BUNKING-OFF BLAIR'S CIVICS CLASS
On the day the second Gulf War started British school children protested in London Liverpool, Birmingham and other towns and cities. Five thousand swelled the demos in Parliament Square. The school students' protests sum up not only the failure of military campaign to overcome disaffection and, more widely, the inability of the authorities to transmit their beliefs to a younger generation.
According to the police and media, the protestors are just truants, but that does not really account for the school children's behaviour. Protestors from Ackland Burleigh School told the WEEK that they had been manhandled and punched by police in Parliament Square, and were clearly doing more than bunking off. But the teenagers' confidence is a reflection of the authorities' inability to lay down the law. At least one London education authority (Camden) is recording school absences as educational visits - which incidentally protects their position for attendance in the league tables.
According to students, teachers can do 'nothing' to stop them leaving class. Though assemblies have been organised on the war, students report that teachers avoid stating a position on the war, for fear of being 'political'. Meanwhile teachers in the staff room at Parliament Hill, including those who have demonstrated against the war themselves, resent the disruption, and ridicule senior management's unwillingness to face down the students. There the headmistress tried to head off walkouts by organising a supervised pupil's delegation to the protests.
Surprised at the schools' inability to control their pupils, the authorities have failed to understand the way that Britain's old martial culture has been undermined. Lacking the moral resources of Imperial Britain, the New Britain that emerged after the Cold War subsists on a culture of conflict avoidance and anti-bullying initiatives. School students raised in this climate find it difficult to understand why toy guns are banned but troops sent into battle; they do not see why war can be right, when their own minor squabbles are subject to extensively regulated 'conflict resolution'; and they find it difficult to understand why racism is reprehensible in the class room, but other races are the target of aerial bombardment. And when the Prime Minister glories in his own rectitude, students' are thrilled to discover that at little cost they too can conquer the moral high ground.
THE COMING RESOLUTION
The Atlantic split between 'Old Europe', in particular France and the US is only the geographical expression of a policy difference than can be seen dividing each Western society, regardless of whether they are in the 'Coalition of the Willing' or the anti-war camp. The difference is over the best means to regulate the post-Cold War world - through a rolling state of emergency, policing rogue states and terrorism, or, by the piecemeal creation of institutions of 'international cooperation', underpinned by humanitarian interventions to aid victims of war and famine.
Despite the apparent hostility between these two approaches - underscored by the refusal of France to support a UN reconstruction plan for Iraq proposed by the UK at this weekends European summit - the eventual resolution of the transatlantic conflict can be anticipated. Already the action in Iraq is being reconceived as a humanitarian mission instead of a war (a war, after all, implies two sides to a conflict, but on the ground there is only the US forces and 'pockets of resistance'). Correspondingly the Iraqis are conceived less as enemies, still less as a sovereign nation, more as objects of charitable assistance. If the US achieves military control of the region relatively quickly, the aid organisations and other non-governmental organisations and the United Nations itself, will find the temptation of 'reconstructing' Iraq irresistible.
One unresolved question for the reconstruction is the ownership of the oil fields currently being 'secured' by the coalition forces. Mindful of the charge that this is a 'war for oil' the coalition - especially the British end of it - are stressing that the oil will be held 'in trust' for the Iraqi people. But leaked accounts of a US document determining the post-war conditions includes contracts for government services as well as the privatisation of Iraqi oil. All of this begs the question, which is it, trust or privatisation? It seems that the 'trust' that the US government has in mind is modelled on the Treuhandanstalt that held East German industry so that it could be privatised. If so, the parallel is not promising. East Germans lacked the funds to buy back their own industry, which transferred to mostly West German hands, while the anticipated value of the asset sale dropped from 1.2 trillion Deutsch Marks to minus 400 billion DM once debts and environmental costs had been factored in in successive re-estimates throughout 1990 (U Heileman, R Jochimsen, Christmas in July: The Political Economy of German Reunification Reconsidered, Brookings Occasional Papers, 1993, p18).
-- James Heartfield
http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/james1.htm