Slaying Goliath
Sam Donaldson discusses the DSEI arms fair and non-violent witness
‘There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.’
- Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (1971)
Merchants of death are returning to London this September for the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), the world’s biggest arms fair. At DSEI planes, bombs, guns and bullets are sold to regimes accused of human rights abuses and indiscriminately killing innocents: children, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents.
The arms industry is a Goliath, with wealth and political power behind it. We are like David in comparison, without armour, sword or shield. It is very tempting to give up and return to tending our sheep.
But that’s not our Quaker way!
As New Zealand Yearly Meeting put it in 1987: ‘We totally oppose all wars, all preparation for war… We equally and actively oppose all that leads to violence among people and nations, and violence to other species and to our planet. Refusal to fight with weapons is not surrender. We are not passive when threatened by the greedy, the cruel, the tyrant, the unjust. We will struggle to remove the causes of impasse and confrontation by every means of nonviolent resistance available. We urge all New Zealanders to have the courage to face up to the mess humans are making of our world and to have the faith and diligence to cleanse it…’
But how do we stop 35,000 people meeting in London to profit from the suffering and death of others this month? If we are to fell Goliath, first and foremost we must rediscover the heart of David, a heart of courage and commitment. But we must also be cunning and play to our strengths (which might also be our weaknesses). David won not by picking up armour, sword and shield but by picking up his sling and aiming for the cracks in Goliath’s armour. We, too, need to utilise all our resources (or lack of them) and creatively resist, thinking outside the box and working with unlikely allies. We must also not forget that there are roughly 21,000 Quakers (members and attenders) in Britain and if only ten per cent of us committed to actively resisting DSEI, it would be impossible to run.
A group of us in Hull met to explore what we can do. We have raised funds so we could transport people down to the Stop DSEI protests. We organised gigs and workshops to raise awareness of its existence. (Most people have no idea that it’s happening!) We also put on a screening of Shadow World, the 2016 film based on Andrew Feinstein’s book about the arms trade.
Protests were organised by faith communities on Tuesday 5 September and Saturday 9 September is the Big Day of Action.
If we are to abolish the Goliath that is the global arms trade then we are in for a long struggle. Just like the abolitionists, suffragettes and civil rights activists before us, above all we will need faithfulness and courage, grounding ourselves in that ‘life and power that takes away the occasion for all wars’.
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