Violence in Human History

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker's brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence. Pinker does not deny that individual human beings are capable of the most appalling acts of savagery. But the test of our propensity for violence is how the rest of us respond. Once it would have been basic human instinct to react to violence on this scale with more violence. But where were the reprisals, the mob rampages, the demands for the torture and killing of the perpetrator? Instead, the Norwegian people responded with remarkable compassion and restraint: love-bombing instead of real bombing. What happened in Norway this summer showed just how peace-loving we have become.

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. As Pinker shows, it is both a long story and a relatively recent one. The first thing that had to happen was the move from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence (where your chances of meeting a violent end could be as high as 50:50) to settled communities. The trouble was that early governments showed themselves at least as capable of cruelty as anyone else: most of the truly horrific instruments of torture Pinker describes were designed and employed by servants of the state. As the 17th-century philosopher John Locke remarked of the escape from the state of nature to so-called civilisation: why run away from polecats only to be devoured by lions?

So the next thing that had to happen was the state had to be properly civilised. This took place over the course of what we have come to call the enlightenment, thanks in part to philosophers such as Locke. In both private and public life – covering everything from table manners to bills of rights – the means were found to restrain our worst instincts. Slowly, painfully, but ultimately successfully torture was outlawed, slavery was abolished, democracy became established and people discovered that they could rely on the state to protect them.

Yet the enlightenment has acquired something of a bad name. Why? The answer is simply put: the 20th century, surely the most appallingly violent of them all, scarred by total war, genocide and other mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale. All those table manners and bills of rights didn't prevent the Holocaust, did they? At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend. The two world wars were essentially freak events, driven by contingency and in some cases lunacy: a bit like the killings on Utøya magnified a millionfold. They do not reflect the default condition of mankind. The evidence for this is the third part of Pinker's case: look at what has happened since 1945, as the world has become immeasurably more peaceful on almost every count. Of course, there have been horrors (Mao, Pol Pot) but no one can doubt that the arrow has been pointing away from the violence of the first half of the 20th century, not back towards more of it.

Pinker calls the post-1945 period "the long peace". But the real surprise is what he calls "the short peace", which corresponds to the 20 years since the end of the cold war. I am one of those who like to believe that the idea of 1989 as some fundamental turning point in human history is absurd: the world is just as dangerous as it has always been. But Pinker shows that for most people in most ways it has become much less dangerous. There have not just been fewer wars, but in the wars there have been many fewer people have died. Terrorism is down, not up. All sorts of disadvantaged groups – women, children, ethnic minorities, even animals – are much less likely to be victims of violence across many parts of the world, and the trend is spreading. Part of the reason we fail to notice this picture is that it is so pervasive: we are more aware of violence simply because we have become so unused to it.

At the outset Pinker calls the story he has to tell "maybe the most important thing that has ever happened in human history". That depends. If you told a medieval peasant that all the horsemen of the apocalypse that blighted his (and even more so her) life would be vanquished by the 21st century – famine and disease as well as war and violence – it might be the first two that seemed the real miracles (as well as being responsible for saving many more lives). Some peasants (though here perhaps more the hims than the hers) might also feel a little ambivalent about the decline of violence. Human aggression, unlike famine and disease, is not just some capricious act of God. It is part of who we are. Giving it up might leave even a victimised peasant feeling a little diminished.

Pinker accepts we have not abolished violence in the way that we have abolished smallpox. In the final section of the book he moves from history to evolutionary psychology to show that human beings are always torn between their inner demons and their better angels. What decides us between them is not virtue or vice but strategic calculation. We resort to violence when violence seems the better bet. We resist it when it seems riskier than the alternative. That's why violence can be self-reinforcing – as in the tit-for-tat world of the hunter-gatherers – but it's also why peace can be self-reinforcing – as in the love-bomb world we inhabit now. Pinker is adamant that we should not be complacent about the decline of violence: the inner demons are still there. But neither should we be fatalistic: as things stand, our better angels are a truer reflection of who we are.

What might change that? As I was reading this book I was repeatedly reminded of two novels. One is Lord of the Flies, an earlier generation's definitive allegory of the violence lurking in us all. Pinker's book makes Golding's vision look dated: there is no state of nature bubbling away beneath the surface of civilised man, notwithstanding all the hysterical nonsense that has been uttered about the recent riots (which were, for riots, remarkably unviolent). The other novel is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this generation's definitive allegory of how it could all go wrong. McCarthy pictures a world in which some random future spasm (perhaps an environmental catastrophe) leaves us all unhinged and lets the inner demons loose. Does our gradual move away from violence towards civility leave us better or worse equipped to deal with the next great calamity when it comes? No one can know, and Pinker does not pretend to provide an answer. But in the meantime, everyone should read this astonishing book.

