OP-ED: Pledging allegiance to peace with white poppies in a war-torn world

On Oct. 24, Peace Quest Cape Breton will be launching its annual white poppies campaign.

A pacifist tradition begun in Britain between the world wars, the white poppies, in the words of the Peace Pledge Union, “stand for remembrance of all victims of war, challenging militarism” and affirming “a commitment to peace.”

The Peace Pledge itself famously states: “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.” It is this determination that makes every pacifist an activist, whether by conscientiously objecting to kill and/or die for the state or by constructively exploring civilized alternatives to the unnecessary evil of mechanized mass-murder.

This is not a fringe vision, but rather the heart and soul of the United Nations Charter, likewise “determined” to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” by establishing myriad practical ways to actually beat swords into plowshares. Article 26, for example, mandates the achievement of “international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources,” creating a world of either unarmed states or states with defensive-only forces incapable of threatening, blackmailing, invading or occupying others.

For such demilitarization to take hold, non-violent means of resolving and arbitrating disputes, preventing conflicts, and enforcing settlements will have to be developed, resourced, and respected, and whole portions of the UN Charter constitute a blueprint for building just such a ‘peace machine.’

For the first 40 years of the UN era, Cold War rivalry blocked this realistic path to a genuinely post-war world. Much more by luck than judgment, the ultimate scourge of nuclear war had not fallen, but millions of people in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had paid with their lives and liberty to ‘sustain’ a global disorder built on extreme military, economic, political and structural violence.

For the last 40 years of the UN era, the golden chance for a charter-compliant world order has been willfully squandered, primarily by a string of self-deluded US administrations claiming the unipolar spoils of a supposed Cold War victory. But Washington’s criminal quest for supremacy has been crucially aided and abetted by allies, including Canada, increasingly in thrall to capitalist vested interests indifferent or antagonistic to social welfare and planetary well-being.

Exhibit A: the strategically senseless military-industrial jamboree-juggernaut of NATO expansion, the long march east – when “not one inch east” was promised – of a conventionally-superior, nuclear-armed alliance towards a Russia reacting with utterly deplorable, but entirely predictable, dictatorial hostility and illegal aggression.

Currently, a third world war seems more likely than a third time-lucky chance to finally fulfil the promise of the UN Charter. A collapse of the entire UN humanitarian, human rights, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, diplomatic, social development, and disarmament system is underway, an assault again led by Washington but again with the complicity of Western powers uniformly dedicated to a socially and environmentally ruinous, high-tech, AI-riddled ‘rearmament’ agenda (from already too-high levels of military spending) openly discussed as preparations for the coming global conflagration.

On Oct. 11, Guardian commentator Simon Tisdall expressed consternation at “the deafening public silence, the absence of large-scale protest in much of the world, the complacency, bordering on indifference, that accompanies this global march to oblivion” and “nuclear annihilation.” Why, he asked, are so many “being complicit” in their “own undoing”? Because, I think, they can’t imagine that another, war-free world is possible – that, indeed, only such a world can possibly save us.

They don’t even know there’s a pledge for peace they can take. But there is.

Sean Howard is campaign co-ordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton. Requests for white poppies can be made to Sean at seanjameshoward@yahoo.com.