EDITORIAL

New Roads to Peace

There are a number of reasons why the Easter peace demonstrations of 1967 may mark a change of direction for some of the peace forces which have occupied much of the stage over the past decade or so. Until recently ' peace action ' was largely, if not wholly, a matter of protest. People marched or they sat, or they demonstrated in other ways, afterwards they went home for tea, leaving things pretty much as they had been; the party machines, cabinet government, the executive, the judiciary and the armed forces carried on regardless, and there was frequently room to wonder whether the footslogging, the speeches, the slogans, and the leaflets really merited all the trouble involved. Certainly those who took the lead in these matters appeared remarkably slow to grasp the real nature of their task. The problem of war in modern society has become so vast and dominant that it is now merely perverse to continue to suppose that it can be solved by a marginal adjustment of our social institutions and our way of life.

Wars in the past were largely a matter of personally felt hates involving personal acts of valour and personal acts of killing and aggression. This type of essentially localised war has become virtually extinct over almost the entire planet, and even where it survives it is not in itself the kernel of the war problem today and it will continue (as perhaps it will), for a few more generations yet without interfering unduly with the development of civilisation.

The real war threat confronting us is a monstrously impersonal one springing from largely impersonal forces and waged by largely impersonal means. Far from the enemy being an object of hatred, some compensatory psychological mechanism appears to be involved as a consequence of using weapons of mass murder which frequently makes him an object of affection. The wicked Hun becomes 'Jerry', and perfidious Albion becomes ' Tommy' and so forth. Similarly it does not stem from deranged Napoleons and Hitlers, but from masses of people in all parts of society, scientists no less than soldiers, factory hands no less than top executives, who, unaware of the degradation implicit in their powerlessness, pursue routine courses regardless of the larger consequences that stem from such moral passivity.

In the same way, when war does come the man who drops napalm or splinter bombs on defenceless villagers does not even need to hate his victims, he is probably more ' efficient ' if his emotions are firmly under control, leaving his mental processes free to concentrate on the technical problems in hand. It might indeed be a good thing if his own human emotions were involved; as it is, he subdues his own humanity in order to destroy that of others.

There is thus nothing in our situation today which suggests that because man has always been disposed to fight, he always will and that therefore there is nothing we can do to stop the modern forms of militarism that threaten us. War today is a behaviour problem only for a minority. (The majority have tacitly abandoned fighting as a means of getting what they want and have opted instead for a life of quiet conformity. Even when their conformism gets them conscripted to be soldiers they continue to hope they won't at least be in the firing line and look forward eagerly to the day of release.) Even for the minority it is not mainly a behaviour problem in the sense that their personal hate capacity and aggressiveness is at the boil, rather is war the product of complex forces operating in our society, forces which the warminded minority are servicing rather than originating.

Bow and Arrow Warfare

Hence a great deal of so-called ' peace research ' which concerns itself with the psychology of aggression, whether in individuals or nations, or with complex exercises in simulated acts of war where ' contestants ' engage in mock battles, a form of militarised 'Monopoly' whilst their emotional reactions are studied, is really beside the point when it comes to shedding light on the modern war problem. This kind of peace research belongs to the era of bow and arrow warfare.

The real origins of modern warfare are in fact to be found in highly abstract assumptions about the organisation of society, and far from willing the wars or war pressures that ultimately derive from these assumptions, the people who make them would generally indignantly (and in perfect good faith) deny that any such relationship exists.

The man who assumes that a mass and highly centralised nation state (which may, or may not allow his quest for profit or power a fairly free rein) is the natural form of government and progress is not consciously a war monger, any more than are the politicians who run it. He is merely sharing a dangerous tradition of thought and action established well before his time which is making nearly every member of such societies a passive participant in a trend to war, a trend which is generated by forces which are a quite inevitable consequence of such assumptions. It is not his unconscious drives in periods of stress that need to be studied in this context, it is the moral and philosophical terms of his everyday existence, especially in their political and economic application, which need to be re-evaluated.

Clearly no mere protest, however massive, can suffice to counter the forces at work here. The very size and scale of the problem suggests it stems from ordinary processes at work in our societies, processes whose mere familiarity may help to dull our capacity to recognise their essentially evil nature.

If this analysis is only partly correct it follows that such a massive and impersonal aberration of power as a global war stems largely from an equally massive and impersonal maldistribution of power in our everyday lives.

This is the real hub of our problem and Easter 1967 may be different in that it indicated at least that there is a growing recognition of the implica-

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