BEING HONEST WITH OURSELVES ABOUT WAR: PEACE QUEST’S 2023 WHITE POPPIES CAMPAIGN
On October 26 Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) launched its third annual white poppies campaign at Cape Breton University (CBU). In a well-attended event co-sponsored by the new CBU Peace Quest Student Society, PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard surveyed the 90-year history of the white poppies campaign and stressed the enduring relevance of its original objectives: remembering all victims of all wars, past and present; opposing any glorification, normalisation or sanitization of the crime against humanity that war is; and working to build a world beyond war, rooted in common, cooperative security and humane, peace-loving, free and fair societies.
The text of Sean Howard’s talk, ‘Being Honest With Ourselves About War,’ can be viewed below. Coverage of the campaign has included an article – ‘White Poppies in Cape Breton’ – in The Cape Breton Post (October 27), and a letter by Sean – ‘Organized Mass Murder Must Stop’ – in The Cape Breton Post (November 7).
Interest in the white poppies this year was stronger than in our two previous campaigns. All donations received went to support the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). As of November 10, 89 members of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza had been killed in Israel’s criminal military assault.
PQCB repeats its call for Canada to demand a full and immediate cessation of hostilities, the release of all hostages, and the prosecution of all war crimes by Hamas and Israel. We also reiterate the imperative of ending the blockade of the Gaza Strip and urgently reviving the peace process in Israel-Palestine.
BEING HONEST WITH OURSELVES ABOUT WAR
LAUNCH OF PEACE QUEST CAPE BRETON’S WHITE POPPIES CAMPAIGN 2023
Opening Remarks by Sean Howard, PQCB Campaign Coordinator
Cape Breton University, Thursday October 26
Thank you all for attending the launch of Peace Quest Cape Breton’s third White Poppies campaign, on this 90th anniversary of the first White Poppies campaign in Britain in 1933, an initiative by members of the Co-Operative Women’s Guild horrified that the Great War that took or ruined the lives of so many of their loved ones was being ‘remembered’ in ways that nationalistically glorified the slaughter, making one-dimensional heroes out of the British and Allied war dead, and thus excluding the vast majority of the 20 million+ souls that perished. In the words of the Guild’s General Secretary, Eleanor Barton, the dove-white poppy was intended to rekindle “that ‘Never Again’ spirit that was strong in 1918, but seems to grow weaker as years go on”.
Since 1936 the white poppy campaign has been run by the Peace Pledge Union in Britain, with the poppies sent abroad to groups like Peace Quest Cape Breton, and Voice of Women for Peace Nova Scotia. Our campaign aims are the same as the Peace Pledge Union’s, defined on its website as:
Remembrance of all victims of war, including both civilians and members of the armed forces. We remember people of all nationalities. We remember those killed in wars happening now, as well as in the past. We also remember those who are often excluded from the mainstream, such as refugees and victims of colonial conflicts.
Challenging war and militarism, as well as any attempt to glorify or celebrate war. White poppies encourage us to question the way war is normalised and justified. They remind us of the need to resist war and its causes today. And –
A commitment to peace and to seeking nonviolent solutions to conflict. By drawing attention to the devastating human cost of war, white poppies highlight the urgency of our ongoing struggle for peace.
The Peace Pledge, which hundreds of thousands of people have taken, reads: “War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.” So it’s a pacifist pledge, but as the Union stresses, to be “pacifist” is not to be “passive,” but, rather, actively strive to build nothing less than a new world order capable of eradicating all those causes – political, socio-economic, patriarchal, racist, religious, cultural, colonial and neocolonial, educational, etc. – of armed conflict.
When the Pledge was first issued, in 1934, many hoped it could help generate enough pacifist momentum to avert the already-looming spectre of a second world war caused primarily by the unforgivably bad and unjust ‘peace’ made by the ‘victors’ – and imposed on the vanquished – of World War One. And many men, it should be acknowledged, who quickly took the pledge soon after took the heartbreaking decision to renounce it, fighting against General Franco’s German-backed fascists in the Spanish Civil War in the unavailing hope that that might stop the global conflagration that would soon claim 75 million lives.
