Pugwash UK
Movement for the Abolition of War

5. Pervasive cultural factors that maintain the institution of war.

As well as the everyday issues discussed in the last chapter, other aspects of the culture in which we live affect our attitudes to war. The cultural climate is influenced by a country’s history, but also both reflects and affects the attitudes of its citizens. For example, nation-states differ markedly in the frequency with which they have experienced war. Some have a long history of militarism, others, like Switzerland, have managed officially to stay out of it even while war raged all around. Sweden, formerly one of the most belligerent states in Europe, took a deliberate decision in favour of neutrality. In general, aggressive attitudes towards outsiders is related to the structure of the society, and to the incidence of violence within the society: amongst industrial societies, those with high rates of homicide tend to be frequently involved in war. Perhaps it boils down to the value placed on human life.

In Britain the culture is deeply entwined with the military. As Head of State, the Sovereign is Head of the Armed Forces. The Queen and other members of the Royal Family hold appointments and honorary ranks in the Armed Services both in the United Kingdom and in parts of the Commonwealth. Furthermore there is a long tradition of embarking on a military career. Prince William, like his father the Prince of Wales, learned to fly with the Royal Air Force and was then seconded to the Royal Navy. Prince Harry entered Sandhurst and served in the Household Cavalry’s Blues and Royals. To what extent is this royal involvement in the military of value to our society and to what extent does it support and encourage militarism? Certainly our cultural values would be enhanced if the Royal Family placed more emphasis on their altruistic roles, as exemplified by Princess Anne as president of the Save the Children Fund.

The importance of the cultural climate is demonstrated in the impact produced by “An Airman’s Letter to his Mother” (see Box). Published in the Times on June 18th 1940, when the UK’s situation seemed almost hopeless, and written by an airman expecting to be killed in the near future, it had an amazing impact. By the end of the year over 500,000 copies had been sold. King George VI wrote personally to the mother. Later a film based on the letter was made. Facsimiles are still obtainable. It could have been Government propaganda, but its authenticity seemed to be confirmed by a letter from the airman’s commanding officer.

I have given space to this letter because it illustrates how one’s attitude can change with the culture, and how the cultural climate can be changed by people’s attitudes. At the time, I took it at its face value and found it inspiring: it was probably a factor in my joining the RAF. As an aircraftsman, frustrated by delays in my pilot’s training, I adopted the cynical attitude of my peers. We had another version which started “Dear Mother, It's a bugger. I’ll send you ten shillings but not this week…”. And now I share what is probably your view – the letter is over precious and the appeal to Empire is absurd.

Not only the cultural climate of the nation as a whole, but also the existence of differences, especially differences in race, colour and creed within it or between it and other states, can affect the likelihood of violence when exploited by leaders to further their own ends. Conflict and war are facilitated when there is a clear distinction between “us” and “them”, between the in-group and the out-group. In everyday life, inter-group rivalry exists even between groups picked at random, such as two football teams: one can say that the propensity to denigrate “them” is part of human nature. The difference becomes more potent when exploited and emphasized by leaders to increase loyalty to their own group. Thus in Northern Ireland the differences, originally basically economic, came to be portrayed as religious, Protestant versus Catholic, and rivalries going back hundreds of years have been resurrected to intensify the conflict. Such internal violence can spread beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The terrible civil war between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda was facilitated by the former colonial masters having insisted on distinct identity cards for the two tribal entities. It has led to devastating violence also in the neighbouring states, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, partly as the result of their interference and partly due to the emigration of refugees.

Rwanda is an example of how, in the colonial era, the seeds of civil conflict were sown when new national boundaries were drawn without regard to cultural or tribal differences. In Yugoslavia, also, groups that saw themselves as culturally distinct were united– eventually with disastrous consequences. In such situations individuals who had been good neighbours and friends may forget their common humanity and, almost overnight, be at each other’s throats.

Religious differences are especially potent as labels accentuating conflict. Many facets of religious belief probably arose as labels for cultural distinctiveness. The Hebrews saw their distinctiveness to lie in the fact that they worshipped a single god in contrast to the polytheistic tribes with which they were surrounded, and the strict dietary laws of Leviticus were a constant reminder that they were different from others. Religious labels are especially potent because they seem to legitimise war and portray it as a sacred endeavour. In the thirteenth century a Dominican preacher commented of those who died in the Crusades “by this kind of death people make their way to Heaven who perhaps would never reach it by another road”. He might well have been writing about the modern suicide bomber.