Slavoj Žižek on the Riots (and everything else!)

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.

We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.

It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

Survivor Of The Day

Mexico - A Failing State?

Violence

Gun Laws Around The World

Australia

Ownership is strictly prohibited unless there are "genuine reasons" such as licensed sport, animal control or employment requirements.

Brazil

If you are over 25 and have registered a weapon, you are free to keep it indoors. The country has the second-highest gun-related death rate after the US.

Canada

Significantly stricter than the neighbouring US. To acquire a licence, applicants must undertake a safety course, pass a criminal records check and be certified by a firearms officer.

China

Civilians are not allowed guns, except for hunting and protection from wildlife. The illegal sale of arms can be punished by death sentence.

India

Gun ownership is a "privilege" under the Arms Act of 1959, allowing civilians to have a licence if they can prove that there is a "threat to life".

Czech Republic

Liberal laws compared with the rest of Europe. Applicants must pass a questionnaire on firearms, have no criminal record and show ID proving they are over 21.

Austria

Also liberal. Guns are classified by four categories – the lowest, for non-repeating shotguns, requires no registration for over-18s.

Germany

The Federal Weapons Act (1972) restricts everything apart from replica guns to over-18s, who must pass checks for "trustworthiness, knowledge and adequacy".

Italy

Citizens can have up to three "common" handguns in their home, but if they want to hunt or carry a concealed weapon they must apply for a licence.

Japan

Licensing requirements are considered a formality – there is little enforcement of the strict laws. However, gun deaths are among the lowest in the world.

Mexico

Strict laws apply for ownership, including criminal records checks. However, there are growing concerns that smuggling from the US is undermining these regulations.

Norway

Since 1989, no registration has been required for buying a shotgun over the counter. There are an estimated 500,000 unregistered guns in homes. However, gun crime is very low.

Russia

Hand guns and fully automatics are prohibited, but over-18s with no criminal record can apply for a licence for shotguns and air rifles. Self defence is not an excuse for carrying firearms outside the home.

Switzerland

All able-bodied men between 20 and 34 are required to have fully automatic firearms in their homes in case of a call-up to the army under the doctrine of "universal conscription". Others may own weapons for hunting but need a licence. Gun crime is so low that statistics are not kept.

UK

Anyone convicted of a criminal offence cannot handle, possess or shoot a gun. A licence is needed for any firearm except low-powered air rifles/pistols. Self-defence is not a valid reason for ownership. The country has one of the world's lowest gun crime rates.

USA

Fully automatic firearms are legal in most states. However, you need a criminal records check and must pay $200 registration tax. In 2004, there were 29,569 gun-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Madness, Again

Bye Bye or Buy Buy?

Six months ago I proposed in the Guardian that if Britain was short of money it should cut defence. I did not mean reduce defence, or trim defence. I meant cut it altogether. We are desperately short of money and absolutely no one is threatening to attack us now or in the foreseeable, indeed conceivable, future. Besides, as we have seen this past week, other ways of ensuring security make more pressing claims on us. We just do not need an army, navy or air force. So why are we paying £45bn for them?

I am not a pacifist. I accept the need to fight to protect my home, hearth and nation and, in extremis, to uphold some concept of global civilisation against an all-consuming tyrant. I grew up accepting the danger of a nuclear war exchange as real; I was never a member of CND. Nonetheless, it stands to reason that all public expenditure must justify its claim on the taxpayer, especially one such as defence that is essentially precautionary. Defence is an insurance premium, a massive one. But it cannot merely be asserted as necessary, and left to professionals to fix the premium.

Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.

This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.

Only later did I realise that review laid the groundwork for a decade of indiscipline and budgetary chaos. Nothing was related to strategy, let alone foreign policy. Each service ordered what its favourite supplier made, and then kept redesigning it. Some hapless future government would pay, even if it was no longer needed. I was intrigued this year to see the MoD ask that the cost of Trident be shifted from the defence budget to the Treasury on the grounds that the deterrent had nothing to do with defence. The outcome is what David Cameron has called a car crash of a defence budget.

Anyone who takes taxes from others should be obliged to say why. In the case of most public spending, the answer is easy. It is to buy a school, hospital, road, care home or welfare benefit. In the realm of overall security I am glad money is spent on the police and the intelligence services. I accept the need for some monitoring of borders and airspace and coastline. I also accept the need for some territorial reserve, for instance to assist in civil emergencies and in UN operations.

