Political commentary

Donna Quixote

Colin Welch

Arecent letter in the Guardian attacked alleged Government plans to muzzle, pollute or take over the media in the event of a major international crisis. It was signed by, among other coryphaei of the Left, two members of 'Journalists Against Nuclear Extermination'. Retired majors of my ac- quaintances were much disturbed to hear of this organisation, news to them as to me. I protested hotly that it must be quite unrepresentative of the vast majority of journalists, a fine body of men and women who are just as passionately in favour of nuclear extermination as retired majors and all responsible people.

I called in on the Greenham Common ladies the other day to see how they are get- ting on. Their encampment, in its poverty, improvisation and squalor, recalled the direst suburbs of Port-au-Prince or Bom- bay. A guider would have had a fit. Most of the shacks are floored with deep straw. Since many of the occupants roll their own cigarettes, with sparks flying all over the place and stubs trodden out in the straw, the risk of conventional incineration, should we ever have a dry day, must be sad- ly and incongruously high.

Near the entry daffodils spelt out PEACE. How could I object? I do not rage when greeted with `salaam' or `shalom'. Objectionable nonetheless is the peace people's appropriation (as homosexuals have kidnapped 'gay') of `peace' as their own exclusive property, sought and cherish- ed by them alone, fit to describe themselves and their movement but no-one else, as if we didn't all, psychopaths apart, pray and work for peace at this most dangerous time.

Timidly shrinking from the group of maenads clustered round the main fire, I spoke mostly with a very amiable couple, one, with sandy hair cropped en brosse, looking like a piquant blend of Huck Finn and Pinocchio. Pinocchia's views had about them a weird and grand sort of con- sistency. She was against not merely cruise missiles here but all missiles everywhere, all means of attack, all means of defence, against all the systems of which these evils are to her expressions, against organisation of every sort. There was no sort of organisation at Greenham, she assured me. I could believe her: si monumentum re- quiris, I thought, circumspice.

All rulers were to her mad, equally mad, all governments bad, equally bad. Reagan, Andropov, America, Russia, Britain — all mad and bad. For Pinoccia Mad Margaret is of course Mrs Thatcher, who has im- prisoned her for expressing het political views (ie, for creating a breacn of the peace, for trespass or the like). By thus imprison- ing Pinocchia for a few days, Britain has shown itself as bad as Russia, Mrs Thatcher another Stalin, the Berkshire police another KGB, the Newbury bench a row of Vyshin- skys, cruel oppressors all.

The consistency of Pinocchia's rejection of the world was marred only by petty trifles — the presence in her shack, for in- stance, of cornflakes and TCP, produced by some sort of organisation and paid for at least in part, as was reluctantly confessed, with welfare funds derived from that same hideous system which deploys missiles. Systems are thus not so easily or wholly escaped, unless by those entirely self-reliant for their own food, clothing and necessities. But of vegetable patches or useful animals (as of books) I remember at Greenham no sign. Perhaps I was unobser- vant.

Pinocchia seeks to preserve the world from destruction. Bully for her: so do we all. But it is a world which she and her friends keep at a distance. So far as they can, they seem to have cut themselves off from parents, children and the possibility of engendering children, from family and family friends, from ordinary life, from fruitful work, from all obligations and responsibilities save one — that of unmak- ing a bomb which cannot be unmade and which, if it could be unmade, would at once, with human knowledge and nature as they are, be made again.

The world which Pinocchia wishes to preserve is for her a notably grey, cold, remote, lifeless, almost lunar sort of place, devoid of all the shadings and colours of reality. No part of it as it is seems to arouse in her any particular affection or detesta- tion. It is all for her blighted by the system or systems, by organisations and institu- tions. Her allegiance is thus to a future world, purged of all such evils. Of this abstraction I can form no picture and nor, I guess, can she. After I had left her, I could not thus help unworthily wondering, friendly and congenial as I had found her, whether she was impelled less by passionate concern than by either a fastidious squeamishness or by indifference, aliena- tion, a sort of nihilism, not by a superfluity of feeling but by a want of certain feelings, a dislike of civilisation or unwillingness to pay the price for it.

We baser mortals, attached to this fallen world as it is and to some part of it in par- ticular, will if need be resort to all sorts of dirty tricks, to lies, compromises and strategems, to threats which if carried out and to weapons which if used would be im- moral, in order to protect it. Pinocchia breaks in — to protect it against whom? The Russians don't want war.

Doubtless they don't, poor souls. Nor did they want civil war, famine, the uprooting and dispersal of whole peoples, the murder and barbarous imprisonment of tens of millions, the persecution of art, thought and religion, the extinction of freedom by a tyranny of brutes and liars. But this in the past 65 years is what they have got. And nuclear war might yet be ad- ded by rulers who care not a fig for their views or feelings and who think they might win it.

`Win it?' cries Pinocchia. 'Nobody can win a nuclear war'.

But alas, there is much evidence that the Russians think they can win a nuclear war. In a hair-raising article by Prof. Robert Jastrow in the March issue of the American magazine Commentary, it is confirmed that Soviet military thinking rests on the surprise use of massed nuclear missiles, leading to victory. Is this the explanation for Russia's fantastic `overkill' capacity, so inex- plicable, irrational and vexing to pro- ponents of MAD (mutual assured destruc- tion) and of the precise `balance of terror' as an objective to be secured by patient multilateral negotiation?

But Russia wouldn't have won, Pinoc- chia objects. That tremendous first strike would destroy the earth's atmosphere, and with it all life on this planet. Russia would have lost too.

The Kremlin apparently doesn't agree. And so long as it retains its nuclear superiority and its shameless bellicosity, it might even be able to conquer or dominate the world without striking a blow. Pinoc- chia is undismayed. Of the grim world which might result from that she has no true picture, against it no prejudice. Is it not the clear and urgent duty of the west to redress the present imbalance, thus rendering the present period of acute danger as short as possible? We are bidden to love our enemies. If we do, should we not warn them, not only by words but by an adequate missile programme, against adventures which, as Pinocchia says, might mean absolute disaster for them as well as us?

Pinocchia thinks the arms race the worst of evils. Worse still, surely, is an arms race lost? Is it within the west's power to win this one? Do not the inadequacies of the Soviet economy set some limit to the effort re- quired by the wealthy west?

We parted, she towards her pacific pot of lentils or the like, I to whatever lunch the system had prepared for a carnivorous militarist, travelling by very different roads to distinct if not incompatible destinations, she to PEACE, I to anything less ghastly than war, she Donna Quixote, I Sancho Panza.

I waved, hoping that, if we should meet again, it wouldn't be in the gulag. She smil- ed at the very idea ...