by Ian Fantom

What is it that turns man into beast when a war breaks out? 

In 1914 only five British MPs voted against declaring war on Germany, yet there were widespread suspicions that there was a secret deal between Britain and France that Britain would send troops to France if France were to be attacked by Germany. One of those MPs was Arthur Ponsonby, who later wrote a book ‘Falsehood in War-Time’. He revealed not only the lies told during the war, but the lies told in order to get Britain into war in the first place. Had that been known for certain at the time, there would probably have been no war. 

In 2012 an influential US think tank, The Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, held a seminar under the title ‘How to Build U.S.-Israeli Coordination on Preventing an Iranian Nuclear Breakout’. In reality, it was about how to get the US into a war with Iran. Their Research Director, Patrick Clawson stated: “I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very difficult for me to see how the United States President can get us to war with Iran”. He went on to summarise the traditional ways of getting to war, and concluded by saying, “We are in the game of  using covert means against the Iranians”, and that they could get nasty with it.

It would appear that all wars are started by a Big Lie, which leads whole populations to believe that they are under an imminent threat from the other side. The invasion of Iraq was no exception, though Tony Blair was one of the few British Prime Ministers to get caught red-handed.

Even if there is no war, it seems that some people are in a war mentality. Perhaps employed by the secret services in the military, they seem to believe they are acting out of patriotism, when that sense of loyalty is not to the people of the country, but to the political and banking elite, who largely control the minds of the people. How else could we explain the behaviours of Patrick Clawson, Tony Blair, and many others, some of whom circulate in our everyday lives, and may actually be known to some of us personally?

That means that whole populations can believe different things, because they are trusting of those who hold authority in their respective countries. This is linked very much to language, which is not only a means of communication, but also a badge of identity. The fighting in Ukraine is not explicitly about language, but language differences play an important role in the definition of ‘two peoples’. When the language of one is suppressed by another, then one of the two peoples is being suppressed by the other. In Yugoslavia Serbian and Croatian were previously thought of as two dialects of Serbo-Croat, until fighting broke out, when each of those two peoples had to be careful which words they used when mixing with the other. Even in Northern Ireland, where they all spoke the same language, they didn’t all identify with the same language. “Do you realise I don’t speak my own language?”, one Irishman once said to me.

Populations are kept separate, so as to minimise communication across boundaries. The authorities don’t want their big lies to be revealed by their enemies. As Ponsonby points out, lying is an integral part of warfare. The purpose may be to mislead the enemy, or it may be to harness the support of their own population. But without the Big Lie preceeding the outbreak of hostilities, there would be no war in the first place.

So to get even limited contact between people on both sides of a war can be quite challenging. Russia and the UK are effectively in a proxy war in Ukraine. 

The August meeting of Keep Talking in London was possibly a first in bringing together people from both sides, with a video link to three Russians in Moscow and St Petersburg, with a live audience in London. The three Russians had appeared in a ‘List of Shame’ produced in Poland, vilifying them as warmongers. I later managed to get into some correspondence with the person who had drawn up that list, who told me that the names were given by others, and he couldn’t himself give me the evidence. When I managed to contact one of the ‘others’ I was met with evasion and abuse.

The result of that meeting is a video of the whole of the proceedings, which can now be viewed online. Here it is.