Author Archives: symonhill

Bad arguments in favour of war (Number One): The hypothetical murderer

Posted on by symonhill

The more I read about the history of World War One, the more I understand how we repeat our mistakes. Nearly every war is justified with claims that the situation is unique. Every time, the arguments made in favour of war are depressingly familiar.

I was reminded of this while debating “just” war on The Big Questions on BBC1 this week. There were good and helpful points made by people on various sides of the debate. However, with only an hour for the programme, there was naturally limited time for anyone to explain their position. It gave me the idea of a series of short blog posts about the arguments I most frequently hear in favour of war.

I decided to start with one that is constantly thrown at me: “What would you do if someone came into your house and threatened to kill you/your children/your elderly relatives/everyone in sight?”

Almost every pacifist has heard this challenge at some point. It sometimes varies, for example “If you had a gun, wouldn’t you shoot the person who was trying to kill your children?” (Where did I get this gun from? How would I know how to operate it?) When British conscientious objectors went before tribunals in the first world war, they were frequently asked what they would do if a German soldier tried to rape their sister.

So what would I do in this situation? I don’t know. Nor do you, unless you’ve been in this sort of position.

I don’t think that dwelling on unlikely hypothetical scenarios is the best way to reach ethical conclusions about how we should live. While many people around the world do face this sort of situation, I suspect we would do best to put our energy into tackling the causes of it rather than worrying about what we would do in their place. Some of the causes may lie closer to home than we would like to think.

Nonetheless, I do accept that this hypothetical question is a valid response to someone who argues that they would never be violent. But it is not a challenge to people who oppose war. War is not comparable to fighting back against an aggressor who is trying to kill your children.

War, by its nature, never involves simply fighting aggressors, but always includes harm to innocent people.

What would I do if someone entered my house and threatened to kill children in my care? I can tell you what I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t go and kill his children. I wouldn’t drop a bomb on the town he came from. I wouldn’t lock up his granny. I wouldn’t regard everyone who shared his nationality as being my enemy, and less worthy of my love, loyalty and respect than people of my own nationality. Therefore, I wouldn’t go to war.

 

If you think UKIP’s members are extreme, read its official policies

Posted on by symonhill

Nigel Farage has thrown out the latest UKIP member to provoke controversy through bigoted opinions. Farage says he wants to get rid of candidates with “extremist, barmy or nasty” views. But it is not individual candidates who are the problem. UKIP’s official policies are extremely nasty, based as they are on an ultra-Thatcherite free-market extremism.

Earlier this week, I blogged about David Silvester, a UKIP councillor in Oxfordshire who attributed the recent floods to God’s judgment on the legalisation of same-sex marriage (rather than the real sin of human-fuelled climate change). I have now lost count of the number of UKIP members that have been expelled due to racist, sexist or homophobic comments. Farage’s insistence that there are bigoted individuals in every party is true but now wearing thin as an excuse for the number of them who appear to have joined UKIP.

You only have to look at the policies of UKIP to see why. They want to make even greater cuts than the Tories. They are committed to workfare (forcing people to work for benefits, instead of paying them a wage). They want to withdraw from the UN Convention on Refugees, meaning the UK could turn back people fleeing persecution. They would also remove the UK from the European Court of Human Rights, meaning it would join Belarus as the only other European country that is not signed up to it.

Despite slashing the welfare state, a UKIP government would increase military spending by forty percent and push ahead with the renewal of Trident. The party’s education policy includes the promotion of a biased, pro-imperial teaching of history in British schools. They would not, however, teach about climate change, as they deny its reality. Their policies include investment in several new gas-fired power stations.

Shortly after his comments about expelling “extremists”, Farage gave us a reminder of his own perception of reality by claiming that women can succeed just as well as men at the top levels of big business – if, he added, they are prepared to sacrifice their families. Why anyone should be expected to sacrifice their family to “succeed” was not made clear.

Of course, the debate on the number of women on boards of corporate directors conveniently obscures the reality of sexism for people on low and middle incomes. But given the power of corporations, it is telling that Farage is happy with those who are wielding that power.

It is not individual UKIPers who are the problem but the party itself and its own policies. Expelling right-wing extremists from UKIP is like expelling sand from the desert. 

UKIP, homophobia and the real sin behind the floods

Posted on by symonhill

UKIP councillor David Silvester believes that Britain’s recent floods are the results of sin. You may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. There the agreement ends, for we have very different ideas about what the sin is and how it has affected the weather.

