Lest I forget who bears the cost of lives

Lest I forget, it’s Remembrance Sunday.  Every day, for one reason or another, I think about people who have died in military action, and so I do not stand in silence for two minutes once a year to commemorate them. I understand and support others who do want to make public their feelings of loss.  I guess we each have to find a way of respecting and remembering those who have lost their lives so violently. This is not to set aside thoughts for those survivors who have been physically and emotionally maimed by war.

Those who die as a consequence of military action have almost invariably been carrying out the will of governments, and this, to an extent, might be morally satisfactory if those wars had been honourable ones. The latter has too seldom been the case. In large measure the less well off people in our country have been the ones who have lain down their lives waging war under the orders of a relatively small group of rich, comfortably off people. The latter generally instigate war to protect their own positions of power, their own financial interests and not the interests of those they would have fight for them. Of the wars in which the United Kingdom has been involved since the beginning of the 20th century it is my own personal view  - and I may be wrong -  that only World War II can be claimed to have been morally justifiable, in that those fighting against the Axis forces were truly doing so in the interests of the wellbeing of all humankind.

I mourn the deaths of each of the human beings who have died in recent decades obeying the orders of a UK government. I do even more so because they were told that they were fighting for our freedom and for the freedom of others. In my view it is difficult to argue that the latter has generally been the case and I am saddened that we do not mark as religiously as those of our own that we do today, the deaths of all the innocent civilian adults and children who have been slaughtered as a consequence of our military adventures in the middle-east in recent decades.  Who bears the cost of these lives ?

For Keir Hardie ditto Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn, like us all, is no doubt a flawed human being, but in my opinion he is a man modest about his own accomplishments, yet nonetheless proud of the achievements of the Labour movement. I am certain that he would not ask to be seen in the same light as James Keir Hardie, one of the founding figures of the Labour Party and its first MP at Westminster. Nonetheless Keir Hardie's treatment at the hands of the baying mob of Planet Westminster bears some comparison with what Jeremy Corbyn faces today and the following extract drawn from Bob Holman's biography of Keir Hardie* hints at the inner strength a person would need when in the face of orchestrated and unrelenting personal abuse.  

“Then he accepted personal abuse. The personal attacks and lies about him never ceased. Early in his parliamentary life, he printed the menus from which MPs gorged themselves and contrasted them with the lack of choice of the starving. They retaliated in the press with rumours that he was a glutton, smoked cigars costing 2s. 6d. each, and lived in a hotel where he enjoyed champagne and ten-course meals. He received hundreds of crude letters. At elections he was accused of advocating free love and being an atheist. Often when he rose in the Commons to make a case for the socially deprived he would be jeered, howled at, and interrupted.

When asked by his friends to hit back, he replied, “Let conduct be its own reward.” Yet the continual misrepresentations, false accusations, and cruel cartoons must have been among the factors which sometimes depressed him and increasingly affected his health.”

Things don't seem to have changed much in the ensuing 100 years.

From:  Keir Hardie by Bob Holman, Oxford, Lion (2010) and  iBooks. https://itun.es/gb/jug4H.l 

Alison Poltock of the East End Film Festival writes for Europe

I've just received this post from Alison Poltock, the Director of the East End Film Festival which opens today, June 23rd, 2016.

I can’t sleep. The festival kicks off in 4 days, but all I can think about is the fact that Thursday 23 June is going to go down in history, and not because it’s the opening night of the East End Film Festival, sadly.

A newsletter just popped into my email from a healthfood shop. It was a plea from the owners to vote Leave. It had some interesting points about the EU health directives, restrictions on drug trials, TTIP….

But the trouble is, all these discussions have become rather moot for me now. The debate has become polarized to such an extent that it reminds me of a journey back from a football match some years ago where my team were on one platform shouting “Watford” and the other team were on the opposite platform shouting “Chelsea”. It just went on a bit too long until you could see everyone starting to think ‘this is a bit embarrassing, we’d better add some words’ – but instead they decided to just shout the same one word, louder, with more menace and add a weird lunging movement.

The Leave campaign bleat that they’re not racist, but actually for all the chichi chitter chatter about trade and the economy (where it seems the only consensus is that NOBODY KNOWS what’s going to happen), unfortunately the ‘Freedom to control our National Borders’ is the main reason that people want to leave. The rhetoric is all about protecting our national identity, like it’s some kind of deified Toby Jug.

If you look at the Better Off Out campaign, It lays out a whole list of ‘freedoms’ that Leaving the EU will supposedly afford us: ‘Freedom to make major savings for British Consumers’ (in other words, to fuck-over workers rights), Freedom to restore Britain’s special Legal System (fuck over human rights), Freedom to save the NHS from EU threats…’(fuck the NHS).

I’m not a proponent of the EU - it’s an unelected organisation based on neoliberal ideology, but Leaving isn’t going to throw us into some kind of ambrosial orgy of socialist democracy, it’s going to throw us into a 3-way with Johnson, Gove and Murdoch with all the horror that entails.

To be honest, any nuance in the argument has disappeared for me. I instinctively thought we should remain before researching in any detail. And since then, any Lexit arguments seem marginal and pointless coz Leaving has come to mean only one thing: the rise of ugly nationalism.

If anyone can tell me how Brexit will make us more loving and tolerant to our neighbours, then I want to hear it. But no one can, that’s already become clear. I just hope that there’s enough people out there as horrified by this poisonous xenophobia as I am – and that they’ll get out and vote before things get any worse. So whilst I have some sympathy with a couple of the anti-EU points – ultimately, if we don’t want the haters to win, there’s only one way to vote: ‪#‎VoteRemain‬

Alison Poltock
Director | East End Film Festival

Mob: +44 (0)7973 836474
email: alison@eastendfilmfestival.com
web: www.eastendfilmfestival.com

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