When a country goes to war, governments always back up their decision with high-flown rhetoric about defending this or standing up for that. They did it at the start of the First World War in 1914. When the shipbuilding workers of Govan on Clydeside went on strike in, I think, 1915 they were told they were “disloyal”, “unpatriotic”. The workers’ union replied that it was not their war. In his book The First Day on the Somme, Martin Middlebrook didn’t mention such resistance during those years, not just because his focus was on one day in a particular battle during that war, but also because he believed that “[t]he entire country, and beyond it, the Empire, entered wholeheartedly into the conflict.”^[1] He did, however, recognise that the reality behind the war was not high-flown at all. He wrote:

“Britain’s stated war aim was to secure the neutrality of Belgium, but in reality she wished to curb the power of Germany, whom she regarded as a growing rival to her trade, maritime and imperial interests.”[2]

So the crime of the workers of Govan was really their disloyalty, not to some idea of “the nation” or to “King and Country” (both of which are routinely dressed up as noble causes) but to something even more questionable as objects of loyalty: Britain’s “trade, maritime and imperial interests”.

In the Foreword to his novel about the First World War, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway makes a similar point, but with some anger:

“The title of the book is A Farewell to Arms and except for three years there has been war of some kind almost ever since it has been written … I am sure that I am prejudiced, and I hope that I am very prejudiced. But it is the considered belief of the writer of this book that wars are fought by the finest people that there are, or just say people, although the closer you are to where they are fighting, the finer people you meet; but they are made, provoked and initiated by straight economic rivalries and by swine that stand to profit from them. I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.”

Moving on to the 21^st century, it seems that the crime of those of us who support Stop the War is similar to that of the workers of Govan in 1915. So let’s keep saying, with them, “It’s not our war.”

[1] Middlebrook, M. (1984). The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916, Penguin Books, London, p. xv.

[2] Ibid.