How exactly does sitting in a bag or growing your hair bring about peace? Please explain the mechanism step by step.

Yoko Ono had some very strange ideas. One of the stupidest ideas was that if you performed an action thinking that you were doing it for a particular cause that cause would be magically enhanced by that action. That is witchcraft.

A trainee bookmaker living in Braintree in 1973 grows his hair long. Please explain to me how this causes war to end. Hey we’ve all got to what we can do, right? OK, let’s eat asparagus for world poverty, balance bricks on our heads for climate change or drink cider for the election of a female Pope. Doing what you can is not enough, if what you can do or choose to do has no conceivable way of impacting on what you want changing then all you are doing is performing a spell.

Give Peace a Chance is a chant. Sitting in a bag, growing your head or staying in bed for a week is a stunt, a magical spell performed by somebody who doesn’t believe in magic in a world that doesn’t respond to magic. You may say that it is the thought that counts but such thoughts count for nothing.

There are people alive today who have marched thousands of miles who have failed to achieve any of their goals. They have marched from somewhere they didn’t need to go to on to somewhere else they didn’t need to be chanting simplistic incantations they didn’t really believe in at an empty sky. And guess what happened as a result? The public voted for Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush etc.

How many wars have been prevented by pacifists? In round numbers, none. In summer 1945 the world was tired of war, any thoughts about following up the defeat of Germany and Japan with a war against the Soviet Union before they got hold of nuclear weapons were quashed by widespread sentiments that there had been enough killing. That great war was prevented by thoughts which were focused on peace but these were not the thoughts of pacifists.

How many wars have been stopped by pacifists? I can’t think of any. The First World War and the Vietnam War were both ended by peace agreements when each side realized that further fighting would bring loss of life but little prospect of victory. The North Vietnamese recognized that America was trapped fighting a war against them that they did not want to be in and could not win, but refused to be seen to lose. The only way to get victory would be to allow the Americans to get out with some vague semblance of dignity. The idea that Ho Chi Minh and Richard Nixon were driven to the peace talks by the prospects of Buddhist monks marching up and down or a Japanese-American conceptual artist and her celebrity husband walking down the street making silly hand gestures is entirely absurd. To credit Yoko Ono or Joan Baez with stopping the Vietnam war is as absurd as believing that tearing out a beating heart at the top of a pyramid causes the sun to rise. Wars are started and finished by those with the capacity to wage them.

The most that protest songs did was to increase the number of draft dodgers by giving some degree of respectability to rational thoughts of self preservation. I suggest that most people who refused to fight in Vietnam were not motivated by the near absolute pacifism of many of the anti-war high command but by the feeling that this was a bad war for their country to be fighting and bad timing for them when being young, care-free, sexually active and above all alive seemed such an obvious next step in their life plan.

The natural urge to self-preservation and the resistance to acting under coercion make it very difficult for liberal societies to engage in bad wars. The anti-war movement was neither sufficient nor necessary to end the Vietnam War but it might have played a part in preventing other disputes escalating to the point that they became major unpopular wars by shaping the mindsets of those who had the power to start to grow wars.

There is now an understanding that the general population has got a clear idea that war can be a bit nasty and is rarely as clean-cut as most people would like it to be. Americans and Europeans are not pacifists, never have been and probably never will be. However the days when all that was necessary to get a column of troops happily marching off to war was to march a band down the high street and offer a free smart-looking uniform are long gone. Pacifists have made a small impact on this state of affairs but a bigger impact has been made by television. Many people don’t really follow the news very carefully but they can and do understand that war is nasty and not something to be engaged upon lightly.

The other big lesson of Vietnam was that conscripts are a huge political liability. Wars that kill volunteers are hard enough to sell to the public but wars that kill conscripts are much harder. When the public isn’t entirely comfortable with the reasons for fighting the burial of a conscript ceases to be the mourning of a great patriotic hero but instead becomes the grieving for a victim of an unpopular policy and flags and military symbolism cause anger, bitterness and resentment rather than pride. Making conscripts wear uniforms in democratic countries is not politically expedient unless there is no prospect of them being sent overseas to fight a cause which might not be popular. Israel can use a conscript army because there is a clear need for some form of military action even if the people argue about the fine details. Neutral countries can get away with it. Israel is of course neutral. I think I need to point this out to Americans who harbour the illusion that the alliance between the USA and Israel is in some sense bilateral or balanced: Israel is happy for America to defend Israel, really happy. When Israel needs help America will answer. When America needs help she can count on Israel’s vote at the UN and somewhere for the carriers to weigh anchor for shore leave, and that’s about it.

I predict that in twenty years time every country that has aircraft carriers and marines will have all-volunteer military forces. Conscription, democracy and force projection make uneasy bed-fellows, countries will have to choose their favourite two out of three.

Give Peace a Chance was not a very strong slogan, Hell No We Won’t Go was the chant that scared Nixon.

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