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REAL MEDIA 2018 / ISSUE 106 9 CARNE ROSS – FROM BRITISH DIPLOMAT TO ANARCHIST Carne Ross is a former British Diplomat. He resigned from the Foreign Office over the Iraq War, and set up an NGO called Independent Diplomat, which advises the leaders of democratic countries. Ross has also been on a journey that has led him to believe in anarchism. We caught up with him to find out more… What was the trigger that led you to anarchism? The trigger was my resignation from the Foreign Office, or rather the Iraq War itself. Because I worked on the Iraq and WMD and weapons inspections. And to see my own colleagues, a government that I thought was basically good, as naïve as that may sound, lie about a war and ignore alternatives to war on something I really knew about and so I knew exactly how it was lying, that was a real breach that opened the door to the journey that followed. Had that not happened, I don't think what subsequently took place, in terms of my own personal transformation, would've happened. It might have happened in other ways. Why does top down society not work? The idea that a small group of people can know the reality of millions or billions is absurd. And that therefore they can make the right decisions about those millions or billions is equally absurd. My own analysis started out from an empirical observation of what was going on. Problems of epic magnitude, such as climate change and inequality resulting from the economic system that we all seem to have been accepting. These problems are not getting solved. So you look at the outputs from the system and you have to question the system itself. Why anarchism? Ultimately, my hope is that if we do this, we'll be able to dispense with political labels altogether because we'll start to see each other as people and not Tories or Labour, Republicans or Democrats or whatever. I think that labelling has been very divisive in a lot of circumstances, clearly very divisive in the current political dispensation. I mean there's a whole host of reasons for that in America and in Europe. But ultimately, a successful, cohesive society where all the vulnerable are taken care of, where everybody has an equal voice, is almost by definition a de-politicised society. It's one where human values and moral norms, in a sense, are much more important than policy or political parties. And I think where these ideas have been implemented, it's quite interesting. For instance, in Brazil, there was an experiment, not really an experiment - a practice of participatory democracy where millions of people took part in the decisions of how to spend the city budget, which led to much more equitable outcomes. But also very interestingly led to a decline in party politics, because people began to see each other as just people with needs. How do we educate our kids? how do we get treated when we're sick? rather than as political enemies. Watch the full interview at realmedia.press