In a letter to a local paper in Oxfordshire, Silvester has blamed the foods on the recent legalisation of same-sex marriage in England and Wales.

I respect the fact that many people interpret the Bible differently to me, but Silvester’s statements about the Bible are simply untrue.

In his letter, he writes “The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.”

This is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. The scriptures make no reference at all to a “Christian nation”. They have no concept of a “Christian nation”. At no point in the New Testament is there any suggestion that Jesus’ followers should build a nation-state founded on their principles or expect any nation to prioritise them and their religion. There is certainly no suggestion anywhere in the Bible of a Christian coronation oath.

What Silvester is doing, like many before him, is rejecting the grassroots radicalism of the New Testament in order to pick bits from the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) that refer to ancient Israel. The people who use the Bible in this way then decide that the Bible’s comments on ancient Israel (or at least, the ones they’ve chosen to pick out) somehow apply directly to Britain as a “Christian nation” today. This simplistic approach manages to insult and misrepresent both Christianity and Judaism at the same time.

I don’t know if David Silvester sees any tension between the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus and the policies of UKIP (including even bigger welfare cuts than the Tories, withdrawal from the UN Convention on Refugees, a forty percent increase in military spending and denying the reality of climate change). I don’t know if he thinks that the UK was a “Christian nation” when Britain was engaged in the slave trade or when Britain’s rulers were committing genocide in Tasmania or suppressing religious liberty in Britain. But I do know that Silvester’s comments will attract more amusement than anger, at least in the mainstream media. Sadly, they will also serve to give people a skewed impression of Christianity. People who have never read the Bible may well assume that Silvester’s description of its contents are accurate.

That’s why other Christians need to speak up. Let no-one misrepresent us as being less Christian than Silvester and his allies, watering down the Bible or compromising the Gospel. We too should speak about sin. Sin is all that separates us from God, from each other and from creation. Sin has played a major role in these floods.

It is not sensible to say that any particular flood was caused solely by climate change. What we can say with confidence is that the frequency of floods and erratic weather conditions is a result of climate change. That change has been brought about by human beings pursuing the goals of capitalism led by politicians worshipping the idols of “growth” and corporations pursuing short-term profit.

Jesus’ solidarity with the poor is central to his teachings. It is at the heart of the Gospel. It is already obvious that the poorest people and the poorest countries will suffer the most as a result of climate change. Christians need to work alongside people of other religions and none in working for new economic systems in which resources are shared rather than hoarded or destroyed.

I don’t claim to live up to Jesus’ teachings. I’m not a better Christian than David Silvester. But I can see that sin is present in destruction, poverty and inequality, not in the love between two people who happen to be the same gender.

 

Gates is wrong: We need more cuts to military spending

Posted on by symonhill

My radio alarm clock woke me this morning with the news that the USA’s former defence secretary, Robert Gates, has criticised the cuts that are being made to military spending in the UK.

If a minister, let alone a former minister, from within the European Union had criticised cuts to social security, the right-wing media would be shaking with simulated outrage about “Europe” interfering in British politics.

However, those on the right who object to “Europe” are often happy for the UK to slavishly follow the US, particularly on foreign policy and military issues. Gates said the cuts could weaken US-UK ties. Such ties are based on the UK government following where the US government leads. They are a wilful abrogation of the British people’s freedom to determine their own policies.

There are people who back welfare cuts on the grounds of cutting the deficit but who take a different view when it comes to military spending (or “defence spending” as it’s euphemistically called). Many right-wing commentators cheer as the government snatches the livelihoods from thousands of disabled people, massively increases homelessness and prices working class people out of higher education, but they insist that it is essential that the UK maintains one of the highest military budgets in the world, despite containing less than one percent of the world’s population.

The rarely-mentioned reality is that the UK’s “defence” cuts are much smaller than most other cuts that the coalition government is making. If ministers were serious about cutting the deficit, they might start with the £100bn that will be spent renewing the Trident nuclear weapons systems, which can work only by killing millions of innocent people.

After planned cuts to military spending, the UK government will still have a massive military out of all proportion to the country’s size or to its other expenditure. A country’s influence no longer rests on the size of its army but Robert Gates, Liam Fox and even David Cameron seem to be living in the nineteenth century.

Very little of the “defence” budget is spent on anything that meaningfully defends the people living within the UK. People being thrown on the streets as a a result of the bedroom tax are unlikely to feel well defended. The reality is that the British people are under attack by British ministers and by the rich and powerful whose interests they promote. We need to defend ourselves from our own government.