As noted already for Northen Ireland, religious and secular issues are often intertwined. The motivation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seem to have been primarily politically motivated – anger at the unconditional American support for Israel and the presence of western troops in Saudi Arabia, but in the longer term religious factors have played a major part in uniting the opponents to western interference in the Middle East.

The importance of government propaganda in exaggerating cultural and religious differences in time of war cannot be over-estimated. On posters, in the newspapers, and in the radio and television the enemy are portrayed as evil, dangerous, even sub-human. In retrospect, it is remarkable how successful this was in World War 2. In spite of the facts that Germany and the Allies were both mainly Christian, and that many Germans had been naturalised several generations back in the USA, stories of German atrocities in Belgium in the first War, or that German pilots shot British pilots descending by parachute in the Battle of Britain in the second, were held with the same certainty as beliefs that the behaviour of British troops was always impeccable.

Categorisation and denigration of the enemy:
A US First World War recruiting poster.
(Imperial War Museum)

The difficulty is, of course, that many propaganda claims have a basis in fact, though a very small one. I could perhaps believe that some German troops did rape women in Belgium, and that the great majority of British troops behaved well. It is certainly true that allied aircrew showed enormous dedication and courage, though the implication that they were all so fearless in the face of death as the Airman’s letter implied is certainly dubious.
What is the answer to these pervasive cultural issues? First, as I have tried to illustrate with the “Airman’s Letter” we must remember that cultures change and can be changed. My attitudes were affected by the cultural climate in which I found myself, and the cultural climate was changed by my attitude and those of thousands like me.

Second, to repeat the key words in the memorandum originated in 1955 at the height of the Cold War by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein, and signed by scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain, “REMEMBER YOUR HUMANITY”. War becomes almost inconceivable if one sees the other side not as “them” but as human beings just like oneself, feeling hungry and frightened, with hopes and fears, parents and partners and children. They are human beings whatever the propaganda says. In modern war, when so much killing is done at a distance, this may not be so easy. The bomber pilot sees himself as doing his duty, and does not need to visualise the suffering he is causing on the ground below him. One bomber pilot, describing his role in attacking a city that had already been identified by flares dropped by the Pathfinder force, wrote: “Our own part in the fighting was quickly over….what we had to do was to search for the coloured lights dropped by our own people, aim our bombs at them and get away”. Only later this pilot came to realise the enormity of what he was doing. Ordered to lead a raid on a small German town he knew that civilian “casualities were bound to be high because the roofs of cellars and shelters would collapse with the heat and a weight of rubble that they could not carry”. Later “I could see I was trapped…. I was sure that what we were doing was not only wrong but stupid ….(yet) I had to believe that the top brass thought this the best way to win the war..” Many years after the war, I asked the widow of a distinguished fighter pilot what he had felt about the people he had killed. She replied. “Well, of course it was not like that. His goal was to destroy enemy aircraft, not to kill people”. And I do not suppose that the German submarine commander who sank my brother’s troopship had any need to think about the human consequences of what he was doing.

In the longer term, we must strive for a world which is not built around the independence of nation states. A fine line must be drawn here: we certainly do not want the glorious diversity of local cultures to be submerged in a uniform Coca Cola world, but at the same time we must search for leaders concerned with global governance and not solely with their own countries’ interests.

Above all, hope must lie in education. Education can put a country’s traditions in perspective, and induce a properly cynical insight into propaganda. Nowadays the history taught in schools is getting to lay less emphasis on wars and conflict, and is more concerned with the lives of ordinary people. Many UK schools try to bring home the true nature of war by taking their pupils to the battlefields of Flanders and Normandy. There they can see the rows and rows of graves, the names of the “missing”, and imagine the horror of the trenches. I remember my own thirteen-year-old coming back from such a trip where they had been shown a mass grave of unknown soldiers and saying with horror and disbelief “Dad the grave was only this big, and there were over five hundred people buried there”.

Unhappily, not all schools are so enlightened. The school in which I was educated still has a military display from serving soldiers, sometimes a parachute drop onto the playing field or a display of aerobatics, on speech days. It even has a “War Games Society”: apparently the children re-enact famous battles on sand trays or in the fields. How could they imply that war is a game? In another arena, encouragement by the UK government of single faith schools is hardly likely to encourage religious tolerance: for those who are religious it is important to be taught about their own culture and to worship in their own way, but it may be even more important that they should learn to respect the cultures of others.