Title: Anarchism and the British Warfare State: The Prosecution of the War Commentary anarchists, 1945 Abstract For the anarchist, the state is most at home when it is at war. So, for anarchist critics of state policy in Britain in World War Two: ‘The issues were sharp, the enemy well defined and anarchist attitudes were clear and uncompromising.’1 Nonetheless, there is an established mystery surrounding the home office decision to prosecute the editors of the wartime anarchist newspaper War Commentary in 1945 under emergency wartime defence regulations. In fact, the prosecution was out of line with the policy which the government had taken towards anarchist publications and left-wing criticism in general throughout the war. This policy was shaped by the consensus within the home office regarding the generally contrary effects of attempting direct censorship on dissident groups. This mystery is not resolved in the literatures on twentieth century emergency legislation or established social and political accounts of the period, and barely examined in key histories of anarchism.2 1 Philip Sansom, ‘Revived 45: Anarchists Against the Army’ The Raven Anarchist Quarterly, 29, vol. 8, no.1, freedom Press, Spring, 1995pp61-71 2 Peter Marshall mentions it in his epic history of anarchism, and the more recent survey of the history of British anarchist movements by Ben Franks also makes a passing reference to the incident. Marshall, p.492, Franks, p.52 1 This paper argues that the home office decision to prosecute the anarchists in 1945 should be understood in relation to the concerns of a militarised state, and suggests that the anarchists were ideologically well-placed to pluck at the raw nerves of the British political elite by addressing tensions around demobilisation. This helps explain the fact that the authorities arrested the editors of War Commentary at the end of the war and not the beginning. Drawing on recent re-interpretations of the nature of the British state in the twentieth century and bringing to light relevant home office material, this paper suggests that the answer to the apparent mystery of the high profile trial and prosecution of the Freedom Press anarchists is rooted in the ideological challenge waged by the anarchist group to the official equation of British international policy with the values of order, democracy and peace. As such this paper highlights the attempt by the anarchists to emphasise the militaristic, chaotic, and socially disintegrative nature of both international and domestic policy in Britain during the Second World War. The response to the anarchist paper War Commentary by the British government, and the timing of that response, are best conceptualised as part of an understanding of the British warfare state of the period and the unmitigated antimilitarist stance of the anarchists, which brought them into a uniquely threatening position in the eyes of principal staff at the Home Office at the end of the war. Introduction The revival of interest in anarchism at the time of the Spanish Civil War led to the publication in Britain of Spain and the World, a fortnightly journal produced by the anarchist publishing house. Spain and the World changed its name to Revolt! in the 2 period between the war in Spain and the beginning of the Second World War, and Revolt! became War Commentary early in the Second World War, reverting back to the traditional title Freedom in August 1945. War Commentary stood outside the pro-war consensus of the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties and consistently opposed the fundamental assumptions of government policy throughout the war. The use of emergency regulations against the Freedom Press publication has hitherto not been examined in detail. This paper will begin by outlining the anarchist position on the war and placing the prosecution within a wider view of the use of emergency powers in Britain in the early twentieth century. The anarchists maintained a consistent opposition to the policies of the wartime state from the outset, in line with traditional anarchist interpretations of the state and its tendency to undermine natural social order. In this context we might ask whether the prosecution of the anarchists was not part of a wider attempt to censor political dissidence. A longer view of the use of emergency regulations in the period would indicate that this is a highly plausible interpretation of the case. However, relevant studies and Home Office files stress that, despite the virulent anti-war stance of War Commentary, the government was reluctant to engage in overt censorship of the anarchists until April 1945. It is in the context of official fears about the potential political turmoil associated with the endings of wars in which civilian populations have been mobilised into a military establishment that the decision to prosecute the anarchists should be understood. The period following World War One had demonstrated the potential for social unrest surrounding the management of mass demobilisation to coalesce into mutinous movement. The government was sensitive to this and the anarchists threatened to heighten possible tension by circulating historical accounts of mutiny among serving personnel. It was a militarised 3 British state that found it expedient to halt the activities of the hitherto relatively minor anarchist group in the incendiary context of demobilising civilian personnel at the end of the war. What is highlighted by these insights into the challenge to the British state made by the Freedom Press editors is the unique and consistently anarchist position taken and developed by the group towards the state and its relation to war, social order and international democracy. For the