Column

Comment

War & peace

17 November 2023

4 min read

More marches might just make the point about peace

Protest marches highlight conflict close to home, as commentators cast around for agents of peace. George Pitcher thinks he might just know who they are.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A crowd of people on a protest march file down the street in one directions.

A recent pro-Palestinian march in London.

Austin Crick on Unsplash.

The Home Front of the Gaza war opened up in Britain last weekend. There had been pro-Palestinian marches since the conflict began on 7th October, but for many here it remained the equivalent of a “phoney war”, waged thousands of miles away.

What brought it home were the threats to civil order presented to us over the Remembrance weekend. We now know that the end was drawing nigh for home secretary Suella Braverman when she wrote in The Times last week that the police response to self-styled peace marchers was inadequate.

Whether or not her words inflamed far-right yobs to attack police at the Cenotaph is a matter of conjecture, but that and the massive pro-Palestine protest last Saturday leave no doubt that Israel’s military response to the Hamas atrocities on its people is now a very live issue on British soil.

Many of us have consequently spent this week wondering about the right and proper way to respond to these events. We are, in a way, spoilt for commentary. Paul Goodman wrote presciently in The Times at the start of the week that there had always been a policy fault line between prime minister Rishi Sunak and his home secretary, just ahead of their political tectonic plates shifting, precipitating Braverman’s condemnatory earthquake of her former boss’s alleged betrayal and weakness.

No one can be left in any doubt that there is now support for Hamas terrorism and racist intimidation of Jews on British streets. As a people, we can’t sit idly by and witness this development. The big question is what we do to protect the peace and who does it. Goodman concluded his piece by writing this:

"We are waiting for someone, somehow, to help bring people of all kinds, ordinary Muslims not least, into a great political alliance of moderation, decency, sense and, yes, Britishness. Who is this saviour? Your guess is as good as mine."

In an otherwise excellent piece, I’m tempted to respond to this pay-off thus: Well, duh! It’s almost like someone saying wistfully, in response to the challenges of illegal immigration which the UK faces, that if only there was some kind of pan-European federation of which we could be a member in order to sort the problem out collectively. The answer to that is staring us in the face, as is the answer to the question Goodman raises.

I’d hope I don’t have to spell it out. It is the duty, even the obligation, of a state that has the Christian Church established in law as its moral arbiter to deploy those who witness to its faith as peacemakers between the potentially warring factions in our midst. If that means getting between Hamas sympathisers, racist yobs and frightened Jews who may or may not be Zionists, then so be it.

We should confront in peace, though firmly, those who chant racist and hateful slogans. We should be visible in our demand for peace; that demand made to our polity, to our people and the United Nations.

Though we should not rejoice in it, this is our moment. So is this nation visible in its Christian witness to peace and reconciliation, to the defence of the helpless and innocent at the hands of those who would do them harm and would kill them? I’m afraid not.

True, the House of Bishops of the Church of England has issued an unequivocal statement on the last day of October, calling for a kind of peace. It calls for the release of Israeli prisoners held by Hamas; for “humanitarian pauses” in the conflict to allow for the evacuation of suffering civilians; for safe areas for them and for the observance of “international humanitarian law”.

But it stops short of calling for ceasefire. Why? Is there not a gospel imperative that the killing has to stop? But, anyway, the truth is that these are just words. We are called to action too.

The organisers of the pro-Palestinian protests in the UK to date have called them peace marches. From what I’ve witnessed so far, I’ve no doubt that the vast majority of participants are doing just that – marching for peace.

The Church should either join them, or organise its own peace marches, led by the cross, alongside people of all faiths and none. We should confront in peace, though firmly, those who chant racist and hateful slogans. We should be visible in our demand for peace; that demand made to our polity, to our people and the United Nations.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that this leadership comes from our bishops. It may need to be a movement from the base up, the way Christian witness has been most effective throughout its history. Last weekend, a friend of mine visited a town-wide church celebration, “flags of all nations on the walls, 500 folk… a mix of elderly 1980s Charismatics, trendy Anglicans, plain Baptists and independents, African diaspora Pentecostals, young hipsters of all ethnicities”.

This is where the hope will come from, (in every sense) the peaceful mass. So, when the estimable Mr Goodman asks rhetorically “who is this saviour?”, our answer should be clear: It’s ours.

Article

Comment

Mental Health

Poetry

15 October 2024

4 min read

Auden and our anxious age

While the tropes of trauma are still with us, how to not die in our dread?

