Column
Comment
Middle East
War & peace
4 min read

Cynical twists that make wars unjust

The dodgy deals and human shields of a past war still disgust George Pitcher, who questions if just war criteria remain fit for today.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A destroyed airliner lies on the apron of a war-torn airport.
A destroyed British Airways plane at Kuwait airport in 1991.
USN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the very early hours of Thursday 17th January 1991, I was despatched as a young journalist on The Observer to the dealing rooms of Smith New Court, a worthy firm of stockbrokers in the City of London, to witness how the markets reacted to the outbreak of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 

A yellowing newspaper cutting shows I reported that, a little before 8am, Smith New Court’s chairman, Sir Michael Richardson watched prime minister John Major declare war on a TV monitor and then said:  

“I had a nudge on the political line a little early, so I’ve been up all night. We have to keep things tightly under control.” 

He did indeed say those words, but it’s not the whole story. Walking up to him on the dealing floor, I asked how we were positioned in the markets for war. Mistaking me for one of his dealers, my notes showed that he replied:

"Number 10 called me last night, so we could adjust our positions in oil. So we should be okay.” 

It was a magnificent example of insider-dealing, in collusion with the government. A few minutes later a Smith New Court PR woman ran up to me to say that Sir Michael hadn’t meant that and even if he’d said it, I was a guest on the floor and everything said there was confidential. 

Kuwait was always about oil. This was an insight into where the UK’s political and financial priorities lay. Richardson had been at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s Government as an unofficial adviser to the Treasury. This was his dividend. Eventually he was to lose his dealing licence for making unsafe loans to an American entrepreneur. He died in 2003. 

I’m reminded of this story today, Thursday 21st September, the United Nations’ International Day of Peace, because it reminds me of where governments’ priorities really lie, because these are the priorities that invariably threaten peace.  

And it matters because over 300 people on board were subjected to unimaginable suffering as “human-shield” hostages.

I’m also reminded that only last week passengers and crew aboard British Airways Flight 149 are preparing legal action against the government for being treated as “disposal collateral”, as the aircraft was used to plant special forces in Kuwait in the early hours of 2nd August 1990, as Iraqi forces crossed the border. 

Their claim is that the UK government and BA have “concealed and denied the truth for more than 30 years". The issue has come to a head now because documents released in 2021 show that the Foreign Office was warned of the invasion an hour before the plane touched down.  

And it matters because over 300 people on board were subjected to unimaginable suffering as “human-shield” hostages over the following five months. 

These stories have a common thread. Smith New Court, with the government’s help, was about money. The government, with BA’s help, was about protecting its Kuwait oil reserves. It’ll be proven that the lives of innocent people mattered much less against these priorities, if they win their case. 

That should make us very angry indeed. The sheer hypocrisy of rhetoric that spoke of defending the people of Kuwait is one thing. The idea that they could simultaneously serve God and Mammon is quite another. 

But it may be that just-war criteria have failed to keep up with the motivations of global late-capitalism. 

The principles of the “just war” have enjoyed a long tradition in Christian thought. The foundations that were laid in the classical Greek school by the likes of Aristotle were built upon to provide a moral architecture for armed conflict by the Italian Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. 

The just war tradition distils into two sets of criteria:  jus ad bellum (the right to go to war) and jus in bello (right conduct within war). The former set contains consideration of “just cause” and rules out war as a simple means of recapturing things or punishing people who have done wrong. The second includes matters of proportionality. By these clauses, combatants must ensure that harm caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive in relation to military advantages gained.  

In the second war with Iraq, an adventure that prime minister Tony Blair started with US president George W Bush in 2003, neither of these criteria arguably were met, along with others besides. To paraphrase Wilde, they knew the price of oil and values counted for nothing. 

But it may be that just-war criteria have failed to keep up with the motivations of global late-capitalism. Economic dependence on oil is now more usually something we hear about in the context of the green movement’s war on the climate crisis. Dependence on oil actually has a firmer grip on political control of the cost of living in western democracies. 

These are not issues that occurred to hot-shot stockbrokers playing war games in 1991, nor to a privatised national airline allegedly being requisitioned for military purposes. But it’s surely not too much to hope that the senior actors in either instance should have summoned at least a religious folk memory to say: No, this isn’t right.  

Article
Comment
Digital
Film & TV
Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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