The Old Lie (2023)

From the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori’ – It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country – is taken from an ode by the Roman poet, Horace. There are lots of sick people in the world who would agree with Horace. Just so long as they’re not the ones doing the fighting and dying. Politicians, deluded nationalists, arms dealers, arms manufacturers, as currently is the case in Russia and Ukraine. Wilfred Owen responded:

…If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer,

bitter as the cud 

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

In August 1914 the SPGB had already declared:

Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism. THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

In the mid-sixties Barry McGuire was growling ‘We’re on the eve of destruction.’ We’ve been on the eve ever since the first American-produced atomic bomb was exploded on Japan in 1945. Twice.

At the same time, Donovan was singing about the effects of nuclear war:

Cities full of people burning, screaming, shouting loud, 

And right over head, a great orange mushroom cloud. 

Now there’s no more war 

For there’s no more world.

Heavy metal bands were also producing anti-war songs.

As the mad men play on words, 

And make us all dance to their song,

To the tune of starving millions, 

To make a better kind of gun. 

(Iron Maiden, Two Minutes to Midnight )

Politicians hide themselves away, 

They only started the war,

Why should they go out to fight? 

They leave that role to the poor, yeah’

(Black Sabbath, War Pigs)

War, I despise, it means destruction of innocent lives

War means tears to thousands of mother’s eyes when their sons go off to fight

and lose their lives.

It’s an enemy to all mankind…

Peace, love and understanding, tell me, 

Is there no place for them today?

They say we must fight to keep our freedom but there’s got to be a better way,

War, What is it good for? You tell me (nothing)

Stand up and shout it (nothing). 

(Written by P F Sloan, performed originally by Edwin Starr)

Folk singers too:

I learned our Government must be strong; 

It’s always right and never wrong; 

Our leaders are the finest men, 

And we elect them again and again.

War is not so bad;

I learned about the great ones we have had.

(Written by Tom Paxton, performed originally by Pete Seeger)

(Written by Tom Paxton, performed originally by Pete Seeger)

Donovan sang:

He’s the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame, 

His orders come from far away no more, 

They come from here and there and you and me, 

And brothers, can’t you see?

No, individuals are not to blame for war. Capitalism is. In 1935, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, an American who had taken part in many military campaigns had an epiphany. He spilt the beans, listing the various countries he had worked in and the capitalists whose interests the military was working for: oil, banks, Wall Street, fruit companies. He described himself as a ‘gangster for capitalism’.

Karl Marx’s words that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,’ remain even more relevant today. The time is long past for us all to change it for the better.

Charles Dickens’s Scrooge asked the Ghost of the Future, ‘Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?’ Response: ‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead.’

Dave Coggan

Blogger's Note:

I think there was a bit of a mix-up in the editing of this article. 'War' by Edwin Starr wasn't written by P. F. Sloan. It was written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. And it wasn't performed originally by Edwin Starr. It originally appeared on The Temptations album,  'Psychedelic Shack'. 

P. F. Sloan did write Barry McGuire's 'Eve Of Destruction'.

Greasy Pole: Gays and capitalism (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the demands of campaigners for homosexual equality is that there should be an end to the discrimination towards gays and lesbians in the armed forces. Everyone, whatever their sexuality, should be treated equally in their military training, the opportunity to join “elite” units and their chances of promotion. And they should be encouraged to kill other people just as efficiently and ruthlessly as any other soldier, sailor or air person. Welcome to the world of “equality”.

We can spend a lot of time considering the nature of prejudice against homosexuals and how deeply this might be rooted in the bigots’ anxieties about their own sexuality. In the case of the armed forces, with their emphasis on disciplined, uniform devotion to the task of wiping out other human beings, it is no surprise that the prejudice should be particularly strong and cruel. But, typically of a prejudice, it is not a theory supported by any evidence; the assumption that military gays have to be confined to work in the cookhouse because they couldn’t be trusted in the frontline has no basis in reality. In the First World War, for example, soldiers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were homosexuals who were as reckless of their own safety in carrying out their grisly “duties” as the most bloodthirsty commander could have wished.

