Letters - 02 September 2022
From Halt these wars to Why Israel
Halt these wars
How should I respond as a Quaker to the ‘culture war’, and ‘war on woke’, seemingly the most pressing issues for the government and some media at present? This preference for ‘war’ is dangerously close to going beyond metaphor. Hatred and insecurity are being weaponised, and the manufacturers of these weapons are making profits in their political gains or newspaper sales. There are victims in the targeted minorities who are suffering, and the ties that hold society together are being damaged. Enemies are being made of fundamental values, justice and human rights in which our Quaker testimonies are rooted. It is easy to belittle commitments to the climate and anti-racism if ‘justice’ is seen negatively. ‘Woke’ is a device designed to wreck positive change.
Complexity requires hard work, but we can find peaceful ways to live with the tensions and frictions of the social and generational changes that constitute the battlegrounds in this conflict. My faith leads me to oppose these wars and promote the disarmament of the weapons in use, counterposing love and tolerance to hatred and prejudice. Our actions can halt these wars now. Otherwise, we will spend years clearing-up the personal and social wreckage.
Mark Lilley
Peace packs
I was intrigued to read that Celia’s granddaughter had been required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at her school in order to complete an A level (19 August). This prompted me to look into which schools in 2022 still have CCFs let alone maintain an element of compulsion about them. My online searching suggests they are all fee paying and independent. Judging from their prospectuses the CCF is invariably promoted as a key component of the ethos of those schools. Presumably, parents choose to pay to send their children to these schools in the full knowledge that they will be exposed to the Ministry of Defence’s youth policy as quoted by Celia to ‘create the conditions whereby recruiting will flourish’. Presumably too, they could choose, if they so wished, not to send their children to this type of school. Do Friends know of any state schools with CCFs?
Over fifty years ago I attended a state grammar school with a CCF. By the time I joined aged fifteen it was no longer compulsory, it was never a short cut to A levels and it was disbanded towards the end of my time at school. I never felt under any peer or parental pressure to join and I threw myself enthusiastically into everything it had to offer, likewise gaining my three stripes. I don’t think any of us were under any illusion as to its real purpose which was to help recruitment into the military, in our case as potential future officers. From time to time we would team up with real boy soldiers from the local Junior Leaders Regiment which existed to produce and train future NCOs. For us middle-class grammar school boys this was probably the most salutary life experience of being a cadet. Now as a sixty-nine-year-old Quaker looking back, I wonder if the Teach Peace Pack had been around then would it have influenced my decision to ‘join-up’? How much impact would it have on my fifteen-year-old-self looking for adventure? I like to think I would have taken all of its messages on board but I reckon I probably would have still ‘put my army head on’, just like Celia’s granddaughter.
I am curious to know what has been the uptake of the Pack. For example, what traction has it had in schools with CCFs? Is there any data on this? And, as one of the key decisions to expose children to creeping militarisation in these schools seems to lie with parents, is there a case for a peace pack for parents too?
Robert Parkes
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