War: Who is it good for?

by Chris Rea | Jan 27, 2024

Chris Rea lays out his vision for the Freedom Movement during the current military crises and threat of WWIII; a new form of anti-war activism that focuses relentlessly on the financial interests at the apex of the pyramid, not just the delivery agents further down.

The closest I get to reading the newspapers these days is a scan of the front pages on the shelves of the newsagent, just to catch up on the latest deep state talking points.

Last week I was struck by a headline on the front page of the Times which read: ‘World on a perilous path to war in five years, warns Shapps.’

The Conservative MP Grant Shapps has been the Secretary of State for Defence since August 2023. He is on the front pages a lot at the moment because the UK is more active than usual in military adventures.

The previous week he had said that ‘the world is running out of patience with Iran.’ The Iranians must have been terrified when they read that.

War is peace

The Ministry of Defence was formed in 1964 as a combination of five departments of state that included the Admiralty and the War Office.

The name is an Orwellian inversion given that the UK has a consistently aggressive military posture. Properly speaking, Shapps’ job title should be Secretary of State for Offence, or Attack, or War. It is a long time since British armed forces defended anything, certainly not the interests of the British people.

Shapps’ job of course is to advocate for militarism in the interests of the arms companies, spook agencies and foreign governments to whom he is answerable.

But let’s assume for a moment that he is an earnest politician in command of his brief expressing a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the global population based upon his privileged knowledge of world affairs.

If that were the case and if he really believed that the world is on a perilous path to war in five years, the obvious response is: What are you going to do about it?

Shapps is Secretary of State for Defence after all. He has more influence in these matters than most of us. Along with Foreign Secretary David Cameron and the Prime Minister himself, Shapps has more influence on these matters than most of the government.

At ministerial press conferences, an honest and curious media would ask Shapps about his progress in taking the world off the perilous path to war.

‘Secretary of State, like the rest of the public, we were shocked by your disclosure. None of us wants the world to be on a perilous path to war. This could have disastrous consequences for the world not to mention the people you serve. We could all die! Please share with us your plan to get the world off that perilous path.’

Shapps, perhaps accompanied at the podium by Foreign Secretary Cameron, would then give a candid account of his ceaseless efforts in pursuit of multiple ceasefire, de-escalation, and disarmament initiatives and report on the crisis calls he was having with other important politicians in foreign countries, friendly or otherwise.

It’s a pleasant fiction. The media will never ask him that. The Times headline was announcing a deep state press release, not a real piece of news.

And Grant Shapps predictively programming the public mind for a major war is like being warned by an arsonist that fire-raising is going to increase or the World Economic Forum sharing its fears about a new virus. It’s a ‘no surprise Sherlock’ situation.

The UK’s peculiar path to peace

What exactly is ‘the world’ in Shapps formulation? He isn’t speaking for all of it. Some parts of the world are well down the perilous path to war, others long ago arrived at the destination. In the first quarter of this century, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have been invaded, occupied and devastated courtesy of the UK and its NATO accomplices.

Shapps himself was a government minister when the UK joined an all-out assault on Libya in 2011 that reduced that prosperous and proud country to beggary and barbarism.

He has also recently signed off on £2.5 billion in military funding for Ukraine, which according to Ukrainian supremo Volodymyr Zelensky is but the first instalment in a projected ten-year programme of military assistance.

Unless Shapps is playing 4D chess, this won’t help the world get off the perilous path to war. In fact, it seems designed to accelerate the world towards the abyss.

I know it is an obvious point but isn’t it typical that the government is able to find £2.5 billion to fund Ukrainian military capability when it preaches austerity and fiscal restraint in the social and economic areas that really matter?

This latest act of largesse to a foreign power whose interests are inimical to those of the British people works out at £37.31 each for every man, woman and child in the UK. Not a fortune but a useful amount for millions of people struggling to pay the bills and eat properly.

Incidentally, if we are going to be led into the abyss, at least let it be by people with some substance and stature. Not Shapps, the former hawker of get-rich-quick guides and Zelensky, the ex-cabaret artiste whose signature routine was playing the piano with his genitals.

Poppy orthodoxy

Loyalty to military ideology sits deep in this country although the ruling class has to stoke the furnace when it detects diminishing public support for the UK’s serial involvement in foreign wars.

