Double-think on disarmament
Most of the people who have read George Orwell’s gloomy novel Nineteen Eighty Four have probably assumed that it was a warning of things to come. Perhaps that is what Orwell intended. Yet he must have been aware that much of what he wrote was not prophecy; it was happening at the time, and it is happening still.
One outstanding feature of Big Brother’s dictatorship was the way in which words were distorted until they came to mean their opposite. The Ministry of Truth propagated lies. The three principles of Ingsoc were: War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength. This is so blatant that there was no need for Orwell to be at all elaborate in attacking it. Yet the same sort of distortion happens today and nobody considers it worth debunking in a best selling novel.
Consider the word disarmament. The meaning is clear enough. It is a word in constant use by all sorts of governments to describe a distant ideal which, they say, they are aiming for and which they would attain if it were not for the obstacles being put in their way by other governments. Political leaders often announce, with the air of men revealing a fundamental secret, that was is needed is a disarmament conference, but nobody else is interested in attending one. Sometimes the nations actually get around the conference table and the reporters tell us they are talking about disarmament.
All of this convinces the sort of people who would be deceived by Big Brother that there is a chance of the rival states of capitalism discarding their armaments. But despite all the talk and the promises, and despite the frequent use of the word, no country ever gets to the point of actually disarming. Indeed, the very governments who claim to have an interest in the matter go for the most powerful weapons in the world, which is more or less the same as saying that War is Peace.
A recent example of this has been provided by the Labour Government who, as we all know, have not got a department actually called the Ministry of Truth. The programme on which the Labour Party fought the last election said:
“First and foremost will come our initiative in the field of disarmament. We are convinced that the time is opportune for a new break-through in the disarmament negotiations . . .
We shall appoint a Minister in the Foreign Office with special responsibility for disarmament . . .”
Now it is Mr. Wilson’s proud boast that his Government are keeping the promises they made last October and sure enough he did appoint a Minister of Disarmament. This man was one of Mr. Wilson’s little surprises—a journalist who, given a Life peerage, was tucked away into his corner at Whitehall and left, in the words of Labour’s manifesto, “. . . To stop the spread of nuclear weapons . . . achieve controlled reductions in manpower and arms . . . stop the private sale of arms . . .”—which nobody can say is an unambitious programme.
This, then, was Labour’s way of taking the initiative on disarmament. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that matters were not so simple. The new Government announced that, even after making several reductions, they were still going to spend more on armaments than ever before in peace time. A few months later they showed how anxious they were that other countries should follow this example; they appointed a “super salesman” to sell British-made arms abroad—and salesmen, of course, thrive on their customers’ increased expenditure.
In this, the Labour Government acted with the same speed as in the appointment of Lord Chalfont. It soon became known that the job had been accepted by Sir Donald Stokes, the managing director of Leyland’s, a firm already well entrenched in the weapons trade. There was no doubt that the Government were as solidly behind Sir Donald, in his efforts to persuade countries not to disarm, as they were supposed to be behind Lord Chalfont in his efforts to do the opposite. The super salesman was pleased to tell us:
“They are giving me a big staff, all the staff I need, and I have been promised assistance and co-operation from Government level downwards.”
Sir Donald did not speculate on what would happen if everywhere his staff went they were turned away by governments who had been under the misapprehension that the Labour Government wanted them to disarm. (There was, of course, no need for him to speculate on the opposite; everyone knows what happens when the weapons salesmen are busily successful.) Neither did he mention that Mr. Wilson, who often attacks trade union rules which keep two men doing a job which could be done by one, has gone one better than the unions by creating two jobs which in theory cancel each other out.
In fact, the Government’s mind is anything but confused. Disarmament is so remote a possibility that it can be ignored, or at best treated derisively. But for political reasons some sort of a gesture must be made. There is nothing original in Labour’s actions, other than the fact that they have appointed a Minister. And what is that worth? Lord Chalfont may not actually get to the bonfire, but he is no more than a dummy, a November guy dressed up to attract the voters’ pennies. The real world of capitalism, with its rival economies and its disputes, is more correctly represented by Sir Donald Stokes.
Weapons, just like all other wealth produced under capitalism, are commodities. The need or fancy which, in their own unique way, they satisfy, spring from the wars which capitalism inevitably produces. The companies which make armaments hope to make profits from them. Sometimes they fail; sometimes—like Ferranti’s and the Bloodhound—they succeed.
The arms market, like those for other commodities, is often affected by government policies. The Western Powers have a strict embargo on exports to China; the Labour Government have prevented sales to South Africa. The armaments companies naturally do not like this interference and sometimes, as a recent biography of Bazil Zaharoff made clear, they manage to sell their wares to enemy countries in defiance of their governments’ wishes.