anarchist, the war-making tendencies of states are closely related to their socially disintegrative characteristics, war is seen as one of the ways in which the institutions of the state corrode and inhibit spontaneous social cohesion. The traditional anarchist depiction of the state as an inherently militaristic body ensured that the Freedom press anarchists were highly sensitive to the militarised characteristics of British state policy and alert to what they perceived as the falsity of its democratic pretensions. For the anarchist writers of the ‘40s, the emergence of total war in the twentieth century was seen as closely related to the power-seeking, war- ready organisational and institutional nature of nation states. The experience of war highlighted the pernicious role of the state in undermining human social order. The anarchists presented the wartime militaristic international and domestic policies of the British state as creating to chaos, disaster, and ‘anarchy’ (as the term is pejoratively used). Conversely disobedience to state militaristic policy was equated with natural order and the restitution of human social instincts. It was in the context of tensions intrinsic to the mass militarisation of civilian populations in ‘warfare’ states that these features of anarchist ideology raised official anxieties in the British context. 4 Anarchist Anti-Militarism: War, disorder and the State One of the classic anarchist arguments regarding the state, and reiterated in relation to World War Two, is that ‘Governments need wars to survive and without them they would collapse.’3 The two anarchistic aphorisms ‘War is the trade of governments’ and ‘War is the health of the state’ present this case.4 Cultural commentator and affiliate of the Freedom Press group, Herbert Read, included in his indictment of the state its propensity to undermine human freedom and solidarity via the waging of wars: ‘I regard war as the curse of humanity and governments as the instruments of war.’5 He was resolute in his conviction that ‘War will exist as long as the state exists’ and that ‘There is no problem which leads so inevitably to anarchism.’6 In 1940 the doctor in the Freedom Press editorial group, John Hewetson, put the case thus: ‘Everyone hates war, but almost no-one understands it’, except the anarchists, who perceive that war is a ‘symptom... of an underlying disease – the contemporary social and economic order’.7 In the pages of War Commentary the war was a ‘symptom’ of the state in all its ‘newest’ 3 Derrick A. Pike ‘Conscientious Objectors in World War Two’ in The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly, 29, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 1995, ‘World War Two’, pp.48-9 4 Colin Ward ‘the Awkward Question, quoting Randolph Bourne, The State (1917), in Freedom, the anarchist weekly, 17th August, 1957 5 Read, ‘A statement’, p.205 6 Read, Poetry and Anarchism, p.120, 119 7 J.H., War Commentary, October, 1940 5 and ‘most ghastly’ implications.8 Anarchist writer Colin Ward, and witness during the trial, expressed this sentiment clearly ‘War is the expression of the State in its most perfect form: it is its finest hour.’9 Resistance to the war-making powers of the state is a dominant theme in the anarchist commentary and intellectual output of the late ‘30s and ‘40s. ‘War is being used as a method of blackmail’ argued the Anarchist Federation of Great Britain as early as 1938, ‘using the people’s natural horror of warfare to intimidate them into accepting tyranny under the cover of defence.’10 So, according to a 1941 edition of War Commentary, the anarchist must ‘concentrate all their energies’ against war ‘in fighting against the State’.11 For the anarchist, the war-making tendencies of states are closely related to their socially disintegrative characteristics, war is seen as one of the ways in which the institutions of the state corrode and inhibit spontaneous social cohesion. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid charted the destruction of the social institutions that embodied the human tendency for mutual aid by the growth of the nation state. The views of the War Commentary writers were in line with this position: ‘in the destruction of the present form of society, the anarchists envisage not the empire of chaos, but the growth of an integrated society...’12 The traditional anarchist position is that organic social order and 8 Reg Reynolds, June 1941, War Commentary 9 Ward, Anarchy in Action, p.25 10 Issued by the Anarchist Federation of Britain, printed in Spain and the World, 30th November 1938 11 War Commentary July 1941 12 George Woodcock, ‘What is Anarchism?’ War Commentary Vol.4, No.13, May 1943 6 hierarchical state authority are antithetical. It equates self-government and spontaneous order with equity and freedom, and state control with violence and injustice. Deploying the anarchist argument regarding spontaneous human order in critical responses to the twentieth-century war-making state, anarchist commentators associated with the Freedom Press challenged conventional beliefs in the socially- oriented and democratic functions of World War Two. They were unique on the left in their comprehensive criticism of the militaristic policies of the state. The War Commentary anarchists in particular linked international state policy with dysfunction, chaos and harm; and rebellion, non-compliance, and disobedience with peace and ordered human relationships. The anarchists were unrelenting in their challenge to the government claims to be pursuing a war for democracy and international order: ‘The possibilities are that war will ravage the face of the earth’ they argued, and when it does ‘The uncontrollable and lowest passions in man will