupied with swimming and decking themselves out with flowers. It was the coming of the white man that altered all this, turning them into joyless beasts of burden, subject to the strange diseases that afflict the civilised white people all over the earth.

The Polynesian was happy because nature and the climate enabled them to get the means of life with little labour and he had plenty of leisure to be happy. Civilisation deprived him of his former leisure and compelled him to labour painfully to satisfy his needs. It did this because it brought a new idea into the simple life of the native, the idea of private ownership and the pursuit of profit. How the present native population of Polynesia must sigh for the good, old “feckless” days!

But even Dean Inge seems to be dubious about the strong and healthy result of fighting for our existence, for later on in the article he writes: —

  Those who prate about a better social order after the war are talking mischievous nonsense. However the war ends, we shall be an impoverished nation. We shall all have to work harder and spend less. 

What a future for the mass of the population who always have to work hard and have little to spend at the best of times. Better, perhaps, the life of the “feckless” Polynesian, which was full to the brim with happiness, though it lacked all the civilised adjuncts which have cost so much effort to acquire, and yet in the main give so little joy under the present social system.

"I've always been respectable" (1953)

From the April 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The peace of mind of ordinary English people has been disturbed! A widow has been sued for possession of her flat at Bow County Court, on the ground that she was an annoyance to other tenants in the house. The annoyance was visits by a man she intended to marry.

“The thought of a couple living in the house adulterously. perhaps, and certainly immorally—worried them,” said the prosecuting lawyer. When asked “What is your attitude to this man living with this woman?” a tenant of the basement replied, “I take a very poor view of it. I’ve been married 28 years and I’ve always been respectable.”

Counsel for the Defence: “The fact that two people who are sleeping together have no marriage lines, doesn’t make their conduct an annoyance to people in an adjoining flat.”

Judge: “The average women in the East End doesn’t like to have an unmarried woman living as though she were married next door to her. They come here in their scores and tell me so.”

Counsel for Prosecution: “The poorer classes are very often much more fastidious in these matters than the top layer.”

Judge: “We won’t say the top layer. We’ll say the wealthier classes . . . anything that disturbs the peace of mind of other inhabitants of a house is an annoyance. This sort of conduct is something that I am pleased to say in these days still disturbs the peace of mind of ordinary sensible English people."

Making an order for possession, suspended so long as visits ceased, the Judge told the widow, “If you choose to sleep with Mr. —, I can’t prevent it, but you must choose somewhere else!" Or, as a certain Mr. Henry Ford used to say, “The customers can have any colour they like, as long as it’s black."

In such cases is much material for study. The “poorer classes’’ are more fastidious about “marriage lines’’ than the wealthy ones. They are very worried if somebody lives next door as though they are married, when they are not. They are unlike the proprietors of some expensive West End hotels, which provide accommodation mainly for persons not married to each other.

These hoteliers would get “very worried” if their guests were married couples, since then they would be on the way out.

In addition to all their other advantages and privileges (No Taxation or Death Duties, no financial worries, no servant problem, no wrangles about places in the Coronation procession; or what to do with the old ancestral hall, or Kenya or the Soudan) the poorer classes have, as their most cherished possession, their respectability. Come rain or shine, fair weather or foul, nobody can deprive them of this most precious jewel.

Rich men may marry a new film-star every year; even in the basement, we’re respectable.

Neither does this extend to “marriage lines” only, as every inhabitant of those quarters occupied by the “poorer classes" knows; behind those threadbare “respectable" curtains lurks the prying eye, the sharp inquisitive nose eager for the slightest sign of a minor slip or lapse. Let Mrs. Brown forget to whiten her doorstep when the snow is on the ground; how the bush telegraph crackles over the garden wall!

Crammed together in numbers which ants would find uncomfortable, in parts of dilapidated houses at the rate of more than 2½ to one small room; not merely next to each other, but literally on top of each other, dependent upon a husband whose job is so deadly dull and monotonous that a Coronation Tea party is a thrilling adventure, their greatest experience a visit to a cheap local cinema, small wonder that their main pre-occupation is to be “cleaner” “brighter," “nicer" or when all else fails, more “respectable" than the woman next door. “Them mats haven’t been touched these last two days!"

“Marriage lines" is the popular slang term for the Registrar’s Certificate, issued under the Matrimonial Act to persons legally entitled to it. This Act ensures chiefly that monogamy (one wife or husband only) is observed, the breach of this, bigamy, being severely punished as a criminal offence. “Sleeping together" without these “lines," annoys scores of poorer women in the East End, though whether many or few do this, we cannot say.

Though not guilty of infringement of the Matrimonial Act, the lady in question, a widow, had no “marriage lines” for her visitor, which annoyed the other tenants. They, unlike heathens and foreigners, are “respectable.”

These rules of the matrimonial game, or “gamble,” as it is sometimes called, are the result of the growth of private property. Monogamy is essential to ensure that a fortune goes to a man’s own children, it is the maintenance of private property. Since it is a social law of Capitalism, the poor, like the rich, must not flout it openly. Had the lady been rich she would not have appeared in Court, since she would not have rented a flat in Bow.

Neither could she have been sued for possession of her own property. She could invite as many visitors to as many of her houses as she chose. Had her “visitor” been wealthy, he could have invited her anywhere he pleased (yachts are popular) without risking Court proceedings, seagulls not having heard of “marriage lines." As is well known, some very wealthy people still practice what in earlier days, or other places, was commonplace, the maintenance of an “unofficial" harem as an advertisement of opulence.

As long as working class women are condemned to grim, mean little lives of grinding poverty, “respectability” will be a straw to clutch at in face of premature age and hopeless exhaustion. The lady suffered from a lack of what becomes yearly more expensive and unobtainable; personal privacy. This is a form of poverty. The occupants of a typical house of working-class “flats” have about as much seclusion as a professional footballer on Saturday afternoons.

As our “modern conveniences” increase, so our lives become more inconvenient. As if the Atom Bomb, gastritis, influenza, the Floods and the Mau Mau are not enough “disturbance,” that woman upstairs “ has got 'im 'ere again. There’s too many in the house already without her bringing more in.”

In his vastly entertaining account of his stay in the Marquesas Islands entitled “Typee." subsequently authenticated, the American writer Melville, comments wittily on the happy lot of the Polynesian in the 1840s 

    “There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles or vexations in all Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the laughing couples down a country dance.” He says there were “no bills or mortgages, no lawyers, no beggars, no prisons, no 'proud nabobs’—in a word—no money.” (Page 136, Penguin Edition.)
   “No cross old women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no love-sick maidens, no sour old bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and high good humour.” (Page 136.)

To which should be appended “no marriage lines” because there was no private property.

Should the reader be contemplating speedy departure to this haven let us disillusion him. From the introduction we quote, “The modern visitor would find little trace of the life described in 'Typee,' for the population which at one time was 100,000, has dwindled to less than 2,000; contact with whites has brought syphilis, leprosy and tuberculosis," and, may we add. Respectability?

Horatio.