Anti-militarism

Members of Veterans for Peace UK line up in Whitehall, London, on 12 November for a Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. VfP UK lays a wreath of white poppies and remembers all those killed in war, including civilians and enemy soldiers. The banner at the front says: ‘Never Again’. Photo: Veterans for Peace UK

While arms companies have been at the top of the peace agenda recently with the DSEI arms fair, their involvement in education in the UK is less well known. Many of the top names have a presence – BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Babcock, QinetiQ, Chemring. Some are big players, forging the way ahead, others have a smaller role.

A ForcesWatch report on military interests in education (out soon) will detail the extent to which this has developed and why. It looks at how the armed forces,…

From the 30 September – 3 October, MAW Youth (Jen Harrison, Becky Garnault, Maddy Ridgley) plus 2 competition winners (Ella Johnson and Khem Rogaly) attended the International Peace Bureau world congress in Berlin.

For 4 days we were immersed in fascinating panel discussions and workshops delivered by an impressive collection of academics, activists, writers, politicians and economists. In our spare time we engaged in stimulating, nuanced and informative discussions with fellow…

‘I would rather have been there than anywhere else in the world,’ said Scottish pacifist poet Ashby McGowan after the Alternative Remembrance Sunday Ceremony in London on 13 November. He added: ‘Like many of the people there, I was in tears during the ceremony.’

The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) organised the ceremony in Tavistock Square only a short distance from the official ceremony at the Cenotaph with its display of military pomp.

Ashby McGowan read some of his poetry…

Veterans for Peace UK had their largest Remembrance Sunday turnout on 13 November. 68 members of VfP walked behind a banner saying ‘Never Again’ to lay a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph in London.

The ceremony was the last piece of a four-day VfP UK gathering which included a public conference, a day-long AGM, and a guided peace walk in central London.

During the conference, a panel discussion on ‘Creating Enemies: Social perspectives’ was addressed by Bilal…

On 10 November, more than 100 peace activists blockaded the entrance to the annual conference of the European defence agency in Brussels, Belgium.

Organisers Vredesactie (‘Peace Action’) criticised the European Commission’s proposal to give money from the EU budget to support military R&D, initially €90m, rising to billions.

Bram Vranken, spokesperson for Vredesactie, said: ‘An industry with an annual turnover of 100 billion euros should pay for its own…

On 1 October, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is organising a major protest simultaneously at RAF/USAF Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire Moors and at USAF Croughton in Northamptonshire.

Fylingdales is a US ballistic missile early warning radar base and could initiate a nuclear response to a missile attack. As part of the US missile defence system, it is also a component of the US nuclear strike force. At Croughton, the US will be spending £200m to turn the base into…

Europe’s first International Nonviolent March for Demilitarisation took place in north-east France from August 4 to 10. People from 15 countries called for the conversion of military structures to civilian use, a nonviolent people’s defence rather than a suicidal military one, the abolition of military blocs, the liberation of objectors and total resisters to conscription, and civil rights for members of the forces.

The climax of the march was the afternoon of Sunday August 8, when –…

White and red poppy wreaths are laid together during Aberystwyth’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony, after 11 years of negotiations between the town council, the Royal British Legion, and Aberystwyth Peace & Justice Network. Photo: Alun Williams

It is a truism that war is a tragic waste of life, but when some wars are so misguided as to be also plain silly, their tragedy is magnified accordingly.

When I was nine years old, my classmates were all abuzz that Falkland (in Scotland) had been invaded. Argentina had done it from the bottom of the world and no-one had seen them coming. The navy was going to sort it all out. Great Britain was probably the strongest country in the world after America, so that was alright. Still,…

The UK armed forces currently make 11,000 visits to UK schools and colleges annually, and large sums of money have recently been set aside to expand cadet forces in state schools and to fund military-based ‘alternative provision’ projects.

This short film, made by young people for young people, examines whether recruitment is one of the aims of the new school cadet forces, interviewing cadets, as well as members of the Woodcraft folk who are campaigning against the…

Speaking on the first day of a conference of grassroots antimilitarist campaigners, poet and indigenous Khoisan activist Zenzile Khoisan told us: ‘I was one of those people dodging bullets outside this building as a 13-year-old in 1976’. The building was the City Hall, an imposing colonial-era edifice on Cape Town’s grand parade.

Speaking 20 years after South Africa’s first democratic election, Khoisan told the War Resisters’ International (WRI) gathering stories of his…

No to NATO march, Newport. Photo: Marian Delyth

On 2 September, the annual meeting of the international network ‘No to War – No to NATO’ called for the abolition of NATO. They rejected the planned opening of further NATO military bases and the deployment of soldiers from NATO member states to Eastern Europe, and stated that the ‘conflict in Ukraine has been substantially escalated by NATO’. The network went on: ‘Currently, NATO views Russia…

‘The View from the Drone; Northern Pakistan (23 January 2009)’
by Steve Pratt, former SAS soldier turned art psychotherapist.If peace is the ecology of mutual relationships, violence is the deliberate or negligent destruction of that ecology – the violation of persons, cultures, communities, peoples, the Earth.

Control, as the will to force a situation into a specific outcome, or to prevent one, is one way of understanding the genesis of violence. As such, violence is the extension…

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has become a vehicle for US-led use of force in the interests of the rich and powerful. It bypasses the United Nations and the system of international law, accelerates and promotes militarisation and escalates spending on armaments, with NATO countries accounting for 75% of global military expenditure.

Preparations are under way for a range of anti-NATO activities in late August and September as NATO holds its next summit meeting in Newport, 4…