Decorated

Owen went back to the trenches from the hospital where he had been treated for—but not apparently cured of—shell shock and concussion. At the front he wrote of how exhilarating it was “baffling the machine guns with quick bounds from cover to cover”. In the final weeks of the war he was out in the leading units breaking through the German lines and he was decorated for it—until he was killed a little before Armistice Day. Sassoon’s exploits in battle were so impressive that he earned himself the sobriquet of Mad Jack. After one particularly reckless episode he too was decorated. He then developed some doubts about the war but then became reconciled enough to go back to the Front.

So there is absolutely no reason for the armed forces to have any qualms about filling their ranks with a mixture of heterosexuals and homosexuals in the confidence that they will all work together in a disciplined employment of the latest weapon technology to destroy as much of the “enemy” as possible. This is all in the best interests of the British ruling class; capitalism depends on the support of its people, in peace and war, boom and slump, whatever other differences they may have. We have recently seen how this principle applies to the governments of capitalism and to what is significant about their operation.

There is no reason to believe that Members of Parliament—no matter what image of themselves they project—are any different in terms of their sexual preferences from the people they are supposed to represent. So we can assume that there are proportionately as many homosexuals in the Commons as in the world outside (although there are persistent rumours that there are rather more). But for various reasons it was considered politically advisable to disguise this fact and there was a powerful, united effort to do this.

Rumours

Tom Driberg, for example, was a Labour MP elected in 1945 whose sexual exploits—at a time when homosexual activity was illegal—were renowned for what might be called their reckless audacity. But Driberg was never exposed, even when he had landed himself in a police station, facing a criminal charge. On the other side of the House the Tory MP Harvey Proctor mixed his homosexuality with a nastier type of racism but he was protected until one of his associates blew his cover. When he had to leave Parliament his friends continued to stand by him, helping him out with loans to open a clothing shop. There were persistent, lurid rumours about more than one prominent member of Thatcher’s cabinets—in one case it was said that his withdrawal from the brightest of the limelight was enforced by a frantic police interest in his activities.

By the time we got round to Ron Davies, Peter Mandelson and Nick Brown the situation had changed. Perhaps it was because the fact had finally sunk in, that the law had been reformed some years ago. Perhaps it was because one or two MPs—most prominently Chris Smith—openly announced that they are gay and that this would not prevent them doing their job as administrators of capitalism. Whatever it was, the steam had clearly gone out of the whole thing so that even the Sun could point out that Mandelson’s sexuality is irrelevant to his performance as a minister—especially one who has to have an opinion on Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Manchester United. In the Sunday Times of 15 November the Tory shadow chancellor, Francis Maude—whose gay brother died in 1993 of Aids—gave the view of ” . . . a classic, buttoned-up, middle class Brit”. Did he disapprove of his brother’s activities?

“It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It’s like disapproving of rain.”

Outed

What are we to think, when the Let-It-All-Hang-Out Sun agrees with a buttoned-up Tory like Francis Maude? Perhaps times have changed enough to put the issue of sexuality into its proper place, so that the millions of people who buy the Sun and the millions who support the parties of Francis Maude and Peter Mandelson no longer think it is relevant to how they vote. One thing which is absolutely clear in the history of capitalism is that the personal characteristics, preferences and sexuality of its leaders have no bearing on how they run the system. The notion that personalities affect politics is part of the deception which persuades people that capitalism is not a society which must operate against their interests.

It is time that all politicians were outed. It is time to winkle them out of the closet in which they conceal the fact that they stand for a social system which can’t help but produce a mountain of human misery—of fear, destruction, neglect, disease . . . It is time for the workers to think in terms, not just of the “liberation” of a group of us but of our whole class.

Ivan

War Requiem (2014)

Film Review from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Written and Directed by Derek Jarman, Music by Benjamin Britten, Poetry by Wilfred Owen, Production Design by Lucy Morahan, Video editor/montage by John Maybury.

Cast: Nathaniel Parker (Wilfred Owen), Tilda Swinton (Nurse), Laurence Olivier (The Old Soldier),

Patricia Hayes (Mother), Sean Bean (The German Soldier), Owen Teale (The Unknown Soldier)

Derek Jarman's War Requiem is a cinematic representation of Benjamin Britten's oratorio War Requiem, op 66, a non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass which had been written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. The war poetry of Wilfred Owen inspired Britten's music, and Britten included nine of Owen's poems in the oratorio. Jarman had read the 1988 John Stallworthy biography of Wilfred Owen, and referred to his film as 'the three queers War Requiem' (Jarman, Britten, Owen). The film includes a video montage by John Maybury of newsreel of the horrors of twentieth century capitalist wars culminating in the mushroom cloud of the Atomic bomb explosion.

