A dawn text from Sweden for the latest money situation. January month end is looming...always a hard one for small businesses after the traditionally heavy withdrawals to fund the family’s year end festivities. There are a couple of big invoices due into our bank account on this side of the German Sea. We did some speech writing for the Chief Executive Officer of TeliaSonera in November and some voiceover work for a Dutch firm in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. Both these jobs were billed through William Franklin.

We also did some scripting and voiceover work in December for a Stockholm media company working on a military product film. There was a time when we refused to take on military assignments but nowadays everything is contaminated so we just bid high so we come out being pleased whichever way it goes. Charge the bastards until their shiny brass pips squeak is our motto.

The purpose of the film was to sell Swedish electricity grids and generators to mercenaries around the world. The Swedes have an impressive imperial record...from Huskvarna to Bofors...of trading arms to all sides in every conflict. It is time to get off the backs of the Germans and Japanese and start looking at the lies the victorious English and the neutral Swedes are peddling about their wars and empires.

As with sanctions and oil for food deals, the ethical issues are complicated. Food, water, energy and medicines are never neutral. Ruling regimes use them as weapons to reward and punlish sullen populations. Denying supplies is not much different to going in with guns blazing. Children don’t get to choose how they die. Civil servants, bankers and company executives have many different ways to kill innocent people...and should be strung up for all of them. Democracy is the discriminator.

Tony Benn has five little democratic questions. Here from his autobiography Dare To Be A Daniel: ‘...if one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.’ The Peace Party has to find ways to wield this weapon of discernment in the real world. Here is Roo's Tale from the 158th chapter of The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala.

Wally suggested I should have a chat with his Dad about the old times. Well, one thing led to another as one things do, so that before I knew it, I was reading about A.A.Milne who had introduced Roo to us when he was very young and still living in Kanga's pouch...Kanga was his mum though it is a little confused. Milne had four highly successful careers after surviving the war to end wars. He was editor of Punch and then a very successful playright before he won world-wide acclaim with Winnie The Pooh. He then spent a year writing 'Peace With Honour'...which vied with Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' in the best seller lists of the 1930s.

In his Ten Million-And Forty chapter Milne explored the war convention by asking what would happen were 'certain people assured that, if there were another war in Europe on the scale of the last war, they themselves would be the first victims of it.' He then selected his victims...and he was writing in 1934. Mussolini, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels head the list. They got their comeuppance but a little late in the day.

Turning to England Milne selected four politicians...MacDonald, Baldwin, Simon and Churchill; two unnamed generals and two unnamed directors of armament firms...chosen by lot; and four media moguls...Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, and the Editors of The Times and The Morning Post. France would furnish a corresponding equality of victims. 'Now here are forty people who are all going to die as a preliminary to the next war.' writes Milne. 'Are the chances of another war lessened?' Good question. 'Peace With Honour' is an excellent statement of a practical pacifist strategy...and Milne is on the right track.

If the War Party demands the right to wage ‘pre-emptive war’ then the Peace Party must counter with their own demands for ‘pre-emptive peace’ as part of a broader strategy. Over the 2004 Christmas holiday I reflected on the absence of any coherent strategy within the social justice movement for eliminating killingry. In order to work, such a strategy must be grounded in an understanding of the mechanisms being manipulated.

Here is where the Peace Party should be heading: (1) persuading power opinion behind the killingry delivery process (land mines, cluster bombs etc.); (2) bankrupting firms producing weapons of mass and individual destruction (factory by factory); (3) destroying the budgets that keep missiles in their silos and standing armies polluting local life and (4) making the killingry business unprofitable for financial and commercial intermediaries. As a project it looks as hopeless as the abolition of slavery...and may involve comparable time-frames. However uncovering the monetary patronage and the power mechanisms that drive the development, acquisition and deployment of killingry is the key.