Some taxes are an insurance against future risk, such as being ill or having a sick relative. But they are usually subject to some actuarial assessment of the risk. Defence spending is insurance of a different order. We make no actuarial calculation of the risk of British citizens dying in a military attack or of British property being destroyed. Yet we are required to part with a premium of £45bn a year to prevent it. Why?

Two weeks ago the coalition government bravely tried to answer this question. It published a list of threats to Britain's security in what I must say is one of the most bizarre documents to emerge from the ectoplasm of the MoD. It was a paranoid's manifesto, a Matrix movie horror. Admittedly, the authors had a tough job. There is no Wehrmacht hovering across the Channel, no Napoleonic Grande Armée massing at Calais and no megaton missile with itchy communist fingers pointing at Britain. So how on earth were they to justify £45bn? They decided, in their tidy way, to group various so-called threats into three tiers of seriousness.

The first tier contains four threats, like a Russian doll. Number one, presumably the greatest, is "attacks on British cyberspace by states and cyber-criminals". The second is international terrorism. The third is a "military crisis" between other states, one that "draws in" Britain. The last is "a major accident or natural hazard that requires a national response," such as coastal flooding or flu.

The second tier of threats comprise "an attack from another state using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons". Next come "instability, insurgency or civil war overseas," that affect us by somehow "creating an environment that terrorists can exploit to threaten Britain". In other words terrorism again. Next is a big rise in organised crime. Next is "severe disruption to satellite-based information, possibly deliberate from another state". This is a repeat of the cyberspace threat.

Lastly we have the third tier of threats, the least serious. The first is "a large-scale conventional military attack on Britain" by an unspecified other state. The second, somewhat desperately, is terrorism again, the third is crime again. The authors clearly ran out of threats, but had to fill their threat quota. We are also threatened by immigrants and smugglers "trying to cross the UK border". We are "threatened" by an accident at a nuclear site; by a conventional attack on a Nato ally, and by an attack on a British colony. Finally, we face a curious bundle of threats: fuel shortages, price instability, and "a short- to medium-term disruption to international supplies or resources".

You may note that almost none of the above is a threat. They are crimes and catastrophes or, in the case of being "drawn in" to a foreign conflict, a matter of political choice. Many things on the list may make me feel a bit uncomfortable, but few are remotely to do with the security of the state. They are incoherent and repetitive and rather desperate, like a madman with a sandwich board crying, "They are coming to get you; the end is nigh!"

Yet this list was the basis for last month's strategic defence review with its £45bn price tag. A set of threats that are almost entirely non-military is to be met by submarines carrying nuclear missiles, two new aircraft carriers and dozens of jet fighters.

Let's start with the threat of a nuclear missile landing on Britain. I have seen no analysis of how this might emerge from the existing international order, and certainly no explanation of how nuclear deterrence might apply in any specific case. In the barely conceivable eventuality of Iran or some such hostile state building a bomb, buying a missile capable of reaching Britain and then firing it, the act would be so lunatic as to be beyond any plausible deterrence. You cannot deter a suicidal nation any more than you can a suicidal bomber. Small wonder defence chiefs wanted their nuclear missile reclassified as "political".

As for using this precious weapon to deter a conventional attack, that is surely no less fanciful. Britain's possession of nuclear missiles has had no deterrent value in any of the dozen wars it has fought in half a century. Did we threaten Argentina with it? No. Yet time and again military strategists refer to it as a useful "reserve capability". When a soldier resorts to abstract nouns you know he has lost the argument.

As for the threat of a conventional attack on the British Isles by another state, we can only ask, who? The threat is so negligible as to be insignificant. It is like insuring one's house for billions of pounds against an asteroid attack. Is the attack to come from Russia, or France, or Germany, or Ireland? Defence pundits to whom I put this crucial question look down their noses, as if it were impertinent or undergraduate. They murmur that one can never know. Yet the political preconditions for a conventional attack on Britain are so distant – the review relegates it to tier three – that Britain would have some notice and time to re-arm, as we did with remarkable speed when last so confronted in 1940.

By jumbling together accidents, diseases, natural disasters and crimes as "threats", the government undermines its own plausibility. The defence lobby is trying to hijack the jobs of the police, civil rescue and medical professions. In the case of "price instability", it even wants to hijack the Financial Services Authority. These are not "threats to national security" against which we expect the defence ministry to plan or assemble conventional forces.