The film is structured as the memories of Olivier's character, the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, attended by his nurse, Tilda Swinton. Olivier recites Owen's Strange Meeting in the film's prologue: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped, Down some profound dull tunnel.' Immediately the emotion of Britten's music, Owen's words and Olivier looking straight into the camera in close-up, all anguish and aged memories of the horror of the First World War and the prospect of death are overpowering. This would be Olivier's last film, he died in July 1989.

Owen was killed in the last week of the First World War aged 25. He wrote 'My subject is the war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.' Jarman portrays Owen and soldiers' lives sacrificed for wealthy bankers, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and this is compared to the Abraham and Isaac biblical story, a ram caught in barb wire, Abraham slits Owen's throat. Owen's poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young: 'Caught in a thicket by its horns, A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one' follows the wording of Genesis 22:1-19 very closely.

Owen believed in an Anglican Evangelical Christianity, and from 1911-13 had an unpaid post as lay assistant and pupil in Dunsden near Reading. During this period his sympathies for 'the underdog' became apparent; he helped the old and the sick, the illiterate, and the poor rural workers enduring an agricultural depression. But his dislike of the narrow evangelicalism practised at Dunsden would prepare Owen for his later indignation at the support which the Churches gave to the First World War.

Jarman employs Christian iconography; the Unknown Soldier with a barb wire crown akin to Christ's crown of thorns at the crucifixion. Jarman wrote 'the immaculate side of Christ's life, nothing to do with the Church, the person who actually went out and brought in all those who were considered unclean in Jewish society, a very fantastic story and a very fantastic achievement, whether or not he is the Son of God.' In the Owen biography, Stallworthy had written 'Christ said 'Love one another' and 'Love your enemies' despite the exhortations of Church and State. Owen perceives that 'Pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.' Owen wrote in At a Calvary near the Ancre: 'bawl allegiance to the state, But they who love the greater love lay down their life: they do not hate' which echoes John 15:13: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'

A five minutes scene of interpretative acting to Britten's music by Tilda Swinton dressed in a Neo-Classical look à la Canova, plaiting her hair by the mausoleum of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier runs the gamut of emotions from laughter to anger, anguish, despair, and reflection. Swinton was Jarman's muse: 'Woman as sister, nurse, and grieving', making eight films with Jarman.

The final scene of Jarman's film and the climax of Britten's oratorio sees the German Soldier with a wreath of red poppies coming to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which is now a tableau after Pierro della Francesca 15th century Renaissance painting The Resurrection with Owen Teale in the central position of the tableau. Aldous Huxley called it 'the greatest painting in the world.' The Mother (Hayes) and Sister (Swinton) arrive with a basket of white poppies in a very moving and heart-bursting scene. The use of white poppies was deliberate; Swinton said 'white poppies, a living white flower', and on the AIDS crisis of the time; 'We had many friends being diagnosed, becoming ill and dying. We felt like we were in a war of our own.' The white poppy established by the Peace Pledge Union in 1934 disassociates the memory of war from the militaristic aspects of Remembrance Day. In 1986 there was controversy over the white poppy when it was given approval by the Bishop of Salisbury which caused Thatcher to express her 'deep distaste' for the white poppy in the House of Commons.

Jarman was the son of a RAF Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War, and his father's despair and depression is attributed to the high number of fatalities that bomber crews experienced and the killing of civilians in German cities. Swinton herself is from a military family; daughter of a Major-General, and sister to a Lieutenant-Colonel. Tilda joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while at Cambridge in the 1980s but is now a member of the Trotskyist Scottish Socialist Party.

Jarman's War Requiem followed his politically angry The Last of England which re-interprets Ford Madox Brown's pre-Raphaelite painting, and tells of the death of England ravaged by internal decay, capitalist restructuring, greed, AIDS, homophobia and repressive morality. Village Voice described it as 'wrenchingly beautiful, the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's, a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous.' Jarman himself said 'I was brought up by a generation who fought the war and established the welfare state, and I perceived that everything my parents had fought for was being taken away.' Following War Requiem Jarman would make the political Edward II, seen as a landmark film in the New Queer Cinema.

