Anti-War

On the road that runs along the sea front a large Range Rover is motionless while the engine continues to run. The driver is staring out to sea. Dreaming of concentration camps for refugees and law and order for the people who shuffle through the streets, plastic shoes, thin coats, huddled up, it’s cold. Just as cold as it is at home. This is England, masses of people are cold and hungry. Hunters in the snow; but who is chasing who?

Automated voices in German, French and English can be heard from the port area. It is cold and grey. Only a few lorries turn slowly as they drive onto the decks of the ships. I’m unsure of some ideas I had back then, some other time, but more assured of others. Ideas are a process that never stop changing. It’s better that way. But some appear to have a fear of losing rigid dogma.

Debts, increasing rents, the movement of land values, fuel poverty, food poverty, money poverty. There is a scarcity of things that people really need and yet an abundance of so much else. Plastic trash, food that’s thrown away. Too much oil, too much shouting media, too much Elon Musk, too much right-wing manic grinning, too many commodities that have little purpose beyond the further accumulation of capital.

Not enough food but plenty of bombs to drop on the terrified people of Gaza. Not enough heat in the radiators of the poor in Moscow, but plenty of missiles to fire at schools in Kyiv. Too many dictators, not enough real leaders of a socialist opposition.

The cliffs are no longer white. They are grey and stained with the poisons that emit from the lorry exhausts. They rise into the air and then fall back to earth as micro particles of tar and toxic dust. Each layer of chalk is permeated with pollution. I can taste petrol in the air.

The cliffs are stained yellow, as if the rain has become ammonia, a bilious yellow, to wash away the tears, or is that to burn the flesh of those who protest? It’s not just about stopping oil, what about the clean up? How is the world going to be de-contaminated after all this abuse?

A long ago civilisation has left behind some rusting stairs, slowly being covered by the sea. That’s all the remains there are. The buildings and public forums, architecture and art; all washed away. What will remain after capitalism has failed?

There were two Palestinian women walking ashore from the sea. They were freezing cold, their clothes soaked with icy salt water. The small raft they had clung on to had just been hit by rockets from an jet fighter of the Israeli Defence Forces. It screamed away, over the cliffs, towards the North Sea. There are protests today in Edinburgh. They’ll be dropping bombs on them as well.

They have a few carrier bags. All that’s left. Everything is else is lost. Their favourite dresses, photographs of their families growing up. Their children dead, buried under the rubble but there are no machines or people left to dig any survivors out. The table that the family sat around each evening for a meal when the children updated their day at school. The school’s gone too. Just some burned remnants of a classroom.

The hypocrisy of the world leader’s once again revealed. The macabre theatre of hate continues. Through the cost of thousands upon thousands of innocent people being murdered.

Peace involves an end to the shriek of rockets and the metallic banging of machine guns and the crash of masonry as a hospital collapse under the weight of bombing. Peace involves an end to the terrified screaming of children, maimed, bloody, half-alive, more half-dead.

Peace is against the noise of war; ant the volume of capital.

It increasingly feels as if the whole world is moving towards war.

Or rather the world of Putin, Biden, Netanyahu, Sunak, Starmer, Mohammad Bin Salman and all the other crooks and hypocrites.

I don’t get the sense that loads of us at ground level are banging the drum for war. (Everyone I’ve ever known who has been in a war hates it. The war lovers tend to have never been anywhere near one).

And at least most of us aren’t hypocrites. We don’t order the bombing of children and hospitals and pretend we’re liberals in the process.

I’m really sick of real politik and compromise.

Anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-capitalism; for the international interests of the working class. It’s not that difficult.