War and Unpeace

I n the eventful years between 1822 and 1922, nearly 1 million British subjects died in war, but not a single member of Parliament died in a political assassination. After the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson by Irish republicans in 1922, there passed more than a half century before the next assassination of an MP: the murder of Airey Neave, also by Irish republicans, in 1979. Those were bloody years, too — nearly a half-million British dead in World War II, more than 1,000 dead in Korea, 1,200 in Indonesia, hundreds in Palestine and Malaya, and more in other, smaller conflicts.

With the stabbing murder of Conservative MP David Amess at Belfairs Methodist Church on Friday, two MPs have been assassinated in five years. In 2016, it was Labour MP Jo Cox, shot and then stabbed by a man shouting “Britain first!” — a slogan with a familiar shape, and also the name of a rightist political organization in the United Kingdom.

Cox’s assassin was a friendless misfit who spent his days on the Internet reading about mass shootings, and was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia and newspaper clippings chronicling the crimes of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist. (Breivik, who now prefers to be called Fjotolf Hansen, killed eight people in Oslo with a bomb before gunning down 69 victims at a summer camp. He now spends his time complaining about the “inhumane” conditions in his Norwegian prison.) The BBC reports that the Amess assassination is being investigated as Islamic terrorism and has identified the killer as Ali Harbi Ali, a British man of Somali background.

Amess was something unusual in Parliament: a pro-life Catholic, also noted for his interest in animal-welfare issues and his vocal criticism of English anti-Semitism.

American progressives may be scandalized to hear it, but you can do a great deal of damage without easy access to firearms. The Evening Standard now has a standing header: “London Stabbings.” Norway has been shocked this week by a terrorist massacre — the alleged perpetrator was a radicalized Muslim convert — in Kongsberg, carried out with a bow and arrows. But Americans should know better: Far more of us are murdered each year by means of fists and blunt objects than by so-called assault rifles. While we argue about the right to keep and bear arms, we apparently cannot be entrusted with the right to keep and bear hands.

But, aren’t these the best of times? In our time, far fewer people are dying in wars than at any other time in human history. Before the Industrial Revolution, the murder rate in Europe was something like 30 times what it is today, maybe more. Most other forms of violence, both official and private, have declined dramatically, too. So have deaths from famine and many preventable diseases and chronic conditions.

If this is peace, why does it hurt so much?

Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations begins his new book, The Age of Unpeace, with a provocative simile:

Great power politics has become like a loveless marriage where the couple can’t stand each other’s company but are unable to get divorced. And as with an unhappy couple, it is the things that we shared during the good times that become the means to harm during the bad ones. In a collapsing marriage, vindictive partners will use the children, the dog, and the holiday home to hurt each other. In geopolitics, it is trade, finance, the movement of people, pandemics, climate change, and above all the internet that are being weaponized.

In a sense, the macro and the micro imitate and recapitulate each other. MP David Amess was assassinated in a church while conducting what the British call a “constituent surgery,” something like a professor’s “office hours” but for an elected leader. Political assassins and mass killers (who may or may not have a political agenda) weaponize the public space, turning the locus of shared community into the locus of fear and domination. Terrorists operate in the same way. So do the neo-Maoist bullies chasing around Senator Kyrsten Sinema. So do the imbeciles chanting “Fu** Joe Biden!” at sporting events. On the personal level as on the global level, to be alive in our time is to be connected — like it or not. One of the things to which we are connected is a vast technological apparatus that amplifies the reach, range, voice, and power of individuals and small groups of people, from philanthropists to mass murderers.

Leonard and his colleagues at the ECFR are engaged in trying to work out how nation-states (and multinational confederations such as the European Union) go about existing in that connected world, achieving genuine peace or, short of that, keeping the casualties of unpeace to a minimum. But because foreign policy is generally a hostage of domestic politics (this is especially true in the United States), those macro considerations are very much bound up with events and personalities at the micro level. The weaponization of immigrants and refugees that Leonard writes about is part of a single complex phenomenon that includes everyone from Anders Behring Breivik to Steve Bannon, who is on his way to criminal charges for refusing to comply with subpoenas in Congress’s investigation of the events of January 6. The forces that warp the minds and souls of figures such as Breivik — and, it may turn out, the assassin of David Amess — also warp the minds and souls of nations.

They can flip elections, too.

Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and full-time Donald Trump sycophant, describes himself as a right-wing “Leninist.” About that much, if not much else, he is telling the truth. Lenin understood terror to be good in and of itself. When the Russian revolutionaries proposed to outlaw capital punishment, he overruled them. “How can you make a revolution without executions?” he demanded. Lenin had other ideas: “We shall return to terror and to economic terror.” Like the Bannon-aligned nationalist-populists who sneer at conservative concern for procedure and the rule of law, Lenin proclaimed that his program was “unrestricted power based on force, not law.”

So, the voters in David Amess’s constituency have their say, but, then, so does his assassin, who acts with “unrestricted power based on force, not law.”

There is a certain superficial attraction to that for a certain kind of person. In practice, it is only violence and tyranny. But there is an alternative.

Call it the Washington Consensus, globalist neoliberalism, capitalism, or whatever you like — the system of interlocking institutions and protocols that developed in the years after World War II and flourished at the end of the Cold War did not produce a utopia. It was never meant to. And it is having a hard time standing up to the Age of Unpeace. But it does provide the basic tools for decent, fruitful relations between and within nations: a rules-based international order, the rule of law at home, protection of civil liberties, a light hand on enterprise and trade, freedom of speech and a free press, regular legal procedure in both criminal and civil matters, democratic accountability. The catch is that these tools have to be cherished to thrive and to function, insulated by local and national norms and by mature political cultures. And what hope do we have of that in a time in which self-professed conservatives, of all people, heap scorn and ridicule on our most vital norms, relishing in the violence done to them?

A nation that holds its best blessings in contempt will not continue to enjoy them for very long. If you want to know what the alternative to peace is, have a look at Belfairs Methodist Church and the blood on its floors. If you want to have a free world, then you need men and women who know both how to be free and why.