The same applies to the threat which the MoD has struggled for decades to make its own, that of international terrorism. The threat review is so keen that it lists it no fewer than three times. It implies a requirement to deploy conventional forces against terrorists, who might be acting as "proxy" for a state. But there is a difference between a state that wants to overpower, conquer and rule us – a ludicrous threat of no serious concern – and one that merely wants to make a nuisance in the hope of achieving some lesser goal, such as getting Britain out of Northern Ireland or making Israel into a pariah.

The latter certainly has applied, but if we were to deploy conventional forces against such a state we might, over the last quarter century, have declared war on Libya, Syria, Iran, the Irish Republic and even the state of Massachusetts. We did not. We treated an act of terror rightly as a methodology, a criminal means, not a political end. As Joseph Conrad said in The Secret Agent, the terrorist was a pest walking the street alone. His is a local and specific form of violence, causing mayhem in the hope of spreading panic and changing a state's behaviour in response to it. Terrorism has no political content unless awarded one by the victim nation.

With the IRA and the PLO in the 1970s, the authorities played down the political significance of any outrage. Prisoners were treated as criminals and denied political status. The most limited coverage was given to their demands. Now we do the opposite. We play up the politics. I remember the admirable response to 9/11 by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. He told New Yorkers on the day of the attack to go about their business as usual, use the park, go to a show, buy a pizza, keep working and, above all, keep spending. The trouble was, 9/11 was so awful an incident as to apparently transform a terrorist outrage into an apparent state of war, and thus admit it within the ambit of conventional defence. Nobody took any notice of what Giuliani said. They did what al-Qaida wanted, which was indulge in mass hysteria. Blair said the rules of the international game had changed – an astonishing accolade to Osama bin Laden. This cannot be unconnected with the fact that a politician's poll rating soars in the aftermath of a terrorist incident. Nothing helped George Bush more than 9/11.

Politicians rush to the cameras, dive into bunkers and warn of threats to civilisation as we know it. Conventional military forces are put on alert. Blair once rushed tanks to Heathrow in a madcap gesture of self-importance. We invaded Afghanistan for harbouring terrorists. We invaded Iraq on the thesis that it might do so. Do we now invade Pakistan and Yemen on the same basis?

Far from being deterred, terrorists and their sponsors clearly derive prestige and political clout when conventional forces are ranged against them. We thereby put them on the pedestal of state threat. By infringing our liberties and curbing our freedoms in their honour we let them win battles. By being publicly scared, as of this week's parcel bombs, we invite them to scare us some more.

Such an approach to defence is not just wasteful but counter-productive. Politicians from Blair to Cameron declare the aim of war in Iraq and Afghanistan is to make the streets of Britain safer. There is not an iota of evidence for this extraordinary claim. Most analysts, including former security chiefs in the House of Lords, say the precise opposite. These wars have made us less safe, by making Britain a prime target for terrorists and breeding homegrown terrorists in schools, colleges and mosques. Watching Gordon Brown in Helmand mouthing nonsense about boys dying for safer streets was painful. He clearly did not believe it.

So what of the other most common cause of Britain going to war, the threat of being "drawn into" someone else's squabble? First, this is not a threat but a political choice. These wars are nowadays called wars of choice. They are always beguiling. What you have, you are induced to deploy, often for the vaguest of purposes, such as "making the world a better place". The navy cites the need to stop pirates in the Indian Ocean and drug-runners in the Caribbean. Blair contributed British forces to six separate conflicts in his time in office, in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and two each in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. None was in response to a threat to the security of the British state. They were adjuncts to his foreign policy goal of "hugging close" to Washington.

Armies with nothing to do tend to distort the purpose for which they were formed. They become institutionalised. They coalesce into a wide constituency of veterans, territorial and political supporters, above all, equipment suppliers. As with terrorism, so with the government's other listed threats, we should ponder those who leap forward to publicise them. Whenever the BBC calls in a "security expert" to comment on the awfulness of some new threat, we should be told for whom he works. Remember Deep Throat's maxim, follow the money?

Being "drawn in" is the phraseology of the security review. But note the intransitive. Drawn in by whom? In whose interests, or on whose behalf, are we spending billions of pounds killing thousands of people in the Muslim world just now? Shouldn't we also have been "drawn in" to Rwanda, Darfur, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Burma? In each case, man's inhumanity to man has been more gross than in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did nothing.