Royal Mint responds to Kitchener coin petition

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This morning, I received an email from a polite and friendly public relations manager at the Royal Mint. This follows my petition calling on the Mint to withdraw a £2 commemorative coin featuring Horatio Kitchener and his recruitment slogan “Your country needs you”. Last night, the petition – asking for the coin to be replaced with one that commemorates the millions who died in the first world war – passed 20,000 signatures.

The email consisted largely of a copy of the statement that the Royal Mint is giving to journalists who contact them about the coin and the petition. The Mint also pointed out to me that, “There seems to be some confusion about the new design being the only one to commemorate the anniversary of the first world war but this is not the case. It is part of a series of designs which will be released, encompassing a number of different high profile individuals and events from the wartime period.”

In reply, I said that I was aware of this but I acknowledged that I had not mentioned it much. The implication of the Mint’s response is that future coins will focus explicitly on commemoration of the dead. Whatever the choice of coins to mark other aspects of the first world war in the next few years, it will not make the Kitchener coin acceptable. To me, there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, because the first of a series sets the tone of a series. The very first coin to commemorate the first world war, as much as the very last, should focus on remembrance of the dead.

Secondly, and more importantly, because there is no context in which it is appropriate to produce a coin featuring a warmonger with the blood of millions on his hands. Kitchener’s atrocities prior to world war one are important. He commanded the troops that carried out the Omdurman massacre in Sudan in 1898. He later expanded the network of concentration camps for Boer civilians in South Africa, in which many died due to the appallingly unhealthy conditions.

In the light of all this, the coin would be bad enough if it simply featured a picture of Kitchener. But it goes beyond this, picturing his image as it appeared on recruitment posters, along with the slogan that accompanied it. This poster pressurised millions of young men to fight and kill other young men with whom they had far more in common than they did with Kitchener. Although the official age for going to the front was 19, many were allowed to join up much younger than this. The youngest person known to have died fighting for the British army in the first world war was 14.

It is not enough simply to argue that the coin depicts an important image from world war one. There are some events and images that we choose not to depict because we know that they give the wrong idea about what we are remembering. No commemoration of those who died in the appalling terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre would be likely to feature a picture of Osama Bin Laden.

Whenever we create a symbol, we make a choice. In choosing how to symbolise an event, issue or idea, we give an impression of how we understand it. How we understand the past affects how we act in the present and the future. British people’s minds are fresh from Tony Blair’s deceptions over Iraq, which may help to explain why thousands of people are angry about this coin. It is especially relevant at a time when generals and certain politicians are resisting even minor cuts to military spending while public services are slashed.

There are many suggestions about what images might be more appropriate for coins that mark the anniversary of world war one. A petition calling for a coin with Edith Cavell has also been very successful, passing 20,000 signatures. Other suggestions that I like include Harry Patch, Wilfred Owen and images of graves or of people marching to the front.

I hope that some of these images will appear on coins and that our campaigning will influence the Royal Mint’s choices of the rest of their series of coins commemorating the war. I hope l that some at least will emphasise remembrance of all who died and suffered. None of these choices can make the Kitchener coin acceptable or remove the reasons for calling for its withdrawal.

I am not asking for coins that simply reflect my own view of the war. I am a Christian pacifist, but many of the petition’s signatories have very different views. Judging from their comments, they include people who believe world war one was justified but that it should not be glorified; others are pacifists while some oppose world war one but not all wars. Many comments say something along the lines of “This coin is an insult to my granddad.” It seems there are many relatives of first world war soldiers who find this coin deeply offensive.

What all these people agree on is that commemorating the dead should be the main purpose of a coin marking the outbreak of the first world war. Without this purpose, the coin does more to serve Kitchener’s successors – people such as Tony Blair, David Cameron and Michael Gove – than to honour the history of the British people and the world around them.

To sign the petition, please visit bit.ly/KitchenerCoin. 

Stop the Kitchener coin! Please sign

Posted on by symonhill

Yesterday, I blogged about the Royal Mint’s bizarre plan to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of world war one with a £2 coin featuring Horatio Kitchener and his slogan “Your country needs you”. The coin will do nothing to commemorate the millions of people who died and suffered in the first world war. Instead, it features a leading warmonger.

Today, I have started a petition about this. Please sign and spread the word. You can find the petition here.

Thanks very much!

New £2 coin glorifies war

Posted on by symonhill

You may easily have missed a news story that received relatively little media attention as Britain and the world celebrated the beginning of 2014.

