Militarised Britain: From Poppies to X Factor to the Premier League

War may well be the continuation of politics by violent means, as Clausewitz said, but it is by no means obvious in British popular culture.

USBlog has in recent months considered the militarisation of British culture by highlighting the ways in which the annual 'poppy appeal' has incorporated support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; support for those wars on prime-time programmes like X-Factor, as well the ways in which military charities are visiting schools and even nurseries to parade their cause. In each instance, and I'm sure in many others too, war is lifted out of politics - the struggle over who gets what and how - and placed in the domain of the welfare of 'our boys'. By so doing, sympathy and empathy are mobilised behind one side and implicitly against the 'other' side, without examining the nature of the war or the gross imbalance of casualties, military and civilian.

Yesterday's Daily Mail added a new dimension to the issue (24 February 2011). Its sports pages are normally opinionated, dramatic and sensationalist. This is not surprising. In uncharacteristically un-sensational terms, the paper reported that a former premier league footballer, Lee Crooks, has joined the RAF and is about to go to fight in Afghanistan. The article purports to be non-political, and just mere reporting, but notes in its very first sentence that Crooks "is about to move from defence on the pitch to the front line in Afghanistan". By noting Crooks's defensive role as footballer in the same sentence as announcing his move to Afghanistan, it implies that British forces there are engaged in a defensive war, an opinion not shared by everyone.

The article quotes Crooks arguing that football and war are quite similar: Being a soldier and player both require "working as a team, being there for your team-mates and moving forward as a team," Crooks suggested. These must be waht Edmund Burke meant when he referred to the "little platoons" that make for a cohesive social structure. Crooks may be in for a shock.

The British empire was built on the playing fields of Eton - sports made Victorian school boys muscular Christians who would civilise the world. As far back as George Orwell, it was noted that football is war minus the shooting. Countries at war often produce aggressive sports, a consequence of militarised culture. The results are not pretty.

Lee Crooks is not going from playing in defence to defending his country. He is going from a sports field full of aggression to the killing fields of Afghanistan.

First Remembrance Sunday, Now the X-Factor: Heroes or Villains?

A few weeks ago, a number of former British soldiers, who fought in wars ranging from the Falklands to Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan, among others, wrote a letter to The Guardian newspaper (6 November 2010) protesting about the hijacking and misuse of the annual Poppy appeal ahead of Remembrance Sunday. They articulated a sentiment that I had felt but also felt unable to express that the British Legion, with the tacit consent one assumes of HMG and the Ministry of Defence, was "selling" the poppy appeal by bundling up Britain's most recent war-injured and dead with those killed in two world wars. (Of course, conflating those two world wars is in itself problematic).

Last night's X-Factor, which is rather eagerly followed in my house (but more significantly in millions of homes across the UK, possibly elsewhere too, and across the generations), featured the performance and release of a song by all 16 finallists from the show, a new version of David Bowie's "Heroes". It was called "Heroes" when released in the mid-1970s: the inverted commas meant to convey a sense of irony or ambiguity about the idea of heroes, perhaps the notion that one person's hero might well be someone else's villain.

In addition to the X-Factor song performance, during which a number of men and women in military uniform, presumably still serving in the armed forces, appeared on stage, there was a brief report on the crippling injuries sustained in a bomb attack by one young soldier while on "routine patrol" in Afghanistan. The injured soldier came from a military family - his father had been killed in Ulster.

According to the soldiers who had written to The Guardian, the Poppy appeal had "subverted" Armistice Day - a "day that should be about peace and remembrance" - and had converted it "into a month-long drum roll of support for current wars.... The true horror and futility of war is forgotten and ignored." They also noted that the poppy had been promoted as a symbol of support of "our Heroes", arguing that "There is nothing heroic about being blown up in a vehicle. There is nothing heroic about fighting in an unnecessary conflict."

Last night's X-Factor, I think, falls broadly into line with the sentiment expressed above. It was hard not to feel sympathy for a young soldier wounded in action, especially as his tearful mother was shown expressing horror at the news of her son's wounding. But the more political sentiment was also significant: there was no suggestion or hint, so far as I could tell, that the war in Afghanistan might be problematic in any way, nor that the number of Afghans killed and injured runs into hundreds of thousands, and that this war has gone on too long and should now end. There was just an understandable expression of sympathy for the injured soldier who, it was clearly stated, sustained his injury in the service of "his country" - which was not questioned at all.