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He works in local government.

An outdoor vigil is lit by people holding up mobile phone lights.

Oxford's peace vigil.

BBC News.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play . . .

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

This week, we mark the 85th birthday of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1st, 1939’. He describes four solitary drinkers in New York on the cusp of the Second World War. September 1st, 1939: Hitler invades Poland. Those four faces struggle to find meaning in their lives.

In a later, much longer poem of 1947 (first UK edition, 1948) Auden built on this theme, having lived through the War, to identify an ‘Age of Anxiety’. He wrote, ‘We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.’

I have been reflecting on this of late, especially in light of a recent night vigil for peace, remembrance, and unity at Bonn Square, Oxford, where I live. This took place on 7 October, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023: the darkest day in Jewish history since the time that Auden wrote his poems.

In an Age of Anxiety, Auden wrote, ‘the world needs a wash, and a week off’. The gathering in Oxford was especially poignant because some 250 people chose to go out in the rain, on their Sunday-evening time off, and in the darkness, to hear prayers and readings from different communities. It was as if the world was awash with people coming together.

The Bishop of Oxford the Rt Rev’d Dr Steven Croft said, ‘Our purpose is simply to be together.’ People simply had to do ‘something in the face of the helplessness that we all feel, in the face of these terrible events’. Louise Gordon, co vice president of the Oxford Jewish Congregation, described people ‘clinging to hope’. Imam Monawar Husain stressed that togetherness as such is a ‘symbol’, a symbol of hope.

Symbols abounded. Candles were lit. In ‘September 1st, 1939’, Auden described ‘Ironic points of light’ which

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

The crowd spontaneously joined in with the protest song ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, which was first sung in 1955.

It is striking that so many of the tropes and themes concerning what has gone wrong with the world, from our perspective, were already apparent and received clear expression from 1939 through to the mid- to late-1950s, in terrible events, then in thought, poetry, and protest song, in an age of anxiety.

If there are similarities between Auden’s age and our own, then we should be encouraged by that.

Sociologists described the ‘lonely crowd’ in 1950. This suggests that people seek more approval and acceptance from others as the physical distance between them diminishes and society becomes increasingly geared toward consumption. The capacity to come together for peace, remembrance, and unity becomes far less likely.

Philosopher Max Picard lamented the loss of the ’World of Silence’ in 1952: the capacity to be still. And later, in 1958, the word ‘meritocracy’ was first used to describe a dystopian world in which merit (IQ + effort) reigns, replacing previous relational bonds, a sense of togetherness, exemplified in the gathering in Oxford in 2024.

C. S. Lewis, in Oxford in the late 1950s, identified friendship as a kind of love which is regarded 'in the modern world' as 'quite marginal; not a main course in life's banquet', which is especially true if we bypass the banquet and spend our time at the bar (or, worse, online, at home). Louise Gordon, at the vigil, also spoke of the way in which people were counterculturally 'clasping hands in friendship'.

When sociologists today describe the ‘lonely century’ (Noreena Hertz) or when so many sigh over our inability to sit, or stand, in silence, in some sense at least they have not identified anything new. War crimes are, sadly, all too familiar to us. And recently, the lawyer Stephen Toope identified an ‘age of anxiety’ today.

It is not as simple, however, as saying that we have been anxious for the last seventy years. Auden’s age was also one of creativity of which the Anglosphere has been proud, for instance, around the foundation of the National Health Service in 1948. His generation stared into the abyss. They did not die in their dread.

If there are similarities between Auden’s age and our own, then we should be encouraged by that. Lamentation is as old as love, and the choice is as stark as he put it in his poem 85 years ago: ‘love one another or die’.

The notion of vigil is equally old. Today, vigils are held for peace, remembrance, and unity. In Christian liturgy, however, a vigil is specifically a watch during the night, looking forward to the dawn of a new day. ‘As the night watch looks for the morning’, likewise the people wait for Christ, their saviour.

That silent watch is far removed from the solitary ‘faces along the bar’ who ‘cling to their average day’. Horrible events such as those which took place on September 1st, 1939 or October 7th, 2023 bring people together in common purpose, simply to be together and to cling instead to hope for a better tomorrow.

Anxiety is replaced by hope.

Candles are lit. It may well rain. But song will be sung. And people of good-will, having climbed ‘the cross of the moment’, will show what Auden described: that great ‘affirming flame’.