The Royal Mint have revealed the design of a special £2 coin to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. It is described as a “commemorative” coin, but it does not commemorate the millions of people who died. Instead, the coin’s design glorifies war and celebrates a leading warmonger.

The coin features a picture of Horatio Kitchener, a general and peer who was made Secretary for War when the war broke out. The coin includes the words “Your country needs you”, famously printed on recruiting posters next to the image of Kitchener pointing outwards at whoever happened to be passing.

I’ve nothing against a coin to mark this important anniversary. Indeed, I think it’s appropriate that we mark it. Like many others, I will be mourning the millions of lives wasted and asking what we can learn from this futile war. I appreciate that not everyone shares this view, just as not everyone shares the pro-war views of David Cameron and others. However, nearly everyone in the UK would surely agree that it is right to mourn and commemorate the dead. Why can this not be the coin’s focus?

Let’s be honest about Kitchener. His supposedly heroic war record includes his command of the troops that carried out the Omdurman massacre. In 1898, Kithchener’s troops, armed with machine guns, killed around 10,800 Sudanese people armed mostly with swords and spears. At least another 16,000 Sudanese were wounded. In contrast, 48 British troops were killed in this “battle”.

At the outbreak of world war one in 1914, the prime minister Herbert Asquith appointed Kitchener as Secretary for War despite his lack of political experience. Asquith recognised that Kitchener was a popular “hero” figure who could help the recruitment effort.

As the prime minister’s wife Margot Asquith put it, Kitchener was “more of a great poster than a great man”. Amongst his other actions, he urged the cabinet to make things very hard for conscientious objectors and suggested that they were simply trying to avoid danger (hardly the case for the objectors who spent years in prison and those who were sentenced to death, even though the sentences were commuted).

I don’t know how the Royal Mint reached this appalling decision. I hope there is still time for them to replace the coin with one that is truly commemorative. Even if there is not, they can certainly refrain from putting into a circulation something that so casually glorifies war and champions a warmonger.

Looking for Bible-reading notes for 2014?

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When I became a Christian, I read daily (or almost daily) Bible reading notes, each exploring a particular Bible passage. They were helpful, at least in terms of assisting me to be disciplined about reading the Bible. They were less helpful in that they frequently jumped around the Bible and often implied that there was only one interpretation of a particular passage (to be fair, some did this more than others). They tended to assume that the reader had a rather straightforward view of biblical authority and they almost never drew any explicit social or political meaning out of the passage in question.

Of course, some were (and are) much better than others. In the last few years, it’s been a genuine delight for me not only to encounter some really good Bible-reading notes but also to have been asked occasionally to contribute to them.

I feel really privileged to have contributed to Fresh from the Word, a set of Bible-reading notes for 2014. Many of the notes have a focus on social engagement and they are intended to be useful to new Christians and to those still exploring and working out their relationship with Christianity. Each reflection is a page (or slightly less than a page) long, to help you to reflect on a relatively short passage.

I’m only one of dozens of contributors. They include Greenpeace organiser Malcolm Carroll, Christian musician Aileen Few, Baptist journalist Mark Woods, poet Nicola Slee and Quaker scholar Eleanor Nesbitt. The editor is United Reformed Church minister and writer Nathan Eddy. My contribution is a week’s worth of notes for November, around the theme of conversations with Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel.

You can order the book here, priced £8.75. Please let me know what you think!

Celebrating revolution at Christmas

Posted on by symonhill

Tonight and tomorrow, millions of people will gather in churches to tell each other a truly subversive story.

They will tell of a baby born to a semi-homeless family living under a viciously oppressive regime. They will declare that the mother’s husband was not the baby’s father; this was a very unconventional family. They will tell of how the puppet ruler of the area was so frightened by this obscure baby that he killed all the children in the town to try to get rid of him.

They will add stories about visits to the child from migrant travellers, who foiled the king’s attempts to hunt down the baby. They will say that the child was visited also by people whose work was looked down on, but to whom God chose to reveal the news of the birth.

In many countries throughout history, and in some today, the authorities have tried to suppress Christians telling these stories to each other. After all, they challenge authority, monarchy, national loyalty and family values.

Over time, the people with power have become more subtle and effective in their methods. They have found it much easier to tell these stories themselves, repeating them so often that they become familiar and disconnected from the realities of life, death, power and politics today. Some of us can be quite comfortable with this. We can enjoy the stories, but not the challenge they bring to our lives. Even those of us want to change the society we live in can still cling on to the comfort of familiarity.