This happened in the late 2000s when a swelling antipathy to UK involvement in the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq was deflated by the instituting of Armed Forces Day, a more comprehensive and better-promoted iteration of the earlier Veterans Day.

Poppy orthodoxy was publicly reinforced through media-generated anxieties over the extent to which television broadcasters were observing button-hole protocols. Around this time the ‘Lest we forget’ metal silhouettes of Great War soldiers started to appear on the gable ends of pubs, shops and houses.

At football games on or close to Remembrance Sunday, teams were accompanied on to the pitch by members of the armed forces and centre circles were covered by huge poppies. Military ‘outreach’ in schools and colleges intensified.

Even more insidious was the promotion of the Armed Forces Covenant which presupposed a sacred obligation from a grateful nation to the military personnel tasked with defending it. No such formal arrangement had ever been proposed before.

As well as cementing loyalty to military culture and foreign adventurism, the Covenant arguably set the pattern for subsequent valorising of uniformed or ‘frontline’ state employees which climaxed with the pan-banging frenzy of 2020.

This period also saw the creation of the Anjem Choudary-Tommy Robinson paradigm, which led to the rapid emergence of the English Defence League and a spate of rallies and demonstrations set up to provoke a response from Left groups such as Unite Against Fascism and Stand Up to Racism.

Having faced off its Left-Right marionettes, the ruling class sat back to enjoy a predictably heated spectacle that kept the Left yet again distracted from the important stuff and which was wound down to a bathetic conclusion with Tommy Robinson being chased round the country by ‘anti-fascists’ as he tried to sell copies of his autobiography from the boot of his car.

The Citizens Army needs you!

Returning to the Times headline and article, I wonder how it was apprehended by the paper’s readers. Did it arouse concern or alarm? Probably not. The ‘educated’ newspaper audience which the Times appeals to is possibly the most credulous, gullible and incurious readership in history.

There’s no Left-Right, Conservative-Labour distinctions at work here. Irrespective of their political allegiances, most readers of the Independent, the Telegraph, the Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times believe what they read and do what they’re told.

Shapps’ prognostication would sit with all the other gloomy developments that obedient citizens have been encouraged to accept as the normal state of things such as the ‘climate crisis’, occasional fuel shortages and the latest covid variant – something to fret about but not a call to action in either direction, i.e. towards opposition to the drive to war or ardent support for it. It’s unlikely it would encourage anyone to enlist in the Citizens Army, the latest deep state psyop wheeze.

The majority public orientation towards war is characterised by apathy and an instinctive loyalty to the military idea. The general social terrain is usually unpromising for anti-war activism, but I think that the political conditions that have developed in the past four years – and the new forms of resistance that have emerged in response – provide promising opportunities for effective anti-war campaigning.

Characteristics of the anti-war movement

Anti-war mobilisation occurs as an immediate response to the threat or commencement of a specific conflict and ebbs away when conflicts end or stagnate. This is obvious and understandable but it does mean that the movement is generally reactive and tactically-driven.

At the moment, Israel’s assault on the Gaza and the West Bank has prompted mass mobilisations reminiscent of the opposition to the assault on Iraq in 2003.

But whilst pro-Palestinian activism operates at an impressive level in between the most egregious outbreaks of Israeli violence, it isn’t strictly speaking an anti-war movement.

Mainstream anti-war campaigning rarely offers a sustained and systematic critique of the war system, i.e. the high level economic and political power that organises and executes conflicts and which operates high above national governments and international organisations.

Although mainstream anti-war activists, who are almost entirely rooted in Left political culture, would not deny that economic factors are important motive forces in armed conflicts, I don’t think that they take that line of thinking far enough.

The thesis set out by Michael Rivero in his film All Wars are Bankers’ Wars ought to be the foundational principle for anti-war activism. If it is true that all wars are fought in the interests of the financial system, then anti-war campaigning should be primarily, if not exclusively, directed at central banks, investment houses and dynastic fortunes rather than national governments or even military blocs such as NATO.

It would be impossible for such an orientation not to embrace parallel anti-human ruling class agendas such as the anti-carbon dioxide agenda, central bank digital currencies and biosecurity fascism.

Broadly speaking, this line of thinking comes naturally to the Freedom Movement but not to the traditional anti-war movement rooted in Left culture.

