Peace Quest Launches White Poppies Campaign 2024
On Monday, October 28, Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) launched its fourth white poppies campaign at Cape Breton University. In a well-attended event co-sponsored by the University’s Global Social Justice Program (GSJP), PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard placed the 91-year history and enduring pacifist principles of the white poppies campaign in the context of the current surge of brutal armed conflict around the world, a violent world disorder arising from the recurrent failure to ‘undo war’ and ‘do peace’ in the 110-years since the end of the ‘war to end all war.’ The full text of Sean’s talk – entitled ‘Greater Wars: The White-Poppy Poetry and Politics of Remembrance as Resistance – is provided below. It was followed by a lively and powerful discussion and exchange of views, with a follow-up session now being planned.
The international white poppies campaign has been run by the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) in the UK since 1936. During that time, its guiding principles and objectives have remained the same, defined by the PPU on its website (www.ppu.org.uk/remembrance-white-poppies) as follows:
“White poppies stand for remembrance of all victims of all wars. This includes wars still being fought. It includes people of all nationalities. It includes both civilians and members of armed forces. In wearing white poppies, we remember all those killed in war, all those wounded in body or mind, the millions who have been made sick or homeless by war and the families and communities torn apart. We also remember those killed or imprisoned for refusing to fight and for resisting war.”
“Greater Wars”: The White-Poppy Poetry and Politics of Remembrance as Resistance
Presentation by Dr. Sean Howard, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, CBU
Peace Quest Cape Breton Campaign Coordinator
October 28, 2024
I’d like to reflect on the history, principles and purposes of the white poppies campaign, beginning with the best summation I’ve ever heard, by the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, recorded shortly before his untimely death last December:
“I love wearing my white poppy. I could wear a red one, but I don’t just want to remember British people who have died in war. I want to remember all people. In fact, I want to remember all people and all animals who have died in wars anywhere in the world. Africa, Asia, Europe, anywhere in the world. You see, for me, the idea of peace is not just a space in between wars, peace is not just the absence of war. Peace is something that we should really be working towards, and it’s not just about remembering past wars, it’s making sure that we avoid future wars. You see, one of my favourite sayings is that ‘there is no way to peace. Peace is the way.’ And until we have rulers, leaders, people in authority who understand that I’m going to continue to keep wearing my white poppy and I urge you to do the same. We have to remember all victims of war, not just the select few, and we have to work towards a world where there is no war. We can do it. If we can put people on the moon, if we can invent computers, if we can do all of these great wonderful things that we claim to do all the time, then why can’t we undo war, and do peace? Wear a white poppy: you know it makes absolute sense. Peace.”
To “Undo War”: it was out of alarm and consternation that the official red poppy campaign in Britain (and the Empire) was being perversely militarized and nationalized – conscripted in an annual campaign to give battle a do-over, Make War Great Again – that in 1933 the dove-white poppies were first released by members of the Co-Operative Women’s Guild, almost all of whom had lost loved ones in the supremely unjust war, the mechanized mass-murder, of 1914-18. As the Guild’s General Secretary, Eleanor Barton, observed, the peace flame of the new poppy was intended to rekindle “that ‘Never Again’ spirit that was [so] strong…but seems to grow weaker as years go on”.
A year from his death (aged 25) on the Western Front, the poet Wilfred Owen expressed grim confidence that the harvest of Death all around him would one day reap a peace dividend. He outlined his vision of ‘the Next War’ in a sonnet of that title, ironically deifying death with a capital D, ‘His’ powers with a capital H:
Out there, we walked quite friendly up to Death, –
Sat down and ate beside him, cool and bland, –
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, –
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets, and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorused if he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum!
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when every fighter brags
He fights on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Owen was killed on November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice: doing his job, let us be candid, of trying to kill others, an (ab)normality he most hauntingly explored in his poem Strange Meeting, when the ghost of a bayoneted young ‘German’ (human) exclaims in wondering despair: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” In The Ghost Road, the final volume of her Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker describes Owen’s death through the dying eyes of her main, fictional character, Billy Prior, who –
“…tried to crawl back beyond the drainage ditches, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he was hit again, but the gas was thick here and he couldn’t reach his mask. Banal, simple, repetitive thoughts ran round and round his mind. Balls up. Bloody mad. Oh Christ. There was no pain, more a spreading numbness that left his brain clear. … He saw Owen die, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arc in the air as it fell. It seemed to take for ever to fall, and Prior’s consciousness fluttered down with it. He gazed at his reflection in the water, which broke and reformed as bullets hit the surface and then, gradually, as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.”