By the end of 1945, fascism was militarily defeated, but militarism stood revealed, in the menacing new form of the Mushroom Cloud, as a force capable of defeating humanity, indeed all Life on Earth. No wonder, then, that the UN Charter opens with a ‘Never Again’ vow of its own: “We the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…” The Charter is also a roadmap to such a truly post-War world. Article 26, for example, aims to “promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources”; and Article 33 requires (not requests) that “the parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”
In short, vital portions of the Charter read like the Peace Pledge writ large. To call war a ‘scourge’ is to regard it as a crime against humanity which – like slavery – must be abolished, in a process referred to in countless UN resolutions and agreements as “general and complete disarmament”: the establishment of a new, non-violent normal where states could still defend their own borders, but only with forces incapable of threatening, invading, or occupying anyone else. And by focusing on the need to radically reduce military spending and invest instead in the kind of truly sustainable development that delivers not just national but human security, the Charter commits all UN members to ‘work for the removal of all causes of war.’
Yet the world, nearly 80 years later, remains brutally and bitterly divided between rich and poor, a heavily industrialized and militarized minority and a systematically exploited, ruinously indebted majority. And as I do not need to tell you, ‘the scourge of war’ is today being wielded viciously and often, more and more frequently as the 21st century crashes from disaster to disaster and the great goal of ‘general and complete disarmament,’ an awakening from war, turns into a recurring nightmare of massive military violence involving (in a perverse inversion of Article 26) a huge diversion of the world’s human and economic resources to armaments and armies, investments generating immense suffering, endemic insecurity – and vast profits, for a few.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University has carefully counted nearly a million direct war deaths – 940,000; 430,000 of them civilian – in the post-9/11 era of the US-led, ongoing and metastasizing, ‘war on terror’. In addition, “several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars – because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.” The great majority of these ‘indirect deaths’ – at least three and a half million – are those of civilians, and most of them are women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities, groups representing most of humanity but still routinely excluded from national and international discussions of both war and peace.
It has cost the United States over eight trillion dollars to maintain its ever-expanding, post-9/11 War Machine, now featuring over 750 bases in 80 countries! Since Washington’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon budget has, well, mushroomed from $379 billion to $844 billion, over $96 million an hour, $2.3 billion a day. But who really pays the price? Not the American rich – their taxes have gone down – but the American poor, through the chronic neglect of their health, education, and well-being; and, of course, all those millions, predominantly in the Global South, whose lives and homelands have been shattered, often forcing them to flee, sometimes into more harm’s way…
There are other costs, too, for while US combat deaths post-9/11 are comparatively small – 7,000 – we must add to this the astonishing figure of over 30,000 military and veteran suicides, an appalling indication of the psychological toll not just of witnessing and suffering trauma but (often) inflicting it, causing harm and taking life in loyal service to that Demigod, The Nation-State.
It’s one thing when men and women volunteer such service, though many people enlist not (or not only) out of a desire to fight or willingness to sacrifice, but for pressing, pragmatic reasons such as escaping poverty, learning new skills, etc. In this country, for example – where so many students fall so deeply into debt – young people may understandably be tempted to enlist by the prospect of the Canadian Armed Forces paying “100% of your school fees, including your tuition, books and academic equipment!” There are similar inducements in the US, while in Britain, the recruitment website of the Royal Navy unsubtly begins by asking: “Ready to get skills for life, not debt for life?”
Many people, too, enlist under the influence of propagandistic and one-dimensional recruitment campaigns, backed by a culture of what the Peace Pledge Union calls “everyday militarism, in which military ideas, values and imagery find their way into more and more areas of life...gradually becoming normal to the point where we can easily forget how disturbing militarism is.” Indeed, the British government has in recent years “spent over £45 million on projects promoting a ‘military ethos’ in schools,” while since 2009 the last Saturday in June has been designated ‘Armed Forces Day,’ with ceremonies in hundreds of communities. In Canada, a federal Liberal government twenty years ago designated April 9 as ‘Vimy Day,’ to ‘honour’ one of the most hyped battles of World War One, the costly and strategically inconclusive capture of a German-held ridge supposedly inspiring ‘the birth of a nation’ (though no one thought so then). And what the Peace Pledge Union says of Britain surely also rings sadly true here: “We are encouraged to applaud soldiers as ‘heroes’ and give to charities to support them, even as the welfare state on which wounded individuals should be able to rely is dismantled in front of us.”
But we enter a whole different moral realm when the State compels men to fight, disregarding any conscientious objection they may have and offering no alternatives to military service. Remembering those who refused to be cogs in the war machine – 20,000 British men in World War One alone, many imprisoned and brutally mistreated – forms an important part of each white poppy season. And just as it is important to “remember those killed in wars happening now,” it is important to ‘remember those resisting wars today,’ and I’d like to close with a few examples.
