Friends stand for peace on Armed Forces Day
Marketed as ‘family-friendly fun’, the day is really ‘a desperate recruitment drive with the 10,000+ annual military visits to schools and the increasing influence of arms company money in our education system’.
Quakers witnessed for peace last weekend as the annual Armed Forces Day (AFD) took place. Marketed as ‘family-friendly fun’, the day is really ‘a desperate recruitment drive with the 10,000+ annual military visits to schools and the increasing influence of arms company money in our education system’, said Lesley Chandler from Falmouth Meeting, which held a Meeting for Worship in the town on 24 June, when the national event took place. Two days earlier, the Meeting hosted a panel discussion with speakers from Quaker Peace & Social Witness, ForcesWatch and Demilitarise Education, and a showing of the film War School.
The event was ‘an opportunity to learn about child recruitment and the roles played by the armed forces in our schools’, Falmouth Friends said. Meanwhile, local and national groups, including Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the Peace Pledge Union, ForcesWatch, Demilitarise Education and Cornwall Resists, united to show their opposition to the day with talks, stalls, street theatre and protest.
CAAT said that the day had cost Cornwall Council ‘at least £300,000 during a cost-of-living crisis’ and that ‘local groups are appalled that this money has been spent promoting militarism when local services have been cut to the bone’.
The group also highlighted the fact that the day is taking place at the same time the Bibby Stockholm refugee prison ship is likely to still be in Falmouth. With a plan for the ship to double its capacity to house 500 refugees and asylum seekers ‘in accommodation the size of parking spaces’, CAAT claimed it was ‘a wider manifestation of the border violence that is enacted on people seeking sanctuary, many of whom are fleeing conflicts either caused by the British military, or the devastation caused by bombs made by British arms companies such as BAE Systems, [which sponsored the event]’.
Bury St Edmunds also held a vigil on 24 June while members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) handed out postcards across the UK to challenge the way the day ‘presents children with a glamourised image of war’. Last year the PPU criticised the military recruiters for allowing primary school-aged children to handle and play with unloaded weapons at AFD events.
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