I was Born in Rangoon: On the Military and War.

 Richard Mellor

8-06-22

 

I was born in Rangoon, Burma in to a military family. Burma was a British colony until 1948 and the country is now called Myanmar and Rangoon, Yangon.

 

My father was in the British Army that he joined after running away from home after his mother died; he headed south from Manchester and signed up for the Middlesex Regiment that was based at Mill Hill in London. He told me he joined the army to be with horses. His father was also in World War 1.

My grandmother’s father, a William Foley from Ireland was also in the British Army as many colonial subjects were; like the Romans and the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the plunder of raw materials and wealth is not the only asset of conquer, human resources are a prize too. My uncle on my mother’s side was injured in WW2 and lost much of his foot due to a landmine, not an uncommon injury for the bomb disposal units I’m sure. I had other relatives who were in the military that I never knew.

 

My father was stationed in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1939. He was captured and spent some time in prison there and then ended up working for Mitsubishi on the docks in Tokyo until 1945.

 

Many years later when we were living in London my dad was a caretaker at the Territorial Army Center in Hornsey on Priory Road. I lived there for a while. There was a bar above the armory and my dad ran it, something he was quite at home with as he had a pub some time before. Being close to Mill Hill, there were “old soldiers” who would be present in my world throughout the teenage years and some who were in Japan with him. After the TA Center (The American Legion here in the US) mum and dad moved to a house in a complex built by the Middlesex regiment for veterans and former prisoners of war, this was after a brief stint in a council house in Wood Green. They were nice houses in a nice area of London. My uncle was there with his family and others that were prisoners of the Japanese with my dad.

 

This history and these people were always present in my world in one way or another. They would tell stories and sometimes have a go at each other over a few pints. One was a veteran of the Great War of 1914-18 who had a wooden leg and I was told he could consume the alcohol he did because the leg was hollow and it went in there. It was not unusual for him to tease them saying they had it easy compared to trench warfare and being “up to your neck in muck and. bullets”.

 

The military life and especially the years as a captive of the Japanese had a prolonged and profound effect on my father and our family. We blamed his alcoholism, his nastiness and sometimes violent moods on this experience.

 

But this introduction is not for the purpose of understanding the physical or psychological effects of war on those closest to it, nor is it a contribution to my family history, but to reconsider what we say to them and about them. I titled a previous commentary for Memorial Day, Let's tell the truth this Memorial Day, and I want to stress that more decisively. As I wrote then, “We do not dishonor the dead by telling the truth, instead we free ourselves from the lies that they died for democratic principles or to protect us from a foreign invader.  I would go so far to say that to not admit that those lives lost in these corporate wars were lost in vain does them a disservice.”

 

No More “Thank You For Your Service”

This is clearly a propaganda statement dreamed up by forces other than those that wallow and sometimes die in the trenches. Memorial Days in any country are propaganda glorifying war. The treatment of veterans of these conflicts is very different on the way out than when they return, as caring for them if they survive is money out whereas war is very profitable. As I write, the US arms industry lobbyists are working very hard to ensure that Ukrainians are willing to fight to the last man standing to keep profits rolling in as a US competitor is weakened. US and British support for the Ukrainian oligarchs has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy or respect for Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

 

So we thank them for their service because we are told the nation is being threatened or under threat from another and they are defending us. This is the trick.

 

Who or what forces are the millions of poor and working-class men and women (mostly men or young boys historically) serving? Whose interests are so threated that millions of a workers from one country or region are sent to fight workers from another?

 

A Few Examples

 

East Africa

When I was young, the British fought a violent war against the Mau Mau, mostly Kikuyu people in what is Kenya, whose land the British ruling class took displacing them and their families from land they had occupied for millennia. It was a campaign of mass killing and torture, despite a reality understood by many---- including the butcher Churchill by some accounts------- that the end of British colonial power in this region was over. How were these people a threat to me? Why were British workers as troops, sent there in the first place?

 

Arabian Peninsula

I remember seeing on the news in the 1960’s British troops led by a sadistic officer nicknamed “Mad Mitch” shooting Arabs in Yemen and breaking down doors and entering houses like the Israeli occupation forces do in the occupied West Bank. I was supposed to feel proud of “our” troops and probably was. But why were Arabs at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula a threat to me in Oxfordshire England? The truth I know now is that they weren’t.

Aden, in Yemen, is at the southern end of the Red Sea and an important port defending the trading route for British capitalism to its colonies, especially “British India” which was a huge source of plunder and profits for the merchants and capitalists of London, Liverpool, Bristol etc. And British capitalism had to compete for plunder of the world’s resources with other colonial powers and the growing influence of their US cousins.

