Wasting enormous billions on arming yourself to the teeth preparing for imminent war surely cannot be the best way to seek world peace and pay Armistice Day respect to my uncles killed in WWI’s trench warfare horrors.
Surely you’d not send your teenage children out armed with kitchen knives in case of attack from other teenagers carrying knives?
It’s only in America, where there are three guns for every person and 30 gun murders every day, that ‘be armed for defence’ can make sense – backed there by National Rifle Association’s vast membership and money.
"Fight War Not Wars", "Ban the Bomb" and "Arms Are For Hugging" were some of the banners used when in my sixth-form teens I joined CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and became a lifelong ‘peace movement’ activist, marching in the early sixties in gigantic anti-war protests in London and Aldermaston (nuclear bomb base).
In fact, when I came to Taunton in 1969 it was truly heart-warming to meet such a large CND group here, mainly of young people.
We still have one recently resurrected in Bridgwater to meet today’s re-launched deadly threats of nuclear war or climate collapse catastrophes.
Also, Peace Pledge Union, in past decades, and still active today, signed me up to pledge: "War is a crime against humanity.
"I renounce war, and am determined not to support any kind of war and work for the removal of all causes of war", plus founding White Poppy Remembrance Day as the pacifist alternative to red (see www.ppu.org.uk).
Today, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the UN and over 100 Poppy Days, not only do we witness, daily on our TVs, wars of genocide in at least three countries, but we see tens of thousands of innocent civilians – largely women and children – and their homes blasted to smithereens by enormous air-delivered bombs, supplied by so-called "rule of law" peaceful nations (US and UK?)!
Surely the UN must have powers to end these evil atrocities and bring those responsible to justice proving "two wrongs can never make a right": now doubly proven by this fortnight’s Baku COP29, warning us all of likely three degrees of global warming and a catastrophic "sixth extinction" even worse than nuclear war?
Time again to follow Keval Bharadia’s worldwide FTT solution via www.revolutionaryreparations.org.
"Give Peace a Chance"
Alan Debenham
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