I live 5 miles from Wotton basset, where the demonstrations in support of the troops take place when the bodies go through. I live in a town and county that is steeped in the military.
the BBC have just invited me onto the radio for the drive time show to discuss the need to withdraw the troops home from Afghanistan, in dialogue and debate with those who will firmly identify with the troops.
Now, if I adopted the approach that the Britosh army are “professional killers” and “mercenaries”, there would not only be no dialogue, but the BBC would almost certainly not have wanted to have me on.
The question is, do you want to just feel smug in your tiny, ineffectual circles of like minded people, or do you want to try to engage in the mainstream political debate, and shift it in a more anti-war direction.
I am assuming that the interviewer will be a professional BBC presenter, and not a member of a deluded trotskyite cult, and so this question is unlikely to be raised.
My argument will be that the understandable feeling of human solidarity with the famillies and friends of the fallen should not get in the way of a political discussion about what the war is about.
The army get sent where they are sent by the politicians, so the debate needs to be focussed on why thw politicains have sent the troops there.
And I will point out that there can be no end to the war without a political solution acceptable to the Afgans, and that the british army may be making that less rather than more likely.
Probably a solution acceptable to the Afghans would need the removaval of NATO troops, and a regional solution including input from all the neighbouring countries, as well as the Afghans.
I had a very emotional experience with it in Jerusalem, when we were visiting as part of a solidarity delegation to palestine, and we were in the mediaeval church on the site of where lazarus was supposed to have risen from his bed after Christ told him to take up his bed and walk. the accoustics in the church are brilliant, and an activist from london sang Jerusalem while we were there, and it was sublimely moving as a call for justice.
It would be a fantastic national anthem for England, as it is entirely devoid of pomp and chauvinism, and stresses not only the beauty of England, but a sense of lost innocence and the way that capitalism has despoiled that innocenne with “dark statanic mills”. And it is inspirational to build a better society, the Jerusalam referrred to is the project to construct a caring community here in England,