 

The British fought two wars against the Chinese in order to be free to import Opium in to the country that was devastating to the population. The southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula was an important piece of real estate for British capitalism

 

In the post World War Two era and the end of the domination of European colonialism, US imperialism has been constantly at war. How was Grenada a threat to US workers like myself? Cuba, Chile, Vietnam where the US took over from French Colonialism, Iraq, Panama, Venezuela, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Korea and so on. Why are US workers as troops all over the world? When we thank our brothers and sisters in the military who are sent to kill or be killed in these ventures, or financially support them, whose interests are they serving?

 

Here’s the thing. I think the vast majority of US workers know what’s going on. We know that joining the military is overwhelmingly an economic decision. And the propaganda about patriotism and national security is effective, there’s no doubt. But consciousness is a mixed bag as well, and I think in the past 60 years or so the idea that these wars are not in our interests has strengthened.

 

But we also know that the men and women in the military are our brothers and our sisters; they are our relatives and friends, they are children of the working class. We definitely see them as different from the Kissingers, the Rumsfelds and every US president including “worker Joe” Biden and the “cultured” Obama, the people who send them in to harms way, who push the propaganda on us about defending the country. Hollywood is a major player in promoting this lie in the minds of our youth.

 

They are our kin, our workmates and friends. We do not want to hurt them. We do not want to forsake them by telling them that their sacrifice is not about defending our interests, our neighborhoods, our jobs, our parks or our way of life. Unemployment is a useful adjunct to military recruitment as it offers workers and the poorest of us an alternative; three good meals a day and some perks when you get out. I know more than one single mother who is grateful her son got in to the military away from the unemployment, lack of opportunities and threat of gang life in urban centers that is a product of these conditions. Then they pray there will be no war on or they’ll not be sent to it.

 

I write all the time about the domination of identity politics in the US and how it is supported by the more astute sections of the US capitalist class because it obscures the class question. I was confused when I first came to the US to hear workers refer to themselves as “middle class”. This is not accidental.

 

Class consciousness is a product of social conditions and our role in production. Even under these conditions, material reality will exert itself more as the unraveling of capitalism intensifies. But working class history has been obscured, undermined, and this will mean a protracted war as the US working class rises to its feet. We have seen huge upsurges in the past years among the organized and the unorganized.

 

Once we recognize the prominent role class and capitalism plays in society the cobwebs of identity politics, that is isolationist and individualistic will dissipate. We can look at working class people with all our wonderful differences, color nationality, customs language and culture and yes, how we identify ourselves in these ways. But what we see when we look at all these differences from a class perspective, even under these conditions, is that our class character, our role in the production of life and society’s needs is the dominant feature for all of us.

 

The difference between workers who sell our labor power and capitalists who buy it or those that consider Harvard and Oxford the Pinnacle of success is far greater than any difference in one’s sexual orientation, religion, nationality, or whether or not they are vegan or eat meat. How many workers have friends that go to Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge. We do not hang with that milieu. The victimization and marginalization that many sectors of the working class face will be seen as they are, an attack on all of us and a hindrance to our class unity. And class unity is the only way our collective material interests and wellbeing can be assured. As the old wobbly saying goes, An Injury To One Is An Injury to All.

 

The Vietnamese defeated the most powerful country on the planet at a great cost because they were defending their culture and their home form a violent invader. And there is no shame in the young US workers that went there; after the Vietnamese themselves, it was the demoralization of the US troops, fighting in jungles 12,000 miles from home against an enemy that they came to recognize as no threat to the US at all that helped in the defeat. The number of revolts among US troops are well recorded. The US lost some 67,000 (think of the effect on the families and the numbers climb) people in that war for market share and we should be angry about that but not at the Vietnamese defending their homes, we would do the same. One of the architects of that slaughter, Henry Kissinger, is a respected hero of the US ruling class and an advisor to his successors.

 

I should make it clear, I am not a pacifist. Workers will defend our own interests, the rights that we have wrenched from the capitalist class over the decades, we don’t need Hollywood to convince us to do so. We should not lose sight of the fact that we saw, in the face of the murder of Black Americans by the state security apparatus, a huge multi -racial response. We are now witnessing a major upsurge among the 86% of US workers who are not in unions and it is young people at the forefront of this struggle, the leaders of today and tomorrow. All is not lost by any means.

 

But let’s drop the “Thanks For Your Service” and tell our youth the truth.

 

Watch: Sir No Sir and The Ground Truth

 

This photo above was taken at Colchester in 1934 I think. It says on the back:

"H.J. Mellor. Enlisted private in the Middlesex Regiment at Whitehall on 22-2-1934. No. 6201445. Served until May 1956.

Photograph taken at Colchester 1935.

Stations served:

Egypt, April 1935 to March 1936.

Singapore, April 1936 to Late 1937

Hong Kong, 1937 to Sept 1942

Tokio, September 1942 to September 1945

Released as POW Japan

Rangoon, Burma January 1948 to June 1950.

Lagos West Africa, March 1952, to March 1955.

Took Discharge, retired as Staff Sgt 1956.