On Wednesday 11th November, a group of anarchists and socialists came together for a 2 minute silence to remember the innocence people and soldiers that have been killed, maimed, families torn apart in conflicts happening around the world.
A wreath of white poppies and single poppies were laid at the cenotaph, poems were also read, one from Danny Martins poem Lessons from website poems by Soldiers.
The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome.
From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world.
Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children. (taken from www.whitepoppy.org.uk/)
ON THE ROOTS OF WAR
Colin Ward, anarchist
Its funny that in the popular imagination anarchists were associated with bombs and bomb throwing and so on. But if you totalled up the whole history of political assassinations, you would find that the amount done was about .000 per cent. The anarchists' reply of course is that it's the governments who wield the bombs which people have actually got to worry about. And nowhere more then in the post-war period has this been more evidenced:
that it's governments which possess nuclear weapons, it's governments which possess war planes and so on. There is a very strong intellectual argument for the anarchists' case that all wars are wars of government against people.
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