Gun-runners and hostages

Western Europe and North America have become increasingly dependent on the sale of arms to balance their foreign trade. And most of their best customers are in the oil-rich Middle East. This has been helped by the fact that the region has been an almost continual war zone for the past forty years. Most of this fighting has been done and paid for by foreign powers, the US, the UK, France, Russia and Turkey. But, for the past four years, a local coalition led by Saudi Arabia has been warring in Yemen and has blockaded Qatar for the past two years. However, no member of the coalition has an arms industry, so all their weapons and munitions must be imported from abroad. And all the arms producing nations have been jostling to supply them. But the war has been brutal, with indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians and busloads of children. It has also resulted in about half of Yemen’s population having nothing to eat. Not to mention its wanton destruction of homes and infrastructure. Corporate media tried to ignore what was going on, but social media publicised it, and voices were raised to criticise the gun-running governments. But Yemen is far away from everything, and the situation has been blurred by real or presumed Islamic radicalism and sectarianism. Then came the gruesome assassination of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. This trivial event, compared to the massacres in Yemen, turned out to be a sort of “Murder in the Cathedral”, with unpredicted and unwanted consequences. Khashoggi had been a respected journalist and the press became quite outspoken. Almost overnight, Saudi Arabia’s effective ruler, Mohamed bin Salman, acquired pariah status, and there was a backwash on the situation in Yemen. The critics became an outcry. Merkel decided to stop supplying arms to the Saudi coalition (Germany had the smallest stake). Macron has dithered and avoided (France has a large stake). Trump has declared that all signed contracts would be respected (the US has a huge stake). May is walking a tightrope over Brexit and is wary of any other divisive subject (Britain has a big stake). But, lo and behold, a British academic accused on trumped up charges of spying for Britain in the United Emirates has just been condemned to life imprisonment. The United Emirates are the Saudi’s most prominent ally, and there are several thousand British subjects living and working there. The life condemnation of Matthew Hedges is a threat hanging over the heads of all that community. They have all become hostages. Meanwhile, the haggling over Hedges release will ensure the continued delivery of military ordnance. Incidentally, this shows that presidential regimes have a free hand in the military domain, whereas parliamentary regimes need a majority on just about everything, and that some government executives more than others have to make allowance for public opinion.

The fall of empires

The history of Rome is not unlike that of the United States. Both are stories of monarchy, republic and empire, of military conquest and perpetual violence. And Rome’s dominion over the Mediterranean can be compared to that of the US over the Atlantic, though the passage from city-state to continental nation has vastly increased the scale of imperial rule. Both Rome and the US became increasingly dependent on their armies that began with conscripts and ended up with mercenaries. The conscript soldier fights with more or less conviction for an ideal, his mother/father land. The mercenary fights for the pay. The first, like Cincinnatus, goes back to his ploughing when the war is over. The second needs continual war to maintain his employment and income. Rome’s permanent legions were backed by industries that supplied standard equipment, from sandals to helmets and from wagons to war-galleys. During its expansion, Rome paid its wars with booty and slaves. When that expansion was halted by oceans, deserts and forests, the cost of maintaining the empire’s borders was paid with taxes. The wealth of expansion became the austerity of contraction. America’s imperial development was paid by access to new markets and raw materials. That has reached not geographical but geo-political limits, those of other imperial powers. Now austerity is biting and military expenses demand ever more taxes. Expansion pays for itself but, when it stops, maintaining the status quo gets increasingly costly.

All empires before and since Rome, notably the British one, have faced the problem of limits to expansion. For the past couple of centuries those limits have been the planet, which is big but not infinite. That finite world has reached a new hiatus, not unlike the one that occurred a hundred odd years ago, where a few major powers have divided it up and can only grow by encroaching on the others. And the mightiest power has the most to defend or lose. America’s dominion and influence peaked in the 1990s with the soft power of market forces. 9/11 marked the end of a gilded era. It signalled that the empire was not universally admired and was vulnerable. It set off a scramble by military and security forces to plug the gaps. And so it has been since then, with the gaps multiplying as fast as the cost of stopping them. America is engaged in a losing struggle, because expansion and contraction are the only alternatives of empire. The past shows that empires always resort to force in an attempt at holding back the inevitable. And this present bellicose situation is accompanied by a stupefying mountain of debt, and by global warming and species destruction. Falling empires have always been destructive. This one has the capacity of ending life on Earth. But that process may already be underway, without a nuclear winter. Yesterday’s victims have been commemorated abundantly, but no one is shedding tears for those condemned to die tomorrow. It seems that remembering the past is more comforting than imagining the future.