“He couldn’t reach his mask”: the point of the white poppies, you could say, is to remove the mask, combat the numbness of false remembrance, unveil the truly hideous face of war: erase the haloes, rehumanize the ‘heroes,’ mourn without glorifying the fallen, see the ‘forever young’ as, simply, ‘forever dead’. As the poet Charles Sorley wrote in Flanders in 1915, in a pencil-draft sonnet found on his 20-year-old body:
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Despite the best, brave efforts of the Co-operative Women’s Guild – and the Peace Pledge Union, which has run the white poppies campaign since 1936 – in WW2 ‘Great Death’ scythed 75 million people down, mainly civilians, compared to His mere 20-million haul of (mainly military) souls from WW1. In the inter-world-war years, hundreds of thousands took the famous ‘peace pledge’, as some of us here have done, and as I hope others here will do: “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.” Faced with the rise of fascism, many renounced the pledge, enlisting to die and kill bitter in the knowledge that, as Nazi leader Rudolf Hess acknowledged, “the Third Reich came out of the trenches,” a plague spread by the abject failure to ‘undo war’ in the vindictively anti-German 1919 Treaty of Versailles, better known to some of us as the ‘peace’ to end all peace.
A global ‘peace pledge’ lies at the heart of the United Nations Charter, “determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”. These stirring words, opening the Preamble, are backed by specific, mandatory commitments: in Article 26, efforts 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,” a “system for the regulation of armaments” to be established and overseen by the Security Council with the assistance of a Military Staff Committee acting in effect as a demilitarization coordinating committee; in Article 33, the compulsory referral of disputes between states to mechanisms designed to facilitate their peaceful resolution “by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means”; and in Articles 34 to 38, a range of political and legal procedures to empower and enable the Security Council to seek the “pacific settlement” of disputes, in accordance with the core provisions and principles of the Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. All of which prose was designed to ensure what Owen’s poem envisioned, that the next War would finally be the greater one waged against war, until its progressive decline became its terminal demise, the “general and complete disarmament” – to cite the official UN term – of world affairs.
Two weeks ago, reporting on the annual session of the UN’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, Canadian scholar and feminist peace activist Ray Acheson wrote: “Seventy-nine years after the creation of the United Nations, states should not still be reaching for war as the answer to tensions or competition.” This is the UN’s first committee not only because it was the first established, but because achieving international security based on disarmament was and remains the UN’s first order of business, its prime directive. “It’s absurd”, Acheson continued –
“…that states invest relentlessly in militarism, which clearly only leads to more death and destruction, while ridiculing those of us who want to try a different way. We are not ridiculous. The warmongers, the weapon builders, the political leaders who seek power and dominance – they are ridiculous. We know why they do what they do: Capitalism. War profiteering. The catastrophic influence of the military-industrial complex over politics.”
And, as if that wasn’t enough, something else, too: something even – something much – bigger. The UN Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945; by the time it entered into force on October 24, the nuclear age had dawned, first on July 16 in the New Mexico desert with the world’s first atomic explosion (remembered by witnesses as ‘The Day the Sun Rose Twice’), then on August 6 and 9 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities (and hundreds of thousands of people) destroyed by single bombs with apple-sized explosive cores of – in part, Canadian – uranium and plutonium. Registering that the ‘scourge of war’ could now seal the fate of humanity, even that of the Earth, the UN General Assembly – in its inaugural resolution, January 24, 1946 – mandated the establishment of a ‘Commission to Deal with the Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy’, itself mandated to facilitating “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons”.
What plan did the Commission come up with? We don’t know, it hasn’t yet met: perhaps it could, in time for the resolution’s 80th birthday? In February 1946, the Military Staff Committee met for the first time, and has met innumerable times since, without ever providing any guidance to the Security Council with regard to establishing the “system for the regulation of armaments” demanded by Article 26: it has, as a UN report recently lamented, remained procedurally active but practically “dormant, unable to fulfill its responsibility.” Perhaps it could revived from its coma in time for the Charter’s 80th birthday?
Both the Commission and Committee were early victims of the 40-year ‘Cold War’, a misnamed nightmare of unrestrained rearmament, nuclear arms racing, close calls with Doomsday – and boiling hot ‘proxy’ wars costing and shattering millions of lives across much of the globe outside Europe and North America. Then came the mid-1980s’ ‘Gorbachev revolution,’ that improbable awakening affected by a Soviet leadership that actually took its core antiwar responsibilities as a permanent member of the Security Council seriously.
The Cold War, that is, did not end when the USA ‘won’ it but when the USSR stopped fighting it, urging instead the forging of common human cause against hunger, deprivation and disease, pollution, illiteracy and intolerance, all the ‘greater wars’ to be won – and partly funded – by means of what Gorbachev told the General Assembly in 1988 was “the most important topic, without which no problem of the coming century can be resolved: disarmament”: his existential point being, not that disarmament matters more, morally or politically, than anything else, but that – as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the UN First Committee said on October 16 – “if we don’t get this right, nothing you care about, and nothing you work on, will matter”.
