The Beauty of Our Weapons

THE BEAUTY OF OUR WEAPONS – From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn.

“With regard to human affairs, not to laugh, not to cry, not to become indignant, but to understand.”

So wrote Spinoza, the 17th century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher. His family migrated from Portugal and the Inquisition to the more enlightened Dutch Republic. For Spinoza understanding was all. He believed that we must attend to the highest good, which also is the highest truth, and thereby achieve a state of peace and harmony. This was not easy to achieve in Spinoza’s war torn world and it is similarly not easy in our peace-resistant and inharmonious age. But we have to learn if we are to be rid of war and embrace freedom, as he himself wrote,

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

One thing to learn from our brutalised time and to understand is that all authoritarians – either blatant or closet – love the military and they also love, above all else, to announce big increases in miliary spending. This, they think, gives them legitimacy, where day-to-day democratic governance somehow does not. It makes them overtly masculine. It is, for them, thrilling. They become mystical when they describe “the beauty of our weapons”. More nukes, more subs, more planes, more tanks, more drones, more boots and the recruits to fill them – more and more and more! Because we are at war!

We are always at war. Because war is good. Because war will grow the economy. It will give you a job. It will make you happy. Because war is reality and peace is an illusion. Keir Starmer has said all this in words and body language and in so doing he has never looked so happy. If happiness is possible for an authoritarian. He has arrived at his moment of glory. There is no need to learn anything from the past because everything is in the future, even the present, that sacred transient dimension which is only inhabited by politicians like Keir Starmer, who relish the opportunity to abandon the hard won traditions of elected representation, humanity and decency, to embark on a spree of wild rapturous rhetoric of dreams and illusions which inch us closer, inevitably, to disaster.

Everything in the world of the authoritarian is a threat. The actor playing the part of the hard man leader of Ukania has made this abundantly clear. Scottish independence is most definitely a threat. It does not matter what the people of Scotland may desire constitutionally or politically, for the future of their country. The Scots will be told what is good for them. Asset stripping is resource sharing. For the hard man there is no such country as Scotland. There is only Ukania.

In Ukania the poor, the vulnerable, the old and the weak are a threat. They have no rights or entitlements and are only on the scrounge for benefits and handouts, so they must be cut. Any talk about closing tax loopholes, pursuing tax cheats, instating wealth taxes (or ideally all three) is old-fashioned communism and needless nostalgia and a threat to progress. There are no unemployed or homeless in Ukania, only hard-working families and people who make poor lifestyle choices.

The authoritarian reassures that all they want is what is best for the country even if no-one really knows what that country is. Whatever else immigration is immigrants are a threat to the culture, which is whatever set of labels and subjects suits the authoritarian. Racism, misogyny and Islamophobia are the fault of black people, women and Muslims. Antisemitism is any criticism of Israel. Nuclear power is the best of all possible energy sources. Nuclear weapons are natural. Any suggestion that there is a link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is treason and a sign of poor mental health. Poor mental health is also the result of a poor lifestyle choice. This is why the internet is a threat – it can prove or disprove anything. Environmentalism is a threat because it causes instability. Civil rights are also a threat for the same reason.

The authoritarian is always passionate about what they declare, but they believe in nothing. So climate activists are, obviously, in it for the publicity. Social reformers are Chinese secret agents. Young people with risky ideas will undertake National Service to properly channel their energies and the internet will be regulated so that they cannot be encouraged in their naiveté. Solidarity between people and causes is obviously insurrection. Critics of the authoritarian’s executive orders are committing acts of rebellion. Justice is whatever the executive orders state. Freedom is to obey the dictat of the executive orders. Parliament is for doing what it is instructed to do. The constitution is whatever the authoritarian says it is. As a subject, your duty is to say nothing and do nothing. Constant surveillance is for your own safety. All political, social and environmental disasters that take place during the time in office of the authoritarian are the results of external interference. To state otherwise is to be labelled as unpatriotic, anti-growth, defeatist and off-project.

What Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, authoritarian, hard man, employs as government is oppression in the name of management. Trust me, he says, I know best. About everything. Which is impossible. In reality this has the opposite effect of installing confidence in the electorate. What is happening is that they are disengaging from the political process. Keir Starmer is building a future Ukania based on Keir Starmer. Who would not be afraid? For example when he blathers on about artificial intelligence, in his unique mechanical authoritarian way – what this produces in workers and “hard working families” is anxiety and incomprehension. The real possibilities of science, even of enlightenment itself, is being deliberately reduced to a caricature which only adds to the general confusion so beloved of authoritarians and populists. Far from opening up society technology is being used to shut it down. Instead of enjoying a future of egalitarian optimistic expectation the young, who are the future, are reduced to vegetating in a techno-babble-trap of adverts, betting, porn and online fascism.

The authoritarian is adept at letting one form of oppression replace another. The problem here for Scots (for everybody) is that no-one has solved any of these problems. Certainly no-one in party politics has, or even thought of it as their duty to tackle them. The function of party politics is to create a government, to grab power, not to make peoples lives better.

So what is an individual to do in the land of Starmer’s Ukania? Is it just that each person of conscience must work in their daily efforts to overcome the oppression of the authoritarian? If they resist or do not conform to the forces bearing down on them, they risk either being subdued or destroyed. But if individuals do not act in good faith, or in the cause of enlightenment, then there is no possibility of resistance to the authoritarian or of making social progress.

Keir Starmer relies on passivity in everyone, so that we watch history pass us by as the seasons move through the year. To protect your loved ones from either being an instrument or a victim of the regime is a risk few take. The oppression of the authoritarian is internalised. It is your fault. This is the mantra of the hard man.

In the end, the authoritarian relies on mythology and not violence to cling to power. In so doing they reduce myth to a diagram of their own political predicament, which is that their own hounds will eventually turn and devour them. Instead of entering into mythology, as a generous person would do, as any sympathetic person would do, in order to use it as a door into an understanding of society beyond the voracious demands of their ego and its pitfalls, the authoritarian traps themselves within it. Their language becomes the labyrinth. Their meaning a maze. Such terms as “fiscal rules” is mythology, as is “government debt”, “departmental efficiency”, “an energy mix”, “a just transition”, “hard choices” and “the defence dividend”. The authoritarian spreads such obfuscation like slurry over a field. Everything Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves say is an entrapment in language. The authoritarian is keen, by this process, to keep politics either as a kind of magic or a great game.

For the democrat, politics is a form of work and one definition of work, which suits Scotland’s current political difficulties, is to move a certain mass through a certain difference. To the authoritarian there is no difference – in society or anything else: Scotland is Britain and Britain is England. Long live Ukania! Conformity is all.

To free ourselves form this oppression a modern Scotland must (has to) define, and to an extent limit, the objective conditions that would or could create a social organisation – a country – free from oppression. So in practical terms it does not matter who leads the SNP if independence is not the central and foremost agenda issue and political priority. If the SNP lose control of Holyrood the authoritarians who replace them will immediately give planning consent to who knows how many nuclear energy projects and to the death cult militarisation that goes along with them. Then we Scots will pay even more for energy that is harnessed from the wind that blows across our land and off our shores and yet which wings its way to England leaving an industrialised Highland landscape and no economic benefit behind.

There is no peace or harmony to be found in such anti-democratic asset stripping. It only sews the seeds of future conflict. As Spinoza, again, reminds us,

“Peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”

It is this disposition which a political dedication to independence for Scotland can bring into being. We have to resist the authoritarian and the hard man and embrace compassion, cultural confidence and social and economic justice. These are our beautiful weapons. Let us use them. If we don’t the future is more of the same on-going class division, wealth extraction, poverty, societal fracturing and decline guaranteed by remaining within Starmer’s Ukania.

©George Gunn 2025