Haggai Matar is a conscientious objector in Israel. A journalist, on the day Hamas militants massacred well over a thousand Israeli civilians he wrote an article entitled ‘Gaza’s shock attack has terrified Israelis. It should also unveil the context.’ “It was important for me,” Matar told Democracy Now! on October 10 –
to remind Israelis and people abroad that that feeling of defenselessness is one that Palestinians have experienced for the past few decades, definitely people in Gaza who have been attacked routinely by Israel. So, when we think about how we understand the Hamas attack, without justifying it…and also as we think about the next steps, we need to understand there is no military solution. These recurring attacks on Gaza bring nothing but death and destruction, and no hope for any of us.
What was most important, it seems to me, for Matar in this terrible moment of truth was to stay true to himself, be honest with himself and others about the moral and political reality of the situation, not just the Explosion on October 7 but the long and winding fuse that led up to it. The pledge he has taken, then, is not just to condemn Evil, let alone just avenge it, but work to remove all its causes.
When Russia illegally invaded Ukraine on another date of infamy – February 24, 2022 – the government in Kyiv immediately barred all males aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country, rendering them liable to compulsory military service with no right to conscientious objection. That ‘law’ is itself illegal, for under the terms of two key agreements that Ukraine has ratified – the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – the exercise of freedom of conscience, including with regard to military service, is enshrined as a fundamental right that cannot be suspended under any circumstances.
On February 23 this year, Christian pacifist Vitaly Alekseenko became the first Ukrainian Conscientious Objector to be jailed – sent to a penal labour colony, for one year – since the invasion. Refusing to ‘repent’ of his ‘crime’ in return for a suspended sentence, Alekseenko stated: “How could I do that when I am not guilty? I agree that I have broken the law of Ukraine, but I am not guilty under the law of God. I want to be honest to myself.”
Alekseenko is a member of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, which has condemned the Russian invasion and both advocates and has engaged in non-violent resistance to it. As Alekseenko was taken to jail, the Executive Secretary of the Movement, Yurii Sheliazhenko, commented: “Conscientious objection to military service is not a crime, it is a human right, and this human right should not be denied even in time of war. In fact, it is especially precious in times of war and historically emerged exactly because of that, because the challenges of modern militarised economies became unbearable to the conscience of a growing number of people.”
On August 3, the International Peace Bureau – to which Peace Quest Cape Breton belongs, and which has been defending the rights of conscientious objectors since 1891 – nominated three organizations to share next year’s Nobel Peace Prize: the Russian Movement of Conscientious Objectors (which somehow continues to operate despite predictably fierce persecution by the Putin dictatorship); the Belarussian group Our House, working to protect and defend conscientious objectors in that dictatorship; and the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. That same day, after his apartment in Kyiv was raided by authorities, Yurii Sheliazhenko was charged with ‘justifying Russian aggression’ on the basis of a ‘Peace Agenda for Ukraine and the World’ released by the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement on September 21, 2022 (UN International Day of Peace):
Condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine, the UN General Assembly called for an immediate peaceful resolution of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and emphasized that parties to the conflict must respect human rights and international humanitarian law. We share this position.
In case you think I’m quoting out of context, I’ve printed copies of the whole ‘Peace Agenda,’ which opens by insisting that –
Peace, not war, is the norm of human life. War is an organized mass murder. Our sacred duty is that we shall not kill. Today, when the moral compass is being lost everywhere and self-destructive support for war and the military is on the rise, it is especially important for us to maintain common sense, stay true to our non-violent way of life, build peace and support peace-loving people.
A few weeks before Sheliazhenko’s absurd arrest (he expects to be put on show trial soon), UN Secretary-General Antōnio Guterres issued ‘A New Agenda for Peace,’ a powerful indictment of the militarism currently frustrating progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that the General Assembly pledged in 2015 to meet by 2030. “Armed conflict,” Guterres wrote –
has a dramatic negative effect on the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. One quarter of humanity lives in conflict-affected areas. Conflict is a key driver for the more than 108 million people forcibly displaced worldwide – more than double the number a decade ago. Without a dramatic reduction in conflict, violence and the spread of weapons, the 2030 Agenda will remain out of reach for a large percentage of humanity.
But while I agree we need a new agenda for peace, I don’t believe we need a new Peace Pledge. Rather, we need to take more seriously than ever the implications and consequences of being honest with ourselves in recognizing war for what it inherently, innately, inevitably is: an unnecessary, unaffordable evil, the crime against humanity of organized mass murder. And in the nuclear age, we need to work harder than ever to remove all the causes of war.
All we are saying is that, given a chance, peace can make the difference between life and death on Mother Earth.
I hope you agree: it makes absolute sense.
