FRANCES  NEWMAN - A WORLD AT  WAR

War, Art, Artists and Society

Mike Gonzalez
Continued from previous page

And in 1917, at one end of Europe, the soldiers on the Russian front chose to make a revolution against the social system that had sent them there, rather than continue fighting against people much like themselves on the other side of the line. They had perhaps come to the moment of recognition that Wilfred Owen recorded in his poem ‘Strange Meeting’ – “ I am the enemy you killed, my friend, I knew you in this dark”

If 1919 was a revolutionary year across the world, it was in part because a generation had experienced the barbarism of a war fought with terrible consequences for interests which they did not share.

We cannot measure, of course, what part art played in this new awareness. But it is reasonably certain that the songs, the poems and the visual images offered a way to feel and make some sense of what had happened. And art, at just such times, can also offer a vision of imaginary places where very different ways of being could prevail.

In the end, we are moved to act as a means of resistance to what is, by some sense of moral purpose – a sense of what we are moving towards as well as from. It is perhaps a unique quality of art that it can, at the same time, do both – reflect upon what is, but charge that act of seeing with a sense of what might be.

Today, Tony Blair and George Bush are once again claiming that the deployment of their weapons of mass destruction has a moral purpose. In the looking-glass world that they inhabit, death and destruction are, we are asked to believe, signs of a peace to come. The ideological machines line up beside the tanks to offer their description of the world against which the West has launched its attacks. The terrorists, the barbarians are at our gates.

And yet when we see their faces, they are people we can recognize (“my enemy, my friend”) whose lives and homes are familiar, or were before the Israeli tank or the cluster bomb tore them apart.

For 20 million people at the very least – those who marched across the world on February 15th 2003 - the lies had been nailed. The marchers carried placards saying ‘No blood for oil’. That simple slogan encapsulated an insight of extraordinary depth. War it said was not an aberration, an unexpected byway on the straight road of capitalist progress. It was a natural condition of that journey.

The plan to invade Iraq was not an opportunistic response to a single terrorist act. That was just the pretext. The strategy had been conceived many years earlier by those who drew up the Plan for a New American Century. Systematic violations of human rights have taken place for decades throughout the Middle East, and particularly in Palestine. Yet not a single Western tank had moved in response to them. The threat to the free flow of oil, by contrast, produced an instant military response from Britain and the United States. And when the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan was immediately followed by the return of the warlords and their armies, the Hoons, Straws and Rumsfelds pronounced themselves satisfied that the situation was now satisfactory and freedom (their freedom) had been restored.

In the new imperial age of aggressive US expansion, war is not limited to battlefields or war zones. Rather, the war waged by a global system and its local servants recognises no free territories other than those conquered and defended by themselves. The war is as global as the interests it serves. The United States refuses to recognise the International Criminal Court or the agreements of the Rio or Tokyo conferences on the environment.

Morning (Jobless) Oil on board 40 x 40cm 2002.

Above: Noon (Moneyless) Oil on board 40 x 40cm 2002.

Above: Night (Stateless) Oil on board 40 x 40cm. 2002

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