In other cases, governments actively help their armaments firms to produce and to sell their goods. Up to now British firms have been left largely to their own resources in the export markets. They had to wait for the export-driving Labour Government to give them the extra push to go out and prove to the world that British weapons knock down, blow up, sink, bomb or simply kill, better than any others. The reason for this support is that the Government feel the British industry is being deprived of its slice of a very rich cake.
The entire arms export market between now and 1967 may be worth £1,500 million, a lot of it in Europe. The American industry is already bidding strongly, with their own super-salesman and a big and energetic staff. One of their current projects is to persuade NATO to take American weapons as their standard equipment, which would be a bitter blow to the British weapon makers. This high pressure selling has provoked Mr. Wilson to complain, and to organise his own bunch of salesmen to operate at a similarly high pressure under Sir Donald Stokes. This is probably very welcome to the armaments firms over here—as Robert Heller commented in The Observer: “. . . it’s not often you get the free services of somebody else’s super-salesman.” But it can be reconciled with Labour’s professed interest in disarmament only by the same mental processes as justify the Big Brother slogan of Freedom Is Slavery.
The Government may well argue that they are not the only hypocrites. Every state pays lip service to disarmament, even while they are arming to the teeth. The French Government celebrated this year’s Bastille Day with a display of nuclear weapons and other military delicacies which have absolutely no connection with Liberty, Equality or Fraternity. The Soviet Government recently took the initiative in recalling the Geneva Disarmament Conference, but before anyone starts to cheer this as an example of the Kremlin’s interest in disarmament they should remember that the Russians share the responsibility for the same conference breaking down last September. It is apparent that other motives lie behind the reopening of the talks.
Nuclear weapons are not simple. Contrary to popular belief, they cannot be made and fired by a solitary madman out of a science fiction paper-back. They are the products of a developed industry, backed by considerable technical knowledge. At one time, only the most advanced countries could hope to have nuclear weapons, but now the situation has changed. At the moment five countries have the Bomb and, according to Lord Chalfont, there are about a dozen others with the knowledge to make it; within the next 15 years the number of nuclear powers may more than double.
This is one of the current problems of the big power blocs; they call it the “proliferation” (Orwell would have been proud of that word) of nuclear weapons. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wants to see the present military power balance disturbed by the rise of other nuclear powers. China is only one of those which could become a dominant menace by the development, and perhaps the use, of a fashionably powerful nuclear weapon. The West German Government, while protesting its own intention not to make the Bomb, it trying to use this act of self-denial to add weight to its campaign for the reunification of Germany. How far is Bonn prepared to go in this explosive dispute? The Russian and American ruling classes clearly have a common interest in trying to control these threats; if the Bomb has to be used, they want to see that is is with their consent.
What the Geneva Conference is actually doing in talking about a treaty to prevent non-nuclear powers becoming nuclear, is trying to control and reverse a process which the nuclear powers themselves began when they first made their Bomb. Russia and Britain did not regard “proliferation” as a problem as long as they were among the non-nuclear powers; they were working hard to spread atomic weapons in their direction. But as soon as they mastered the Bomb they became interested in restricting the number of nuclear powers. Their claim to be interested in disarmament is worth no more than the title of Ministry of Peace, given by Orwell to the department which waged perpetual warfare.
If disarmament conferences are complicated affairs this is but a symptom of the tangled interests and the involved disputes which are capitalism. The conference cannot succeed because capitalism is always at war. One of the latest to testify to this is Lord Watkinson, who used to be a Conservative Minister and who is now the chairman of the British National Council’s committee for exports to the United States. This is what he said on July 13th last:
“The situation facing Britain at present can he summed up as “export or bust” . . . The Government must he convinced that, whereas war is a possible occurrence, the trading battle goes on the whole time.”
It is impossible to imagine the sort of world which Lord Watkinson described laying down its arms. The perpetual trading battles of capitalism breed its wars, and so make armaments necessary. The capitalist powers talk about disarmament but this is only another example of words being distorted to accommodate a blatant hypocrisy. The fact of the matter is that while the politicians talk and make their promises the arms pile up and become more powerful. It is not yet 1984, but the people who support this system-the people who make the weapons and who use them and who make all the other wealth of capitalism—are as deluded as Orwell’s party members. It is not an overstatement to say that capitalism survives by virtue of the working classes conviction that War is Peace, that their Slavery is really Freedom, and that the whole murderous Ignorance of it all is Strength.
IVAN