News from the New Party

Remembrance

Canon Andrew White, the vicar of St George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, called for letter-writing campaigns like those of the Second World War to raise the morale of the service-men and women risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His plea, backed by Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop to the Forces, David Connor, Dean of Windsor, echoes a similar call made by the Roman Catholic Bishop of the forces, Tom Burns.

Canon White contrasted the level of support given to British troops in Basra by the public to that shown by the American public for their forces.

Speaking to The Times yesterday in London on the eve of being awarded the the “Pursuer of Peace” award by the Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths, Canon White admitted that mistakes had been made in Iraq, but said that the former regime of Saddam Hussein could not have been removed by the Iraqi people acting alone.

“What really concerns me is that the British do not support their military in the same way as the Americans do,” he said.

“If you go around the American embassy in Baghdad it is full of letters and pictures written and sent by children to American soldiers.

“Among the British troops there is nothing. Apart from Armistice Day, when do we ever hear of the British supporting their military? I would like schools to do letter-writing campaigns. I would like people to be made more aware of how many troops we have serving in Iraq.”

In a letter in today's Guardian, the editor of a campaigning political magazine called The Lancet, Richard Horton, lends that journal's imprimatur to lecturing veterans on the proper way for them to mark Remembrance Sunday:

    [T]he purpose of poppies needs to be recast if it is to have any lasting meaning. Wearing a poppy should be about remembering civilian lives lost in all wars, not merely military lives sacrificed in British wars. Wearing a poppy should be about a commitment to peace and justice in the future, not only about war and victory in the past. And wearing a poppy should be about our broad global solidarity as a human community, not our narrow expression of national identity.

Horton is a fixture at rallies of the Stop the War Coalition. Normally I would spend only a few seconds debating whether his designation of the act of remembrance as "a narrow expression of national identity" was more ignorant than impertinent or the other way round...

Horton at least perceives that Remembrance Sunday, as it stands, commemorates what George V's proclamation in 1919 called the "glorious dead". Compare and contrast with the White Poppies campaign of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, which every year generates some unwarranted publicity. Also in The Guardian today is a letter from one Lucy Craig:

    I wholeheartedly support [Channel 4 newsreader] Jon Snow's decision not to wear a red poppy. My only wish is that he would sport a white one. For whereas the red poppy and Remembrance Day signify support for the British service personnel who have given their lives over many decades in many different wars, white poppies remember and honour all those whose lives have been lost - civilians and soldiers; old and young; British, German, Japanese, Russian - and of course, Iraqi and Afghan.

Again, give her credit for one thing. She understands that Remembrance Sunday isn't merely about commemorating the victims of war. It's about expressing gratitude to British servicemen. The partisans of the White Poppies campaign can't do that, because they believe the servicemen who have fought against our autocratic and totalitarian enemies have all been wrong. For the political origins of that campaign, I modestly refer you to what I have previously said about them at this time of year...

[T]he white poppy is the symbol of an organisation that comprehensively failed to inoculate itself against pro-Nazi elements in British public life in the late 1930s, and whose views even as the full extent of Nazi barbarity became known were strikingly devoid of self-criticism. I recommend on this subject the standard historical work Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945, by Martin Ceadel (2000), from which I have taken the three quotations that follow.

John Middleton Murry, editor of the pacifist journal Peace News during WWII, wrote in that magazine on 9 August 1940:

    Personally I don't believe that a Hitlerian Europe would be quite so terrible as most people believe it would be.

The best that can be said of Murry is that, unforgivably foolish as this judgement was (did he imagine Kristallnacht was mere youthful high spirits that would be toned down with the responsibilities of the occupation of Europe?), at least he had the belated sense after the war to acknowledge the truth about the moral failings of pacifism. (He is now best remembered as a literary critic and editor of the brilliant short stories of his late wife, Katherine Mansfield.) The pacifist Peace Pledge Union overall cannot be acquitted so lightly. Right up till 1943, the Marquess of Tavistock, founder of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic British People's Party, was winning election to the national council of the PPU. He was nominated for the council also in 1944, but declined to serve. In Peace News, 30 October 1942, he invoked the following rationalisation for Nazi aggression in Europe:

    ... the very serious provocation which many Jews have given by their avarice and arrogance when exploiting Germany's financial difficulties, by their associations with commercialized vice, and by their monopolization of certain professions.

To honest pacifists, the gas chambers - and the consequent certain knowledge that every Jew in Europe would have been killed had the allied powers not taken up arms - were a cause of personal shame as well as horror. Not, however, to the most famous of all British peace campaigners, Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth (and, incidentally, mother of the current [2004] Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords, Baroness Williams of Crosby - who would certainly not share her mother's view of WWII). In one of her regular letters to her fellow-campaigners, on 3 May 1945, Vera Brittain maintained that the gas chambers were being publicised by the allies:

    ... partly, at least, in order to divert attention from the havoc produced in German cities by allied obliteration bombing.

Thus an ethical objection to war - grossly misguided, but not inherently ignoble - became a position indifferent to tyranny and genocide, uncomprehending of the moral imperative of combating evil, and even complicit in support of that evil.