be let loose in blind fury; fury against an enemy towards whom he bears no malice, for a ‘cause’ which is not his.’13 Children would be ’the cannon fodder of tomorrow... butchered in the front line trenches in the name of a ‘democracy’ whose benefits they have never experienced.’14 The disorder, chaos and war hysteria would accompany ‘death to hundreds of thousands of homes and widespread misery throughout the world.’15 If war is statehood and peace is anarchism then rebellion and resistance to the state furthers the cause of peace and natural order. Herbert Read, prominent cultural commentator and anarchist 13 Editorial, Spain and the World, 30th September 1938 14 Editorial, Spain and the World, 30th September 1938 15 Editorial, Spain and the World, 30th September 1938 7 writer, argued this case in his assertion that: ‘There is no problem which leads so inevitably to anarchism. Peace is anarchy. Government is force... which in turn involves the individual in destructive impulses and the nations in war.’ 16 The answer, according also to the Freedom Press writers, was disobedience: ‘refuse to serve ‘your’ country!’, and ‘refuse to assist the state in its manoeuvres for murder!’17 In order to resist the war, they claimed, it was necessary to resist the militaristic policies of national service, conscription, and the ARP, regardless of ‘the fall of France’, ‘Dunkirk’, or the ‘Stalinist switchover’.18 Against official claims to be waging war in the name of democracy or international justice, the anarchists urged their readers to ‘... just pause to think of the fate of Spain...’19 ‘As we have not been paralysed by recent political events’, claimed the Freedom Press writers, ‘we can still think’. Thus armed, and reflecting on ‘the events and British policy during these last few years’, they argued ‘the next war will be no more a war for Czechoslovakian democracy than the last war was one for Belgian independence.’20 The anarchists were primed for their critical stance towards government claims to be pursuing democracy by their experience of British international policy towards the Spanish republic in the 1930s: ‘let us look at more 16 Read, ‘The Prerequisite of Peace’, p.29 17 Revolt!, 23rd March 1939 18 War Commentary Vol.4, No.13, May 1943 19 editorial in Revolt!, 1st May 1939 20 Editorial in Spain and the World, 16th September 1938 8 recent times’ they pointed out ‘and we discover that the policy of the present government has in every respect been one of active support for fascism’, and further ‘not once was it suggested that we should go to defend Spanish democracy.’21 Equating fascism with centralised, militarised, authoritarian state government, the anarchists argued that it was ‘just as rampant here as abroad’ and ‘the enemy is on your own country!’22 Alongside the War Commentary anarchists, Alex Comfort argued that fascism was a characteristic of militarised German and British states alike, which are ‘sitting on the Press “because this is Total War”’ and ‘making our soldiers jab blood bladders while loudspeakers howl propaganda at them’.23 ‘Our own government’, added Comfort, ‘if it wants to make butchers or bomber pilots of our children, is as much our enemy as the Germans ever were.’24 The anarchist perception of the state as an inherently militaristic institution rendered War Commentary writers highly sensitive to the ‘mechanised, highly organised, technical’ characteristics of the British state policy, under which ‘millions of men are concentrated and drafted’.25 The anarchists beseeched the readers of Spain and the World: ‘Do not accept the usual pro-militarist ballyhoo.’26 ‘Being obstinate people’, they 21 Editorial Spain and the World, 16th September 1938 22 Revolt!, 23rd March 1939 23 Alex Comfort, in D.S. Savage et al, ‘Pacifism and the War. A Controversy’, p.417 24 Comfort, Art and Social Responsibility, (London: Falcon Press, 1946), p.83 25 Ridel, mid-January, 1942, War Commentary 26 Issued by the Anarchist Federation of Britain, printed in Spain and the World, 30th November 1938 9 argued in War Commentary in 1942 ‘we refuse to believe that there is the slightest trace of human emancipation in the fact of working at maximum output, consuming as little as possible and leaving the daily lives of millions of people in the hands of a state power over which they have no control whatever.’27 Anarchist anti-militarism in the 1940s was particularly hostile towards the policy of conscription, as a ‘tremendous weapon in the hands of reaction’28 and, under capitalism, ‘simply a reversion to chattel slavery’.29 The anti-militarism of the Freedom Press anarchists was a clearly identifiable feature of their publications, campaigns and public meetings throughout the 1930s and '40s. Police Special Branch recorded the clear policy of the Freedom Press as ‘opposition to militarism’ and ‘opposition to the war’.30 Their reports record public events such as a meeting at Hyde Park on 5th October 1941 as attacking military and political policy.31 A Special Branch report dated November 1941 underlines that the sentiments expressed at this event were that ‘Churchill is as much a brigand as Hitler’.32 In a detailed report of one London meeting on the 7th July 1942, Special Branch noted that 400 people 27 Ridel, mid-January, 1942, War Commentary 28 Issued by the Anarchist Federation of Britain, printed in Spain and the World, 30th November 1938 29 Reg Reynolds, June 1941, War Commentary 30 HO45/25553 833412/8, Extract from Special Branch Fortnightly Summary No.23, Dated 15th October 1941 31 HO45/25553 833412/8, Extract from Special Branch Fortnightly Summary No.23, Dated 15th October 1941 32 HO45/25553 833412/8, Extract from Special Branch Fortnightly Summary No.25, Dated 15th November 1941 10