By way of example, take this announcement in the Financial Times in June 2023:

‘BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase are helping the Ukrainian government to set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.’

I may be simplifying too much here but I think a typical Left response would be, ‘yes, the opportunist capitalists yet again cashing in on a crisis just like they did with covid.’

A more imaginative reading, however, might conclude that the conflict was arranged in the first place in the interests of BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase and other powerful financial entities.

Freedom Movement thinking figured out very early on that the covid operation was a gigantic fraud. Capitalist opportunists didn’t cash in on covid. The operation was engineered to serve the interests of capitalists. The ‘vaccine’ wasn’t developed to combat the disease. The disease was created to create a market for the ‘vaccine’.

Preposterous pretexts

Freedom Movement thinking is also more prone to scepticism about media and state war narratives. Put simply, it has better BS detectors. If you have been switched on throughout the covid operation, you know to distrust every single atom of information mediated by the process and the state.

Plenty of people were switched on long before that. Every pretext for every war the UK and the West has waged in this century has been an obvious fraud, including 9/11, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi’s Viagra-fuelled mercenaries, Assad ‘gassing his own people’ and Hamas beheading babies.

It isn’t surprising that the majority population fall time and again for these crude and infantile narratives but it is disappointing that the anti-war movement itself also gives credence to such absurdities.

This often takes the form of caveating opposition to Western military violence with such formulations as ‘of course, none of us supports Assad’s/Gaddafi’s/Saddam’s oppressive regime…’ or ‘whilst none of us can condone the violence of Hamas…’ followed by a ‘nonetheless, we stand against US/UK/NATO aggression…’

In my experience, the mainstream anti-war movement was totally on board with the 9/11 narrative. The Left’s abhorrence of ‘conspiracy theories’, which are regarded as the exclusive property of the ‘far right’, has prevented it from engaging in any kind of dissenting critique of a colossal fraud that has only been topped for sheer audaciousness by the covid operation – which the Left also refused to interrogate.

In the case of 9/11, the caveating went along the lines of ‘whilst we deplore the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, they shouldn’t come as a surprise given the actions of the US in the Middle East’ – in other words, ‘blowback’ theory.

Again, a more imaginative reading of 9/11 cannot help but conclude that it was engineered to serve as a pretext for the events that followed: permanent war in the Middle East, the development of a domestic police state and the institution of an ideological apparatus, the Great War on Terror, lately supplanted by the Great War on Viruses.

With 9/11, you either believe in Tony Blair and George Bush’s version of events or you investigate the alternative narratives. Once you’ve done that, there can be no going back.

Yet the mainstream anti-war position, whilst deploring the ‘response’ to 9/11, still cleaves to the idea that the US was attacked by radical Islamists, just as mainstream Left opinion believes that the world was attacked by a deadly new virus in 2020.

This narrowness of thinking, this inability to see the massive, obvious picture, is why the legacy Left is doomed to repeat over and over the same cycle of activism, which is often triggered by inauthentic or staged events or narratives designed to elicit exactly the response the ruling class needs. Black Lives Matter, the ‘climate emergency’ and covid are three outstanding examples.

Building a new anti-war movement

Freedom Movement thinking, which evolved in the heat of struggle during a period of monumental crisis and is largely untrammelled by dogmatic political traditions, is naturally disposed towards a more radical reading of critical political events.

Covid? An obvious conspiracy designed to advance the interests of the biosecurity state. 9/11? An inside job, no doubt about it. Net Zero? A massive racket that will make people colder, poorer and more miserable.

The power nexus that organised and executed the covid operation and which is driving Net Zero, central bank digital currencies and all the other anti-human elite agendas, also engineers and finances and profits from war.

The Freedom Movement has an important job to do in agitating for a new form of anti-war activism that focuses relentlessly on the financial interests at the apex of the pyramid, not just the delivery agents further down, and it must educate the public about the interconnectedness of the dominant ruling class agendas.

Socialists with experience of the traditional anti-war movement should expect this new form of anti-war activism to be different to the anti-war culture we have previously inhabited. It will feel less like a single-issue campaigning position. It’s a good opportunity to reshape our thinking and develop some exciting new narratives. We should start now before Grant Shapps finishes us all off.