From the earliest enunciation of liberal interventionism, it has been wanting in rigour. In 1999, Blair spoke in Chicago in favour of humanitarian "just" wars, as if they carried with them their own validation. All they carried was a clutter of moral superiority. I do not regard Germans or Japanese or Indians or Brazilians as lacking in moral fibre for not fighting alongside us in Blair's wars. I find nothing peculiarly moral, first in helping the break up of former Yugoslavia, then the break up of Serbia and now the devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are left with what I call the ontological argument for defences spending. It exists and therefore it is. It is the ultimate security, to which no concept of proportion can apply. We protect ourselves out of instinct. Like spending on health, you just cannot get enough of it.

It is a response not to known threats (such as Russia), nor even to known unknowns (such as a resurgent Russia), but to those famous unknown unknowns. The great ontologist, Donald Rumsfeld, remains the patron saint of defence expenditure.

The argument can take amazing forms. Come now, say the high priests. Just suppose another Hitler rose again, built a new Luftwaffe and U-boats, and bombed London and sank all our coastal trade. We would need a carrier. Suppose Russia falls under the sway of an oligarch with a grudge against Harrods and a business rival in Kensington Palace Gardens. Suppose he decides to nuke them. Supposed 100 suicide bombers block-booked themselves on Eurostar and went to every Premier League match. You would look pretty silly, Jenkins, wouldn't you?

I would look pretty silly, and probably I wouldn't be the only one. But for the time being, I regard such unrealities used to justify massive spending as no less silly. We can only meet realistic threats. We do not build 1,000 NHS hospitals and leave them to await the return of bubonic plague.

Britain as a sovereign state is less "under threat" today than ever in my life, indeed less than ever in its existence. That is to the credit of recent generations of British governments. But this means we do not need a defence that has been successfully rendered obsolete.

The chief threat to me today, if at all, is from crime. Yet we are appalling at combating it. Obsessed with punishment, we neglect crime prevention. To guard me from unreal foreign attack the government spends £45bn, but to guard my home and hearth from crime it spends just £6.4bn, and badly. I am defended against crime, including terrorist attack, not by an army, navy or air force, but by vigilant acquaintances of the criminals, by an alert school and mosque, by the police and by the apparatus of intelligence, espionage and diplomacy.

The truth of the matter is that our defence spending is misdirected and extravagantly out of date. We are re-equipping for Agincourt on the brink of Waterloo. We are laying down long boats for the battle of the Atlantic. We are deploying cold-war weapons against occasional outrages by fanatics with no capacity to cause the state harm.

I sometimes wonder why I see things this way, when so few others do. I am a pragmatist, not a pacifist. But I respect language, and am suspicious of the vapid cliches about national interest, punching our weight, sitting at top tables and being respected. I hate to see terrorism, a miserable perversion, accorded the accolade of grand enemy of the state. I hate to see statesmen whose job is to keep threats out of sight and mind exploiting the politics of fear.

The fault lies partly in the sloppy language used to discuss defence, which loses all ability to convey risk and proportion and slides into sloppy nouns and sloppy thinking. At that point, leaders lose touch with democracy, a serious threat to the security of any state. The only defence against that danger lies not in armies, bombs and guns, but solely in the deployment of meticulous reason.

by Simon Jenkins

Where Were You That Day?

That Tuesday morning...

Last week, the website WikiLeaks released half a million pager messages that were sent on Sept. 11, 2001. These messages provide a fascinating glimpse back at how people responded in real-time to the terrifying events of that Tuesday morning. While many of the messages are either unrelated to the attacks or simply the incomprehensible techno-babble of automated telecommunications, many others capture the raw emotional flavour of the chaos following the tragedy. People reach out to family and friends to see if they're safe, exchange "I love you" s, inform others who may not have heard about the terrorist acts and express -- often in colourful terms -- their shock and outrage.

The texts make for fascinating reading, and provoke some good discussions of the cliched, "Where were you when it happened?" variety. But a source I've found even more interesting, if chilling, is the Sept. 11 Television Archive ( www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive).Here, you can watch television coverage of the event as it happened, starting even before the attacks began. The videos cover the major American broadcasters -- CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox --as well as the BBC. The passage of time has not dulled the horror. It's still as much a kick in the gut as it was eight years ago. Indeed, watching the coverage again this morning, my eyes were glued to the handy little clocks the networks insert into their broadcasts alongside their corporate logos. A literal countdown. It's like watching a tragedy from afar, knowing it's going to happen, but being helpless to stop it. The feeling of dread is still overpowering.

Al-Nakba

Tarantino The Great

Robert Capa