Letters - 13 December 2013
From the first world war to boycotting goods from the West Bank
First world war
Why do we have to join in the world war one commemoration?
As a seventy-eight year old Friend, I am wondering how alone I am in having no interest in taking part in 2014 in showing the Quakers’ excellent work in various ways during the first world war in its centenary commemoration. It was an unnecessary, horrific waste of life that, in fact, started to set the stage for the coming of Nazism and the second world war. That the Friends did all they could to show their abhorrence of these wars by every peaceful means in 1914-18 and after that doesn’t, in my mind, now justify bringing forth all the historic references to where and how Quakers stood in those dark years.
I mean, who are we doing it for? To show the world what we did? It will make no difference to the millions killed or to those who grieved in the decades afterwards, for they are all gone.
As a child I remember having to take part in first world war commemorations – then – at the same time as going through, as a child with millions of others, the second world war! Now in our Local Meeting and Area Meeting we are being encouraged to do it yet again.
No! Not for me. Show me ways to help keep the peace in our modern world and I’m all for it. But to bring up again what happened one hundred years ago in the lives of Friends or the military or civilians is now bordering on the crass, in this old girl’s opinion. To keep the peace in our present and future world makes sense.
Shirley Heathcote
This week has brought yet another reminder from Friends House that we should be collecting stuff for a first world war commemoration in 2014. At the same time I am reminded that George Fox claimed that we live in the light and power that takes away the occasion of all wars. Are we living in that life and power, as we claim, whenever we support our Peace Testimony with George Fox’s words? Or are we consciously exploiting the media hype to gain a little cheap publicity, and helping in the glorification of war at the same time?
If it is publicity we seek, should the end objective justify the means? Are we happy to spend time, effort and money to raise interest in the saddest ever event in man’s history? Should we, rather, be pursuing practical peacemaking in the twenty-first century? If we must seek publicity on the back of military conflict, should we not spend our time and energy – and our understanding of divine light and divine power – on the evils in Syria or Afghanistan or Palestine, and leave the first world war to the historians?
Geoff Pilliner
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