Who fights the good fight exactly? No-one I know.

On the front page of the World Justice Movement are two taglines.

The first says they are ‘world justice campaigners’ and the other invites visitors to “Join us in the fight for economic justice and an end to global poverty.’

You often see this ‘fighting for justice’ language, often used interchangeably with the phrase ‘campaigning for justice’. But who is ‘fighting’ who exactly and what does this kind of fight look like.

it occurs to me that this ‘fighting for justice, climate action, equality, <insert cause>  fighting is not really fighting.

I have been in the occasional fight and disliked it a lot – fights either verbal or physical are heated violent brutish affairs that don’t tend to last long. Fights favour the strong inevitably and there are pretty quickly winners and losers – winner takes all.

I’ve never really been in a full on physical fight as in truth I am just too gentle and averse to risk and pain to get involved. I have no desire to join the army or a jihadi crusade in a foreign land or a terrorist organisation or even rough someone up a bit. I prefer to share agreeably and run web pages and attend polite demos where no one gets arrested and not a single bin is set on fire.

Perhaps I am the living embodiment of a kind of comfortable self congratulatory ‘fighting’ that feeds a collective delusion that lots of people are engaged in some great war for justice when in fact hardly anybody is.

Campaigning is not fighting. Waving a placard at a demo is not fighting. Writing angry comments on The Guardian website is not fighting. Working for an NGO is not fighting. This blog is not an angry mob or a revolution, its just a blog. This is not to say that its utterly pointless, far from it,  but its not a war that will one day deliver a victory – its activity.

Now of course all the new petition websites that serve this activity 24/7 proudly announce ‘victories’ every day and this is not to be dismissed or derided – but its not a victory really.

The small number people who hold the power and (increasingly) the vast majority of the money in this world may occasionally abandon one of their more craven or insane grabs for more of both but the overall drift is obvious – those that really do fight and fight ugly, are winning.

Crude, vulgar, mean-spirited, vain, greedy and selfish people are cool with actual fighting if it gets them what they want and one need not look far in this world for examples of their handiwork.  But the characteristics of their would-be opponents rather sabotage any opposition, since the qualities that make them the opposition render them rather poor fighters.

How many ‘worthy cause’ groups I have I sat in that fell apart because of a collective squeamishness about leadership or being seen to lead – do you reckon Shell have this problem at board meetings?

As the character Sir Humphrey Applebey said in  ‘Yes Minister’ “If the right people don’t have power the wrong people have it”. The powerful are happy to be shouted at, as long as you don’t oppose them in an effective way. you either fight them and take their power away or you don’t. 

How many of the gentle and kind spirited people I know really WANT to grab power for themselves? Many activists seem to imagine that the struggle for political and material power can somehow be short circuited just because they don’t want to participate.

How many people of good virtue are prepared to bend or break a law in the ‘fight’ for global justice? How many at banks, corporations and corrupt state institutions are prepared to flout laws? Its not a happy thought experiment is it?

We seem to be blissfully ensnared in a double delusion – that the ‘authorities’ will play by the rules they set for us and that ‘we’ are heroic ‘fighters’ sticking it to the man at every opportunity – neither is remotely true.

Let us take a real fighter then – Edward Snowden. He sacrificed his entire future to give the NSA a bloody nose – now that’s fighting!  He has made a real difference but would I do the same? Not a chance, those US security types scare me to death and I’ll do nothing to upset them – would you?

If this nation goes into another world war then my generation probably won’t fight it very well or at all. Its fortunate that Nazi Germany doesn’t menace us right now or we’d be in real trouble, I’d swim to Australia before picking up a gun (guns are dangerous – someone might shoot at ME!) and whatever bellicose posturing you might hear from my contemporaries I doubt they would oppose the fascist menace either.

If WWII was to happen right now then we might be able to mount some rousing Facebook pages or a fundraiser for those daft enough to pick up a gun (Support Our Heroes, 7pm @ the Community Centre please bring organic vegetarian food to share) but Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, D-Day landings? Fat chance. Happily I suspect the modern German youth would be too busy taking selfies on I-Phones to actually drive a tank or bomb anything.

Here we are facing a tiny enemy – a global wealthy cabal  that is looting the planet with abandon, destroying bio-diversity and threatening irreversible climate damage and the very future existence of the human race. 

The neoliberal elites employ corruption , bribery, propaganda, brute force and murder to grab more and care less with each passing day…

…and how do we fight back?

…the truth is for the most part we don’t.

Perhaps our generation is too cosseted from the realities of fighting for justice, too hypnotised by screens and the media, too comfortable, too self absorbed and preoccupied with celebrity, too hooked on consumerism and shallow pleasures? But perhaps critically the vast majority of us are all too happy to believe that the endless churn of public relations around ‘fighting for justice’ is the same as fighting.

In this rare instance it seems there really is lots of smoke without fire.

John Lynch

p.s with sincere apologies to those tiny few who really do fight – I wish I had your courage, grit and selflessness.