Talk of Third World War being inevitable could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy – Joyce McMillan

Vladimir Putin must be defeated in Ukraine but subtler measures are also needed to promote the cause of peace

Sunday night, in these strange times; and the news is all war and rumours of war. The head of the British army talks of mobilising a civilian army against future threats, a Norwegian general says Europe must rearm, Joe Biden is being urged to attack Iran directly, after the deaths of three American soldiers in Jordan, and some sections of the British media are taking the talk of war as seriously as they know how.

After publishing no fewer than ten stories in five days about the imminent threat of a Third World War, the Daily Telegraph – for example – runs a features-style piece on what war could mean for life in modern Britain. The illustration features Big Ben half-concealed behind a pile of sandbags; the sub-headline asks whether the “Blitz spirit” would come to the fore, or whether our ill-prepared “prewar generation” would fall apart at the seams, faced with a real conflict.

Those with a strong sense of history may well feel, of course, that we have seen all this before; including elements of the British right berating the younger generation as a bunch of unpatriotic snowflakes, exactly as they did in the 1930s. Before we become carried away on this tide of war talk though, we as citizens surely owe it to ourselves to pause; and to consider what we might be able to do to prevent war, which is not (and was not in 1940) some kind of morally bracing, Dad’s Army nostalgia trip, but a terrifying human catastrophe involving untold suffering.

Following Finland’s example

That’s not to say that citizens who care about peace – and about the structures of human rights and justice that tend to sustain peace – will find it easy to work out how they should respond to the chilling global situation we face. Since the Hamas raid on southern Israel in October, there have been ominous signs of a world lining up in two opposing camps, neither of which fully deserve the support of peace-loving citizens. To align in any sense with Russia, China or Iran – currently framing themselves as friends of the Palestinian people – is unthinkable to anyone who values basic human rights; and all the more so since Russia’s brutal 2022 assault on Ukraine.

In that sense, it is difficult not to agree with those who argue that the nations of Europe are facing new and dangerous times, and might be wise to follow the lead of countries like Finland and Norway, which have always shared borders with Russia, and have always used forms of conscription and community service to prepare their citizens to defend their country if need be. And it’s also difficult to avoid the conclusion that one way to avoid further conflict is to ensure that Putin and his deranged vision of an ever-expanding, 21st-century Russia are thoroughly defeated and stopped in Ukraine.

Yet there is no question that the West’s abject failure to apply basic standards of international law to the Israeli government, over its devastating assault on Gaza and its population since October 7, is a fatal error that will echo down the decades, and is already creating a surge of anti-Western rage and contempt, across much of the Global South, which could both take critical pressure off the Putin regime, and mark the end of any attempt to create a rules-based international order.

Rethinking individualism

And all of this mounting conflict takes place, of course, against the backdrop of a climate crisis which urgently requires not war and polarisation, but new levels of global cooperation; a crisis, indeed, which makes any intention to waste more resources on weaponry and war seem criminally wasteful. Small wonder that even Rishi Sunak’s government is not currently buying the arguments for conscription, among a generation many of whom feel that UK foreign policy has lately taken a serious wrong turn.

So how can peace-loving citizens navigate this field of horrors? Demonstrating and protesting against blatant acts of aggression and violence is an understandable response, and a positive one; as is putting pressure on our elected representatives, voting for parties and politicians which do not war-monger, and trying to counter the influence of the lucrative arms trade.

It strikes me, though, that there is one powerful grain of truth in General Sanders’ argument on mobilisation; and that lies in the idea that all of us as citizens now probably need to rethink the ingrained individualism of recent decades, and to become more mobilised, more prepared, and better organised against an age of threats to our world, and to our communities. The pandemic was a huge warning klaxon about the kind of grassroots mobilisation that may be needed in future crises; and in the unlikely event of the UK facing a direct military threat, that kind of mobilisation – once known as civil defence – would also have a role to play.

The UK, including Scotland, would therefore probably be well advised, at this moment, to invest resources not in a bigger army, but rather in the strengthening of its existing community networks, as an aspect of resilience to all the possible threats of an uncertain future. And those of us who want peace, and a world that tries to live according to basic humanitarian law – well, we each have our own decisions to make about whether and when war is ever justified.

What we know, though, is that we owe it to all the victims of war down the ages to keep the horror of it always in our minds, and to try to avert it wherever we can. In that sense, to accept war as inevitable – and to talk up its inevitability – is the greatest and most murderous sin of all; and to keep trying to imagine and build peaceful and positive futures, as the architects of peace in western Europe did after 1945, remains the greatest obligation we carry, now and always.