Instead, though, of a decisive paradigm shift – from ‘peace through strength’ to ‘strength through peace’ – the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a vacuum filled by Western-backed ‘casino capitalism,’ the hubristic expansion of NATO (demanded above all by a military-industrial complex fearful of its own decline and fall), and then – as predictably as the humiliation of post-WW1 Germany spawned the evil of Nazism – the arising from the post-Soviet ashes of that sneering, vengeful phoenix, the Putin dictatorship.
In the hour we spend here, large numbers of mainly young men, most of them conscripts, are killing and dying in the Flanders-esque trenches and wastelands of Ukraine, a carnage-of-choice started by Putin’s Russia, a nuclear-armed, indeed Bomb-emboldened, state. In this hour, another nuclear-armed and -emboldened state, the United States (with many a criminal war on its record), will spend nearly $100 million on its military, a drop in the bipartisan ‘defense’ budget of nearly $850 billion, a significant portion and driver of record-breaking global military expenditure set to smash the $2.5 trillion barrier this year. In this hour, another nuclear-armed and -emboldened state, Israel, will continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere, a vortex of violence now tearing Lebanon (and – progressively, inexorably – the region) apart. Indeed, as Palestine’s First Committee Ambassador said on October 16, “every hour…our people are subjected to the most heinous crimes…using all available means for killing, torture, starvation, thirst, siege, and deprivation”.
In all, at this hour over two dozen major armed conflicts, between and within states, are raging, and have forced tens of millions to flee – if they can – often into vulnerable, desperate, and persecuted exile. Many armed forces and gangs, state and non-state actors, are deliberately ‘weaponizing’ gender-based violence, mainly against women and girls (including the deliberate targeting of women, girls, and other persons with disabilities); as was the case, for example, on an epic scale during the most devastating conflict (so far) of the 21st century, the 2020-2022 genocide by Ethiopia against the people, culture, and agriculture of one its own regions, Tigray, at the cost of at least three quarters of a million lives, out of a population of just under six million.
And all this inhuman waste and mayhem – the sick fruits of so much ‘deterrence’ and toxic military masculinity – is always justified (and ritually remembered) as a ‘necessary evil’, the only real way, in the ‘real world’, to fight for peace and freedom, honour-thy-Mother-&-Fatherland, etc. Indeed, as I recently discussed at a ‘philosophy café’ here at CBU, we are, according to many western military and political leaders, now supposed to think of ourselves as living in ‘pre-war’ times, on a clear, 5-10 year trajectory to a third world ‘war to end all wars’, one which will – when, as highly likely, it ‘goes nuclear’ – end tens of millions of lives in its first day, with hundreds of millions to soon follow, wrecking the climate for years in the omnicidal process.
In late 1914, Wilfred Owen wrote: “now the Winter of the world/With perishing great darkness closes in,” a “foul tornado” bringing “famines of thought and feeling,” reducing even “love” to a “thin wine,” radically insufficient to sustain, let alone define, us. Well, the ‘foulest tornado’ of all, nuclear war, will usher a Winter of famines killing billions, a “perishing great darkness and cold” the accursed survivors will never recover, ‘spring’ back, build back better from. But if we are going to prove able, as individuals and societies, to appreciate what kind of Storm is brewing, we have also to register the realities of the wars – past and present – guilty of sowing that Whirlwind. This basic, white-poppies contention – that the kind of peace we need to ‘undo war’ is impossible without, inseparable from, the kind of remembrance we need to resist it – was brilliantly encapsulated by Benjamin Zephaniah in his 2021 poem Reminders:
‘The peace garden is opposite the War Memorial,’
Said the old soldier.
‘We had to fight to make the peace
Back in the good old days.’
‘No, the War Memorial is opposite the peace garden,’
Said the old pacifist.
‘You’ve had so many wars to end all wars,
Still millions are dying from the wars you left behind.’
We began with Zephaniah’s plea to wear our white poppies “until we have rulers, people in authority who understand that we have to…work towards a world where there is no war.” I’d like to close with this refection: what if those leaders aren’t out there, won’t ever appear, charging in on their poppy-white horses? What if, as the peace pledge suggests, we need to take the lead, do the work, exercise collectively the authority vested in us as human beings to reject war as a crime against humanity (indeed, all life on Earth)?
I’m not saying there are easy or obvious answers to these questions, or the many others – of tactics, strategy, theory and practice – they beg. I am suggesting that answers only tend to come to the questions that we ask; and that it’s not too much to ask ourselves to get the questions right, prepare ourselves and others for the ‘greater wars’ Owen saw coming, and that better break out soon.
