The questions we have to ask ourselves

What should doves and pacifists be asking about the post-American century. And are we ever going to ask them?

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I’m never going to go to war. No matter how bad things get, no matter how extended any conscription gets were the worst to happen, they just are not going to call up 50-year-old women. It is with a level of consciousness of this that I always try to think about what we can and should do when it comes to military action. It simply will not be me being asked to put my body on the frontline of the action.

Despite this consciousness, I am not a pacifist. I lean more toward the dovish than the hawkish position, but I have supported and opposed different military actions throughout my life.

But I know an awful lot of pacifists of my generation. For many, it is one of their defining beliefs. But it has – for the most part – been a comfortable belief and one that may be challenged in the coming decade in ways it never will have been in their lifetimes. Conscription ended over a decade before I was born. Before my parents were old enough to have been drafted into it. Ever since then, serving in the army has been a choice – one that many leftists simply can’t imagine making. It’s often the choice though of young, working class men who did see it as a good way to get a good job and a good career. As someone whose politics is class conscious, that has to factor into my attitude towards not just war, but the treatment of those who will fight it.

The same is true of the defence industry. I recoil in horror at the stories of landmines left behind only for children in conflict zones years later to find and blow themselves up with. I don’t resile from opposing this form of weaponry for a second. It is wrong.

But that doesn’t mean that all defence manufacture is wrong in a world where war has always existed. And it doesn’t mean that those communities who rely on the defence industry should be judged differently from those whose traditional manufacturing industry is shoes or pottery or cars. This is why I have always loved Shipbuilding as an anti-war song - because it does wrestle with some of these complexities.

Pacifists and doves of my generation were not radicalised by Vietnam. My generation was radicalised by Vietnam movies (often while also talking loudly about US hegemony and propaganda). Now don’t get me wrong, I think the Domino theory and the war in Vietnam in particular were dumb as rocks. But as a woman born in the mid-1970s I have lived through not just a sustained peace, but after 1989 (when I was a teenager) I wasn’t even living under the threat of the cold war. There were a few exceptions – I just about remember the Falklands, and a war in Yugoslavia saw refugees come to my school so that one probably had the biggest impact on me. I marched against both Iraq wars because I thought these were bad choices. I also opposed military intervention in Syria - which I think now I was wrong about.