When war victims were soldiers

Some seventy heads of state have commemorated the centenary of the 1918 armistice that put a stop to four years of butchery on the Western front, where Europe’s youth had been relentlessly killed or mutilated, along with so many others from around the world. But the fighting did not end for everyone at 11:11 am on November 11^th. It went on in the Balkans, Ukraine and Eastern Siberia for a few more years. There was a pause, however, though the toll of colonial forced labour did not let up. And that pause was short. Less than a generation later the massacres were underway again. But this time it was not just young men in uniform who lost their lives or limbs. Aerial carpet bombing targeted whole populations, and so it has been ever since. What was commemorated in Paris with pomp and circumstance was the last time warfare killed more soldiers than civilians. (The flu epidemic that subsequently killed millions cannot be directly attributed to the conflict, though the war’s conclusion sent soldiers back home to spread the virus).

Populism and demagogy

The word populism is back in favour. It appears frequently in editorials and books, and is often mentioned on talk-shows and in media commentaries. The term - derived from populus the Latin for people – is quite recent. It was adopted by popular political movements in the US (People’s Party) and Russia (Narodniks) at the end of the 19^th century, and was claimed by a French literary movement in the 1920s. At about the same time it became associated with rabble-rousing demagoguery that was proving to be politically successful across Europe and elsewhere. The word demagogue comes from the Greek demagogos that means a leader of the people. Originally it did not have a pejorative connotation, but then Cleon managed to govern Athens as a despot thanks to his oratory skills (429-422BC). Thereafter demagogues were perceived as the instigators of mob-rule.

Populists wanted to educate and emancipate the people. Demagogues want to lead them. The first tried to publicise what common people were thinking. The second tell them what to think. Populism was short lived. It failed to give the people a voice. But then, the disparity of mass societies may have made that an impossible task. The rural and urban divide is the universal obstacle to a common discourse, alongside wealth inequality. Demagogues rely heavily on the opposition between “us” and “them”. The “us” is always the leader’s faithful followers. The “them” may, and often does, vary over time, but it usually starts with the degenerate, corrupt “elite”. This opposes the people (“us”) and those who govern financially and politically (“them”). However, the successful demagogue becomes part of that “elite” – if he did not belong there in the first place – and must change the “them” into something else. The easiest targets, held in second place until then, are religious, ethnic and gender minorities. The ultimate step is to make war on another nation, which will represent “them” in a concrete manner.

Populists believed even the humblest people should have their say on the government of society. The argument against this idea is that social mechanisms are too complex to be understood by the less educated masses. They can at best choose more knowledgeable representatives. This supposition installs a ruling class alongside the propertied class, and the two intermingle and collaborate. The elected few live in a different sphere, and their distance from those they are supposed to represent gets ever greater. That chasm that separates wealth and power from the people is where demagogues thrive. Blocking people’s aspirations to the control of their lives and communities, making them poor and powerless, and ignoring their experiences, produce a simmering violence that can erupt in collective and individual acts. Keeping the lid on the social pressure-cooker is the function of the security industry, whereas demagogues juggle with it. A successful demagogue knows how to play the people’s frustration and anger, how to let them go and call them back. He has practiced and perfected the techniques of swaying and galvanising a crowd. Conflating the populist and the demagogue is historically false, but it obstructs all attempts at letting the people have their say. If a call to the people to express their willingness for change is judged demagogic, alongside calls for violence against all that is deemed different, then the demagogues will always win, and all will change so that nothing changes.

Demagogues are not populists. They want to grab power for themselves, not give it to the people. They are potential tyrants, and the confusion with populist ideals leaves no room for popular movements to coalesce in opposition. Demagogues are the product of particular historical circumstances. At times when progressive, liberal politicians are in disarray and compromised, and when capitalism can no longer resolve the contradiction of profit with debt. The present is one of those periods. Both political sides have followed the same unpopular policies and have pandered the wealthiest few. And the stock market cannot be far from a steep downhill slide, with all the financial consequences of that fall. In these dire straits, capitalism can no longer be generous with the wider masses and fears their reaction. The demagogue is a perfect lightning-rod that catches and deviates the resentment, anger and violence. He knows how to fan the flames and direct the heat where he wants. And with the enthusiastic support of the political and financial aristocracy, who can stop him? This “resistible rise” pleases the dominant class that dreads a popular uprising, but the hand that feeds sometimes gets bitten.