Steve Clayton

Wilfred Owen — war poet, icon . . . visionary? (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

As one of the most popular and widely-read poets of World War One, Wilfred Owen’s legacy is a body of work deeply critical of war and its effects. But what was his attitude to the ultimate causes of war?

That turbulent decade, the 1960s, with its "Peace Movement" - CND, Aldermaston Marches, anti-Vietnam protests and all that – witnessed also the rediscovery of the works of World War I poet Wilfred Owen and his popular elevation to something of a "moral exemplar" and "voice for his generation"; a process further enhanced by composer Benjamin Britten's inclusion of several of his poems in the opera War Requiem.

A whole eclectic range of groupings have, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, claimed him as their own; from pacifists, feminists, Christians to so-called socialists, and whilst politically he did "tend to take the liberal side of the question", he was no pacifist and certainly no socialist, "so called" or otherwise.

Owen was one of a cluster of poets -Sassoon, Graves, Brooke and others - who endeavoured to view war from the perspective of the common soldier, portraying it in all its stark inglorious horror; a genre miles (well, easily half a league) away from the triumphal propagandist outpourings of late - Victorians Arnold, Newbolt and Tennyson. Whilst they, from distant drawing-room safety, could narrate glowing sagas of heroic charges, famous victories and sabres clashing, Owen’s poetic tapestry was an altogether more realistic one, interwoven and spattered with images of carnage and suffering.

Infantrymen "shiver and cringe in holes", "curse through sludge", "bleed and spew", lose limbs, eyesight, sanity. The air resounds to "the monstrous anger of guns", the wailings of "shell on frantic shell", "stuttering rifle fire" and "stinks sour" of mud, of men - of corpses.

It is perhaps not widely known that Owen spent little actual time on the Front Line - a mere 30 days between January and April 1917, from which period most of his poems emanate, followed by a further month through October into November 1918. Moreover, although he did suffer all the tribulations of combat and did indeed pay the ultimate price, he was spared the month on month, year on year wet, freezing, verminous conditions and the prolonged tedium, intimidation and gnawing uncertainty endured by so many. Whilst he could with every justification write, "Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life" and, "Those last 4 days I've suffered Seventh Hell", his overall war experience was by no means typical.

The son of a minor railway official, Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire in 1893 and if money was sufficiently tight to preclude university education, his upbringing was not a deprived one. Displaying some small academic talent, Owen pursued careers initially as pupil-teacher then parish assistant.

Already, inspired by Keats, he was dabbling in verse. The outbreak of World War 1 found him eking out an existence as an English tutor in Bordeaux, France whence he displayed not the slightest inclination to "answer his Country's call". Eventually however, feeling "traitorously idle" and galvanised by the views of his French literary mentor, Laurent Tailhade, he crossed the Channel in October 1915 and enlisted as a private in the Artists' Rifles, "to defend his language and culture".

Thereafter, through sheer graft, "Little Owen", a frail diminutive figure and "perceptively provincial", secured a commission as Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment and in January 1917 arrived in the trenches "to fight Fritz whom," he insisted, "he did not hate". Then ensued intermittent periods of ferocious action until in April, already traumatised by a recent gassing incident later featured in verse, Owen was blown up, rendered temporarily unconscious and subsequently diagnosed as suffering from "shellshock".

By 1917, a more scientific attitude had been adopted towards this phenomenon. The Somme offensive the previous year had yielded 30,000 such cases and as they clearly couldn't all be "degenerates" or "cowards", a new term, "Neurasthenia", had come into vogue. The importance of immediate therapy being recognised, this was provided in nearby field hospitals; not it should be noted, from any humanitarian considerations, but solely to enable the less serious cases, around two thirds overall, to be speedily "cured" and returned to the trenches for another dose of the same.

Owen, as a more severe case, was invalided home, hospitalised in Edinburgh and set about creating the poems that would eventually secure his reputation. In Dulce et Decorum Est, an ironic comment on the famous line by the Latin poet Horace, that it is "pleasant and honourable to die for one's country", Owen recounted the plight of an unmasked Tommy caught in a mustard gas attack, concluding:

"In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dream you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend you would not tell with such zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."