No king, no dictator, no burner of books has ever suppressed the Christian message as well as those who have domesticated Christianity. Turning subversion into a fluffy story is much more effective than banning it.

At times, we glimpse the transformative potential of Christmas. On Christmas Day ninety-nine years ago, German troops on the Western Front displayed a sign reading “We no fight. You no fight.” The British responded in kind, and the opposing soldiers were soon shaking hands and playing football. The authorities on both sides responded by criminalising such behaviour to make sure it didn’t happen again. If people realise that they are fighting people who are just the same as them, they might decide that there are better causes to fight for, and better ways to fight for them. If the troops had gone on playing football into Boxing Day, they might have stopped the war.

The baby we’re talking about this week grew up, despite the king’s murderous intention. He continued to be in conflict with authority. He welcomed and challenged all whom he encountered. He declared his solidarity with the poor and marginalised, while offering just as much love to the rich and powerful as he called on them to repent. He spoke of the kingdom of God, a revolutionary notion in an empire whose emperor expected to be worshipped. He was executed after a rigged trial by the local rulers, helped by the collusion of religious leaders. Some of us have faith that the oppressive powers could not hold him and that God raised him from the dead to continue to lead and liberate us.

That really is something worth celebrating. Merry Christmas.

Alcohol and Islamophobia

Posted on by symonhill

As a teetotal Christian, I would not want to sell alcohol. If I worked at Marks & Spencer, and had politely asked a customer to pay another member of staff for her champagne, I doubt that it would have led to a national media story. Marks & Spencer’s policy on this issue has hit the headlines because of a staff member who made such a request – and who is a Muslim. This conveniently suits the agenda of the right-wing media, obsessed as they are with portraying Muslims as weird.

Ever since 2001, stories involving Islam have come to be regarded as inherently more newsworthy than stories involving most other religions. In the light of the controversy, Marks & Spencer confirmed yesterday that they would not force a Jewish member of staff to handle pork. This has hardly been reported at all. It would not, of course, suit the agenda of those who like to accuse supermarkets (and society generally) of “giving in” to Islam.

In the last few hours, I have received a stream of aggressive messages on Twitter as a result of expressing my sympathy for the Muslim checkout worker concerned. Of course, there is an argument that all staff in supermarkets should be required to handle any item on sale. While I do not agree with this argument, it can be expressed reasonably and peacefully. The tweets I have received, on the other hand, consist largely of attacks on Muslims.

One of the most bizarre tweets asked why I had not condemned the killing of Lee Rigby. Firstly, I have done (on Twitter and this blog, at the time of the murder). Secondly, how can anyone possibly compare a polite refusal to sell alcohol with a cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man in the street? This is the grotesque level of bigotry to which media-fuelled Muslim-bashing has led.

Bill Main-Ian, UKIP’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Carshalton and Wallington, tweeted me to tell me I was talking “absolute rubbish”. He added, “There is no force about it. If their beliefs are in conflict, why are they applying for the job?”

Perhaps because there’s mass unemployment, Bill, and half a million people reliant on food banks thanks to austerity policies that UKIP support.

Another tweet asked if I would support a Muslim who refused to serve gay people. One Twitter user told me it was like “refusing to assist people who are different to me”, which would lead to her being “sacked for discrimination”.

Yes, it would, and rightly so. It would of course be wrong if a member of M&S staff refused to serve non-Muslims or non-Christians or gay people or disabled people or people over 6’2”. This is already illegal (if not enforced as much as it should be). It is not the same as not wanting to handle, or deal in, a particular product. We must not confuse freedom of conscience with freedom to discriminate.

As someone who would like to see the entire economic system changed, and workers given far more control, I am not suggesting that these confusions can be solved simply by M&S (or anyone else) adopting a simple policy. However, while private corporations continue to dominate employment, it should not be impossible to expect them to be reasonable about respecting conscience and religious (or non-religious) choices.

It has long been the case that employers such as M&S might allocate Muslims and Jews, along with other teetotal or vegetarian staff members, to duties such as the bakery counter or shelf-stacking. It is also a sad reflection on our consumer-driven, alcohol-drenched society that alcohol can be bought at every aisle in a supermarket rather than some of them only.

Even the customer who made the original complaint acknowledged that the Muslim checkout assistant was polite when explaining that she could not sell alcohol. Such respect and reasonableness seems sadly lacking in much of the discussion resulting from the utterly unnecessary media storm.