Humanity Against War, and for Justice
This article is a transcript of the presentation Victoria Brittain delivered at the SHAPE webinar ‘Humanity’s Future’ on 27 October 2022.
Good morning from London. It is an honour to join you all on this webinar and to stand with this panel of distinguished and inspiring people. My contribution is in memory of the great Peace campaigner Bruce Kent. Earlier this year after the war on Ukraine began we spoke together in Trafalgar Square in London for peace and opening of talks, as the entire UK political class backed the war enthusiastically.
An invitation from Asia is very special to me – I was born in India.
And my first exposure to the deep issues we are confronting here was in Asia when I took myself and my small son to Saigon during the American war destroying South Vietnam’s lives, forests, agriculture, society. I wanted to be a journalist who saw and described the horror of that war.
It was decades later before I knew how much I didn’t see then. For instance, the major war crime when the US dropped 19 million gallons of Agent Orange poison on the remote Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam and 600,000 of the more deadly Agent Purple on an even more remote corner of Laos – a country internationally recognised as neutral.
More than 50 years later children with rare and terrible birth defects are still being born to the grandchildren of those villagers who tragically suffered this and other unseen actions of the US war. Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Vietnam war crimes can never be allowed to be forgotten.
Our humanity depends on the refusal of normalising war.
War does not bring peace, freedom and justice, as Western leaders always say – ask Yemenis, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans today among those suffering in US-led Forever Wars.
Civil society in its many forms is the only hope for campaigning against today’s wars.
The justice we want means accountability.
The world’s arms industry, worth $531 billion in 2020, and dominated by the US (56%) has captured law makers in countries across the world with lobbying and bribes. They have distorted government spending priorities from what really matters: action on the climate change which threatens the existence of our planet, and on the dismantling of nuclear armaments; plus real spending programmes on education and health, to transform the next generations’ capacity to re-make society.
Only confident, educated civil society can end the US embrace of a gun culture which pretends guns bring safety. In America this culture brings random death on the street, especially for black youth, and is turning American schools into fortresses.
And Americans’ liberal access to guns has opened frontiers to a gun smuggling industry across its southern border which has turned parts of Central and South America into open season for gun deaths linked to the drug trade and organised crime. Ask those desperate refugees fleeing Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala for Mexico and the US border.
Barbarism is the word for the realities we live today – even beyond the wars. For example: state torture, kidnapping, assassinations, bombing of civilians, occupations of countries for decades (Palestine for instance is the great moral issue of the last 70 years), plus gross and growing economic inequality within countries and between countries.
All this horror is now normalized in the practices of the most powerful country on the planet and is copied on every continent. This includes the routine practice of lying and the creation of gross misinformation and manipulation of truth by political leaders which has so deeply damaged democracy.
For the first time, we are living in a world where, according to UNHCR, 100 million people have been forcibly displaced by the linked issues of climate change and war, for which the key responsibilities lie with Western governments’ policy choices. It will be worse. The International Organization for Migration has predicted that 1.5 billion people will be forced from their homes by 2050.
Today, with total impunity, Western governments are ignoring international law on refugees (as well as on much else): the Mediterranean Sea is a graveyard as Europe repels refugees with boats, walls, armies, and payments to Libya, Niger, and Turkey to keep refugees away. Australia imprisoned refugees on remote islands, the UK government fights its own judiciary to fly them to Central Africa, and the US daily uses inhuman cruelty on the Mexican border.
Guantanamo Bay and other secret US prisons from Asia to Europe symbolize how international law has been scorned. A complete lack of accountability in the US War on Terror twenty years plus ago became the order under which we still live now. Prisoners are occasionally being released after 17 years in US custody where they suffered well documented torture and were never charged with any crime. Others are still held, a handful facing trials stalled for decades by a mockery of law. The torturers, the lawyers, and the politicians who gave the orders flourish today. Their crimes will however not be forgotten by history.
What we need on every continent is a society informed enough at the grass roots for action to transform our limping democracies into a planetary civilization and change the world. Women’s leadership is essential for this. Some seeds of important brave new journalism lie in multiple strands of citizen journalism across the world challenging the misinformation power of much mainstream media. Much of this is initiated by a young generation. Artists of all ages and disciplines are powerful vectors of dissent. As I indicated earlier, education for the next generations is the central platform of hope and power for the future.
I want to end with the words of a great British thinker of the 20th century, Raymond Williams, “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Hope is the most important gift we offer the next generations.