Sarah Baxter on the Women's Movement

Sarah Baxter, whose writing I first came across when she was Political Editor of The New Statesman around 15 years ago, has a thoughtful piece in today's Sunday Times comparing the peace camp of Greenham Common in the 1980s with today's feminist campaigners against war. She writes:

Something has gone badly wrong with a politically correct feminism that prefers to take aim at the United States, a haven of free speech and relative sexual equality, than to tackle the threat posed to women by Islamic fundamentalism. Just as the existence of Thatcher, the Iron Lady, at the helm of British government in the 1980s failed to impress the women’s peace movement, so the presence of Condoleezza Rice, a black woman who grew up in segregated Alabama, as US secretary of state has not dimmed the cries against American “racism”.

For this the 1980s peace movement must take some of the blame with its overbearing emphasis on the evil Reagan empire and soft-pedalling of the Soviet Union. But I am surprised, all the same, by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes.

The regimes and movements she is referring to include Iran and its proxy Hezbollah. Of course she is right. One of the longstanding themes of this blog is that there is something bizarre, if not entirely lacking historical precedent, in the way campaigners nominally of the progressive wing of politics now habitually ally with causes of extreme reaction.

One shouldn't be sentimental about the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and I'm relieved that Ms Baxter - who writes of her activism on its behalf - is not. The campaign against the deployment of Nato's Cruise and Pershing missiles got almost everything wrong, starting with the extraordinary misconception that these were first-strike weapons intended to allow the US to fight a 'limited' nuclear war in Europe. (The rationale was the exact opposite: to demonstrate to the Soviet Union the strength of the US commitment to the defence of western Europe, by filling a gap in the system of extended deterrence on which Nato strategy rested.) Most fundamental, the anti-nuclear campaigners failed to understand that international tension was a function not of a supposed arms race but of the political relations between states of which those weapons were a symbol. The old END (European Nuclear Disarmament) slogan of a nuclear-free Europe 'from Poland to Portugal' was, as Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor Of War Studies at King's College, London, wrote at the time ("Disarmament and the Future of Europe", Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 1981, reprinted in the author's The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma, 1986, p. 55):

... frivolous and pernicious. These matters are too serious for objectives to be decided upon because of alliterative effect. Apart from neglecting Scandinavia, it avoids the critical question of the Soviets. It is like talking of a "zone of peace" in Africa, "from Mauritania to Mozambique", carefully overlooking [apartheid] South Africa. At least the old Gaullist slogan, "from the Atlantic to the Urals", was clear on Soviet geography.

The cause of the anti-nuclear movement was, in short, favourable to the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. It could not have been otherwise, because at its best the movement considered Nato and the Warsaw Pact to be comparable alliances, whose dissolution was necessary. The movement was wrong. Nato was an alliance of free and independent states, in which the armed forces of the leading nation were stationed in Europe by invitation. The Warsaw Pact was an organisation of a totalitarian power and its satellites, in which the armed forces of the leading state were stationed in Europe by force of geography.

But to say, factually and descriptively, that the anti-nuclear movement served Soviet interests is not to say that its leading figures themselves advanced pro-Soviet propaganda. CND in the 21st century is a different animal in this respect, because it frankly advances the cause of theocratic Iran in its nuclear diplomacy. As Ms Baxter observes (and as I have also noted):

Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.

The CND Chairman in the anti-Cruise campaigns, Joan Ruddock (now a Labour MP), would not have advanced something like this, and I know for a fact does not share the views of CND in opposing the UN's multilateral mechanisms for disarmament where they apply to Iran. The late E.P Thompson, the leading polemicist for END in the 1980s, argued spuriously that there was no moral difference between the foreign policies of the US and the USSR, but was prepared to venture the judgement, understatement though it was, that "there has been some pro-Moscow influence in the Western peace movement, and it has been damaging and time-wasting" (Double Exposure, 1985, p. 51). Reports reach me periodically of named former Greenham and CND campaigners who are aghast at the shift in attitudes of the organised anti-nuclear movement. The principal exception appears to be Bruce Kent, General Secretary of CND in the 1980s, a silly man then and now, who I understand is in accord with CND's "regret at the IAEA’s decision [in February] to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme".

Ms Baxter concludes:

The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair.

I hope those whose disquiet she quotes, and those she campaigned with a generation ago, perceive the stakes so clearly.