"My country right or wrong," conveys the sentiment. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - words used by Wilfred Owen in his world war one: It is sweet and seemly to die for one's country, no matter the cause.

In addition, the soldier showed and expressed considerable courage in getting his life back together and seemed to be unrepentant about anything he or the British army might have done or be doing in Afghanistan. He resolved to go forward with his life - no looking back.

That resolve is precisely that urged by the current goverment in regard to Afghanistan - keep going. It is what Tony Blair argues over and over again in his unrepentant memoir, A Journey.

Is someone a "hero" just for fighting or dying in the military, regardless of the cause for which they fight? Why isn't the British state looking after these young men and women? After all, they sent them out there in the first place? Why is left to a charity? Why do they use a mass entertainment programme for what is a political/military cause?

I have no problem feeling sympathy for someone injured in a war. I have no problem in charitable organisations rasing funds for such causes. My problem lies with why the British state does not look after those who risk life and limb.

I have a problem with the misuse of a mass entertainment programme that unquestioningly, and probably unwittingly, promotes an unjust war. While David Bowie and Brian Eno, who wrote the song, had a sense of irony about heroism, the X-Factor betrays no such subtleties.

Children of a Lesser God

Children of a Lesser God

All men may well be born equal but their deaths certainly betray huge inequalities. A month or so ago (24 June, to be precise), Michael Tomasky, GuardianAmerica’s editor at large, wrote that the chances were that Obama’s military strategy in Afghanistan was likely to work but that a lot of people “will die along the way”. But, he noted, at least America was doing “something decent” there, so the sacrifice – in Western lives - would not be in vain. Just yesterday (29 July), Maureen Dowd, in the International Herald Tribune, noted how America always ends up with egg on its face, and a knife in its back, despite trying to do “the right thing”, the decent thing. Dowd was referring to attempts to train a national army in that tragic land.

How easily are such sentiments expressed. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed in the past decade of the ‘war on terror’, waged in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So what are a few thousand more? They’re just Afghans, after all, and who’s really counting their casualties anyway? There are plenty more where they came from. And this from Tomasky, a liberal critic.

Around about 1983, the eminent Marxist scholar, EP Thompson, wrote an article in The Guardian about the relative worth of lives according to race and ethnicity. I don’t recall the details but its import was that if you are black or brown or, at least, NOT white, casualty numbers and deaths hardly matter, because such lives are cheap. He was employing irony and wit, long gone from the pens of ‘serious’ columnists on foreign affairs today.

And America always does the “decent” thing? In Afghanistan? Iraq? Guantanamo Bay? Backing an illegitimate and corrupt warlord like Karzai who stole the last election and still managed to get less than the constitutionally-required 50% of the vote? This is evidence of amnesia on a stupendous scale, standard fare in the media, however. The release of over 90,000 documents via Wikileaks, it is said, is “damaging” to the American effort in Afghanistan, particularly the ‘revelation’ that innocent people have been killed and that Pakistani intelligence services have been backing elements in the Taleban insurgency. This is news? In the realm of myth, weaved by media spin, Wikileaks’ ‘expose’ really shakes the world. For the rest of us, who read the very newspapers that so loudly proclaim THIS news, the leaked material was already well known.

Some neo-conservatives (remember them?) argue that the 1990s were a holiday from history – responsible leaders just weren’t taking seriously the threats that were emerging in the post-Cold War World, especially Islamic fundamentalism. What they failed to recognise then, and what liberal commentators fail to recognise today, is that those threats resulted from America’s history of doing the ‘decent thing’ in backing the Mujaheddin against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, paying the Pakistani military regime to fund, arm and train Osama bin Laden, stationing a garrison in Saudi Arabia, and steadfastly supporting Israel against the Palestinians, incubating long-term resentment and outright hatred of American double standards in the Middle East. Is it too much to expect Great Powers to learn the lessons of the past?