Anti-militarism

1 April 2010News in Brief

65% of people in Britain think that diplomacy should be used to solve the current Falklands oil dispute, according to an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll published on 5 March. Only 20% of Britons approved of the use of “any means necessary, including military force” to continue with the planned oil exploration.
Meanwhile, a similar proportion of people want the removal of British armed forces from Afghanistan by end the of 2010, according to a ComRes poll for the BBC’s Newsnight…

1 March 2010News in Brief

19 Turkish anti-militarist activists have been charged with “alienating people from military service” and “praising a crime and criminals” as the result of a 6 January solidarity demo held for Enver Aydemir, a conscientious objector who has been in prison since 24 December. Amnesty is asking for (polite) appeals on behalf of Enver and the 19, to the Turkish minister of national defence, by 8 March.
Please write to: Vecdi Gonul, minister of national defence, Milli Savunma Bakanligi,…

1 February 2010Review

Mainstream Publishing Company, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-845-964-56-6, 336pp, £19.99

Based on over 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, Voices Against War is a fascinating and lively survey of anti-war protest in the UK from 1914 to the present day.

A university lecturer and author of the bestselling Young Voices, Lyn Smith is keen to stress the complexity and range of anti-war positions held by those who have resisted their Government’s call to go to war. For example, in the first world war conscientious objectors (COs)…

3 December 2009News

Once again, Aberystwyth led the way as the town council laid a white poppy wreath at the Cenotaph on 7 November. Despite the weather, the ceremony was well attended. Those present remembered the suffering caused by organised violence and “all the places where our humanity has been denied”, commented Jill Gough of CND Cymru.

Rhidian Griffiths chose the hymn “Let There be Peace on Earth” by Fred Kaan, “a lifelong pacifist, whose convictions grew out of his childhood in the…

3 December 2009Comment

I read, with uneasy and strongly personal interest, the discussions in September’s issue. For the whole of my conscious life – or so it seems – I have been confronted by this question: “What would you, a pacifist, have done in the Second World War?” For years, my feeble cop-out was to say: I wasn’t even two when it started so I’m concerned with now, not then.

However, the question is a valid and proper one and, if it is posed by someone whose father fought and died in the Second…

3 December 2009Comment

On 25 July 2009, Henry John “Harry” Patch died. Aged 111, he was the last British survivor of the First World War trenches still living in the UK. Following the funeral held in Wells Cathedral he was buried near Combe Down where he was born.

For more than 80 years Harry refused to talk about his wartime experiences, refused to attend regimental reunions and avoided war films on the television. It wasn’t until he was over 100 that he broke his silence. In 1998 with the…

1 December 2009News

87% of Britons agree with the statement: “Remembrance Sunday should be about marking the dead on all sides of war, not just the British”, according to a ComRes poll carried out for the Christian think tank Ekklesia at the beginning of November.

93% say they believe that, contrary to existing remembrance traditions, civilians who died in war should also be remembered.

95% say they think the main message of Remembrance Sunday should be one of peace.

When…

1 December 2009News in Brief

In early November, the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund published the first in-depth investigation of the effect of war on forces children, The Overlooked Casualties of Conflict. 60% of spouses say their children had increased levels of fear and anxiety when husbands or wives went to war, and 57% reported increased behavioural problems.
The report includes the story of an eight-year-old boy who found the images of body bags on the news so overwhelming that he hanged himself…

3 November 2009Comment

Do you support the troops? Are you proud of them? It would be a brave – or perhaps foolhardy – person in public life who said no.

Indeed, in a recent speech to mark the end of military operations in Iraq, archbishop Rowan Williams – the dangerous radical who once got himself arrested at an CND protest – declared the need for all of us to “speak our thanks for those who have taught us through their sacrifice the sheer worth of justice and peace.” He was talking about British…

3 September 2009Comment

The funeral of the last British survivor of the trenches of the First World War was held in Wells Cathedral on Hiroshima Day (6 August) attended with pomp and circumstance, and solemn honours from politicians and the mainstream media. While they proclaimed their respect for Harry Patch, who died at the age of 111, political leaders and media commentators almost entirely ignored the core message to which Harry Patch devoted his last years.

The man who saw some of his best friends…

1 September 2009News

Peace News asked participants in the Trident Ploughshares Summer Camp in Coulport to reflect on the Second World War, and to give their suggestions for what they would have done in 1939. Here is a collection of answers that they gave (over the phone) after a long discussion of the topic:

After the First World War, we would have started campaigning against future wars and concentrated on arms companies. We would have lobbied churches, other groups and individuals to disinvest from…

1 July 2009Review

Zed Books, 2009; ISBN 978 1 848132 78 8; 272pp; £19.99

“At last a book on conscientious objection to military service from the point of view of contemporary objectors. It expresses the critique objection poses to patriarchy and social militarization and firmly places objection in the context of struggle for social transformation” – that’s my enthusiastic and heartfelt endorsement on the back cover of this book.

It is absolutely genuine – and not just because I’m friendly with one of the editors and some of the contributors, or because I…

16 June 2009Feature

Britain doesn’t need an Armed Forces Day, recently invented by Gordon Brown. We already have Remembrance Day. What Britain needs is an Unarmed Forces Day - when we can remember those people, like Tom Hurndall, Rachel Corrie, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, who dedicated their lives to nonviolent social change.

Unarmed Forces Day is a Peace News initiative. It is a celebration of the power of nonviolence, a call for real support for our damaged veterans,…

1 June 2009Review

Pluto Press, 2009; ISBN 978 0 745328 29 4; 288pp; £16.99

Once you get past the introduction – which is poorly written and unfocused, with most of the important information repeated in the main body of the book – Long Time Passing is just what it says on the cover: a country by country breakdown of the effects of war and terror on mothers, families and society.

Each chapter – covering Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and the US – starts with a well-referenced history of recent events that have briefly appeared in the…

1 May 2009News

I’m at a loss finding the right idiom for this story: Throwing good money after bad? A fool and his money are easily parted? A leopard can’t change his spots…? You decide.

A joint report by the National Audit Office and the Wales Audit Office concluded that the Red Dragon project to build a super-hangar at RAF St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan cost the public £113m and created only 45 jobs instead of a forecast 4,500. It now stands virtually empty.

The problem arose…