Is it just cowardice?

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I’m not aware of a single occasion, in the whole of recorded human history, when the citizens of one country have stated en masse that they hate the citizens of another country and want to go to war with them.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t subsequently get caught up in hatred and war fever – I can well remember growing up in the 1950s and hearing adults of my parents’ generation saying things like “The only good German is a dead German”.  That sort of hatred is necessary to sustain a long war, and the elites who start the wars invariably use all the propaganda tools at their disposal to encourage it; the point, however, is that it’s the elites, not the citizens, who decide to go to war in the first place.

It’s the ordinary citizens on both sides who provide (and always have done) the cannon fodder and most of the casualties, but it’s only since some 70-80 years ago that ordinary citizens started to be deliberately targeted through mass bombing of cities, culminating, of course, in the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.  The whole rationale for strategic nuclear weapons is that their only possible actual or threatened use is for the mass annihilation of ordinary citizens – men, women and children alike – as they go about their daily business, for the sole ‘crime’ of living within the boundaries of a state which finds itself at war with another state.  It follows that anyone who supports the possession of such weapons, let alone states that they are willing to use them, is effectively arguing that that is a legitimate way of pursuing a war started by the elites.

And that brings me to the Labour Party’s leadership election.  As I understand it, all five candidates have expressed, at one time or another, their willingness to deliberately target citizens of another country in this way, whilst arguing that class solidarity is more important than nationality.  All five are being utterly disingenuous: there is no way that anyone willing to kill millions of working people solely for being of another nationality can argue any such thing.  Their argument, I’m sure, is that any leader stating that he or she would be unwilling to press the button would be ‘unelectable’, by the standards of the media and those who control them.  But if that’s their only reason, I’m not sure which is worse – their stated willingness to use such weapons, or their cowardice in refusing to say otherwise in order to get elected.  But what does it say about the electorate at large that the majority are willing to be guided into only electing someone who professes a willingness to commit mass murder?