Adam Hochschild has a moving essay in the Guardian on the 100th anniversary of the launching of World War I, that first great war from hell, asking how we should celebrate the moment and who exactly we should be commemorating -- and why, in particular, we dont memorialize those who tried to stop the madness from happening and opposed it when it did. Tom We will be asked to do a lot of commemorating over these next four and a half years, but whom and what should we commemorate, and in what spirit? Today most people would surely agree that the war of 1914-1918 was not fought for the lofty motives that each side claimed, and that we all would be better off if it had not been fought at all. Before he died, Harry Patch, the last surviving British veteran of the war, said it best: It was not worth even one life. Yet all the traditional ways we remember wars make little space for this feeling. Think, for example, of the hundreds of cemeteries that spread across the old Western Front, the densest collection of young mens graves in the world. All are immaculately maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and its counterparts from other countries. One of the most beautiful is on a hillside outside the French town of Albert and holds the remains of some 160 British soldiers, almost all killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme – a particularly senseless battle in a particularly senseless war. Among the comments in the visitors book one recent summer day were: Paid our respects to three of our townsfolk, Thanks, lads, and Sleep on, boys. Only a single visitor, out of hundreds, struck a different note: Never again. Of course we should remember the dead, especially those whose lives were tragically cut short in their youth. But there is a vast difference between honouring the memory of a family member and honouring the cause for which he died. The customary ways of looking back on war too easily allow us to confuse the two: military cemeteries with the gravestones in ranks like soldiers on parade, parades themselves, statues (which are almost invariably of generals), and war museums and their exhibits of tanks, planes, machine guns, artillery pieces and other technology for meting out death. Let us remember the dead, yes, in these years ahead, but let us also remember the men and women who recognised the war for the madness it was and did all they could to stop it. In Germany, radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were jailed for their opposition, as was the American socialist leader Eugene V Debs – who was still in prison in 1920 when he received nearly a million votes for president. The pioneer social worker Jane Addams helped organise a conference in neutral Holland in 1915 that brought together women from warring countries on both sides. The great French political leader Jean Jaurès spoke out boldly and repeatedly against the war he saw coming, and, because of this, was assassinated in a Paris cafe several days before it began. No country should be more proud of its anti-war activists from that era than Britain. More than 20,000 British men of military age refused conscription, and, usually because they also refused the alternative work offered conscientious objectors – which could be in a munitions factory – more than 6,000 went to prison for their beliefs. Behind bars also for their opposition to the war were Britains leading investigative journalist, Edmund Dene Morel, and its greatest philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Why is there no blue plaque outside Pentonville prison, where Morel served six months at hard labour, honouring the other war resisters locked up there as well? Every leading country in north America and Europe has spruced up its war museums for these anniversary years, but why are there so few museums about those who fought for peace? theguardian/world/2014/jul/28/first-world-war-century-anniversary-peacemakers
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:00:01 +0000
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