The "old Lie"? During his prolonged convalescence, Owen encountered various viewpoints, dissenting and otherwise, on the conduct of the War but there is no evidence that he ever developed any understanding of the underlying reasons for its having been waged in the first place. Nevertheless, however inadvertently, Owen has, as it were, "landed a direct hit". It does require a lie; a veritable pack of them in fact, to persuade the artisans, the farmhands, the clerks in one country that their own best interests are suddenly and mysteriously at variance with those of their direct counterparts in another and to spontaneously quit their respective workplaces, dole-queues, semis and slums to participate in the act of mutual slaughter that is war. Always "freedom", "democracy", "ways of life", "national pride" are at stake and, remarkably, "God" is ever on their side.

Specific to the 1914 affair, German "militarism" had to be rebuffed and "plucky little Belgium" supported. The truth is decidedly less exotic. Wars are always and only waged for entirely commercial reasons - access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. In short, to consolidate existing profits and aspire to the accumulation of others. The present globally-dominant economic system, capitalism, features within each country, the ownership of the means of wealth - the land, factories etc. - by a tiny parasite minority, from which it follows therefore that any profits will accrue only to that minority. The overwhelming non-owning majority; those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a peashooter to their lips? Hence the need for the "old lie".

Germany did not become unified until the 1870s, by which time the bulk of the world's exploitable resources had been colonised by longer-established nation states like Britain and France. To develop and expand, therefore, required attempting to "muscle in on the action", precisely in the way that criminal organisations have long engaged in feuds over bootlegging, gambling and drug-trafficking rights. World War I was only ever a sordid largescale turf war between rival "families" within capitalism's mafia - although by the time the politicians, the media, the clergy and the educationalists had spun their lies, old and new, very few people saw it as such.

Ignorant of the real causes of the War, Owen could only see its solution in terms both abstract and impracticable, if not downright silly. In this he was not alone. Some held that the war was a "natural tragedy" to which the only responses could be of sorrow and compassion; others that it represented merely the periodic erupting of some innate human predisposition towards aggression. Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells believed the war would "exhaust itself", enabling wise and devoted people (like themselves, presumably), to step in and "rebuild Society". Owen himself considered that when the war machinery had "choked itself to a halt", then "art" and "beauty" could be deployed to "help refresh the human spirit".

Accordingly, he hoped to avoid being returned to the Front, but his hopes were not to be realised. In due course, he was deemed "cured" and returned to France nicely in time to participate in the final decisive attack on and through the Hindenberg Line. For bravery under fire he was awarded the Military Cross but as this particular incident involved him also single-handedly exterminating numerous "Fritzes", the actual text of his citation tends not to be quoted by those who would portray him as the "Poet of Pity". He himself perished at St. Souplet just one week prior to that supreme exercise in pretentious cant -"The eleventh hour of the eleventh day, etc., etc." - that was the signing of the Armistice.

The September 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard, observing the entirely "business" nature of the war embarked upon, both extended the hand of friendship to the workers of all countries and declared that there was nothing at stake "to justify the shedding of a single drop of working class blood". This uniquely principled stance, maintained throughout, s one of which socialists can feel immensely proud. More importantly, a solution, concrete, practicable and eminently sensible, was offered. Since wars arise solely from conflicts of interest between rival groupings of capitalists, and are merely an extension, a more turbulent or intense phase of this ongoing struggle, then it follows that their eradication lies with the universal replacement of private ownership with common ownership. If the world's natural resources and means of producing wealth were the property of Humanity at large, what possible reason for conflict would, or could, remain?

Wilfred Owen's poetic voice was an exceptional and developing one, prematurely stilled. Who knows to what heights it might have soared? His poems depict their subject matter in ways that are once beautiful and repulsive and are, albeit unintentionally, a damning indictment of class-divided society. Furthermore, they serve as a dire warning to any testosterone-fuelled youth "ardent for some desperate glory", that the net result of "taking the shilling" might just be the sudden and catastrophic loss of his testosterone-producing faculties. As much, however, as his poems deserve to be read, to be appreciated, to be cherished, they do merely observe; they neither investigate nor solve. This requires the altogether more prosaic process of examining and understanding the underlying reasons for war.

Andrew Armitage