This year it\u2019s difficult to avoid politicians of various hues reminding us of the 100th anniversary of the first world war. For them it\u2019s an opportunity to retell history, and to hark back to a time when patriotism, nationalism and empire were at the fore of national consciousness. For peace activists it\u2019s important too, marking a century since the birth of some lasting institutions and providing an opportunity to reflect on the experience of our predecessors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before 1914, the centre-left political parties were the natural home for advocates of peace. Pacifists in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) \u2013 most notably Keir Hardie \u2013 had been instrumental in founding the Labour Party in Britain only 14 years before. But the hope that those parties might provide a principled pro-peace position was dashed, when, alongside Woodrow Wilson\u2019s US Democrats, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the French Socialist Party and the British Labour Party all reneged on their previous policy and backed the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One result was a growth in anti-war groups. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg formed the Spartacus League \u2013 a reference to the famous leader of the Roman slave rebellions. In the US, the Socialist Party of America grew in popularity, and prominent anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman established the No Conscription League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Britain, Independent Labour Party member Fenner Brockway co-founded the No More War Fellowship, and fellow ILP-er Ramsay MacDonald resigned as chair of the Labour Party to establish the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), which called for parliamentary votes on foreign policy, and advocated that, at the end of the war, negotiations and peace terms should be arranged in such a way so as to decrease likelihood of future hostilities. Perhaps the second world war could have been avoided as well if they\u2019d been listened to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some Christians reasoned that killing was incompatible with their spiritual teachings, which held more authority for them than national leaders. Resistance was rooted in faith for two friends across enemy lines \u2013 English Quaker Henry Hodgkin and German Lutheran Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze \u2013 who pledged to one another on a railway station platform in Cologne, \u2018We are one in Christ and can never be at war.\u2019 They went on to establish The Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international pacifist organisation which had spread to the US by 1915.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was in the interest of states to dissuade war resistance, ensuring not too many people refused to fight, but imprisoning objectors ran the risk of making martyrs of them. Alongside this strategy, governments waged skillful propaganda campaigns to boost nationalist sentiment and marginalise opponents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This shines through war recruitment posters of the era, some so iconic they remain well-known today. Lord Kitchener points at readers on a poster declaring \u2018Your Country Needs You\u2019. Commissioned in Britain at the start of the war, it later appeared in the US with the picture changed to \u2018Uncle Sam\u2019. In another ad, a guilty-looking middle-aged man stares into the distance. At his feet his son plays with toy soldiers, and his daughter asks, \u2018Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?\u2019 Propaganda came alongside physical coercion of dissenters. In the US, 101 members of the anti-war Industrial Workers of the World were tried, found guilty and sentence to prison in 1918. The previous year, 249 Russian-born activists were arrested and deported, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The British government pursued a similar approach. The press cast the UDC as extremist, despite its reformist politics and constitutionalist methods. In 1915 the Daily Express printed \u2018wanted\u2019 posters of its most prominent members, Ramsay MacDonald and ED Morel. The John Bull magazine went further, demanding that MacDonald should be tried by court-martial and condemned as \u2018an aider and abettor of the King\u2019s enemies\u2019. MacDonald lost his seat at the following election. Morel suffered a worse fate. His house was raided by the authorities. When it was discovered that he had technically broken the law by posting a UDC pamphlet to a friend living abroad, he was sentenced to prison for six months, and died shortly after his release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government encouraged people to shun anti-war activists \u2013 and suggested that women give white feathers (a symbol of cowardice) to men not enlisted. On the streets, anti-war activists faced taunts of \u2018coward\u2019, \u2018shirker\u2019 and \u2018conchie\u2019 for refusing to join the forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an anthology of anti-war voices stored at the Imperial War Museum, Harold Bing, a conscientious objector, recalls how difficult life became: \u2018On the whole, apart from a few friends and sympathisers, people\u2019s attitudes towards me were distinctly hostile. This would be the ostracism of neighbours who knew I was going to appeal to be a CO or a critical attitude of my employers who terminated my contract after my tribunal and refused to reinstate me.\u2019 Indeed many peace campaigners lost their jobs, including renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell who was dismissed from his post at Cambridge University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The war played hard on Keir Hardie. In the early days he made efforts to organise a Europe-wide strike against the hostilities. But the call was not taken up and many within the very party he had helped to found came to regard him as a traitor. He died a short while later. In her memoirs, his partner, the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, wrote that \u2018the great slaughter, the rending of the bonds of international fraternity, on which he had built his hopes, had broken him.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In most countries the anti-war cause was hampered by the pervasive ideology of nationalism. However in Ireland and Canada (particularly Quebec), nationalist sentiment aided the anti-war cause. Vibrant campaigns against conscription became an important step for the independence movements within both countries. In Australia, at the time still a part of the British Empire, the population voted narrowly against conscription in two referenda, in part due to nationalist sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Russia, anti-war campaigning had a very different character. It fused with broader economic concerns and class identification, paving the way for the Russian Revolution, the downfall of the Tsarist regime and a new government negotiating its exit from the first world war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those events gave confidence to class-based movements in other countries too, most notably Germany. In October 1918, sailors in Kiel mutinied and formed their own worker-soldier committees. By November the rebellion had spread. A general strike was called in Berlin and armed groups took to the streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Scotland, too, a number of strikes in munitions factories took place alongside mass demonstrations on the streets in what has become known as \u2018Red Clydeside\u2019. In the end both German and Scottish initiatives were brutally put down. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in 1919, following a further uprising by workers. The Scottish protests were suppressed by placing tanks on the streets of Glasgow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
States did more than repress individuals: they exercised control over society\u2019s narratives.\u00a0Michel Foucault\u2019s idea that elites \u2018discipline and punish\u2019 \u2013 installing \u2018common knowledge\u2019 about right and wrong in the process \u2013 can be clearly seen in WWI history. Howard Zinn sums up the dynamic in A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/em>, writing that the justice system of the era was used to demonstrate how certain elements of resistance \u2018could not be tolerated\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though they didn\u2019t ultimately stop the war, peace activists who confronted the war ideologies of their time gave birth to the independent peace movement we know today. Many who followed, from historians to activists against later wars, gradually helped to chip away at the nationalist worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peace institutions founded by WWI resisters have lived on. Six members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation have won the Nobel Peace Prize over the years, as have the Quakers. Bertrand Russell\u2019s Nobel Prize for literature recognised his humanitarianism. In 1985, a statue of Fenner Brockway was erected in London\u2019s Red Lion Square to mark a life that also included the co-founding of the anti-poverty organisation War on Want and campaigns against colonialism. In 1998, Britons whom soldiers had shot as punishment for \u2018desertion\u2019 or \u2018cowardice\u2019 were honoured at London\u2019s Cenotaph for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not the version of history evoked by today\u2019s elites. Conservative politicians would have us look back with fondness at a time when nationalism and imperialism were even more deeply entrenched. Labour politicians would rather we forget the moment when their party ceased to be a party of peace. But the rest of us can learn that even when our actions seem to \u2018fail\u2019 in the short term, they could still change, in the long term, how people perceive and understand the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peace activists against the First World War were treated as enemies by their government, but left a legacy of perserverance writes Tim Gee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":46745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1977,186],"tags":[3148],"class_list":["post-13494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-war","tag-tim-gee"],"yoast_head":"\nA legacy for the peace movement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n