Tag: Peace

THE WILL TO CHANGE IS THERE… BUT HOW DO WE BUILD ON IT?

angela findlay5 Comments

As I write this blog, I am holding in my thoughts and heart all who are suffering, grieving, lonely, lost, anxious, frightened, helping, serving, or dying and all the infinite shades of individual human experience that fall between.

Like for some, but unlike for so many more, my rural little Covid world of the past 5 weeks has been a haven of sun-filled peace. Such is the stillness that you can almost hear buds bursting into bouquets of blooms as Spring rustles through the land like a breeze. Woods carpeted in white and blue have become cathedrals for choirs of birds filling the daily Sunday silence with song. Time is no longer measured by clock hands and calendars, but by the gradual emptying of a fridge shelf or the clapping hands on the pavements that announce another week has passed. 

As if from another world, packages of numbers wrapped in the language of war drip-drip-drip-feed death, tragedy, fear and devastation into our days rippling the peace like a faulty tap. Are we at war with Covid-19? Is our sole purpose in the face of a cruel enemy that is attacking all we have come to know and value as “normal,” to defeat it? War requires strategies to target and vanquish an adversary through killing. But, as Angela Merkel said in her address to the nation on 18thMarch, the Covid-19 pandemic is a war without a human enemy.

I find it interesting and heart-warming that 99-year old Captain Tom Moore, an army veteran who fought in the world’s largest war, has become Britain’s inspiration and symbol for how to face the Coronavirus. In total contrast, both to armed conflict situations of war and the language used by several governments, he is not fighting to kill off something. By completing lengths of his back garden, he is walking to help our dedicated services save lives. 

I have to confess that there are moments when I almost dread the day Covid-19 is “sent packing,” as Boris Johnson blustered before the virus robbed him of his usual air, and things return to ‘normal’. Of course I want a rapid end to the huge and relentless suffering of so many. But I don’t want us to go “back to normal.” I don’t want the war metaphors to continue but now with triumphant declarations of victory. For Covid-19 has not just been a vile enemy and bringer of death and misery. It has also been a huge teacher, a creator of peace, a unifier of communities, a friend to nature, a highlighter of the fissures in our society and a persistent pointer to the most vulnerable, the most needed and the most brave. Covid-19 is a killer, yes, but as anyone who has been close to the death of a loved one will attest to, it is also guiding us to our hearts. 

Many people have said it much better than I can, either in this or my last blog. In my opinion, one of the most insightful and erudite writings on the subject is the essay The Coronation by Charles Eisenstein. In it he says: Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless… Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important.

I feel deeply and passionately that there is a much bigger picture to the close-up snapshots we are getting from around the world. We are standing before a phenomenal chance for change. A unique opportunity to not go back to the “normal,” which was neither just, nor sustainable, nor even working for the majority of the global population. As Charles Eisenstein asks: For years normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter… Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

The Indian author, Arundhati Roy, says much the same in THE WAY AHEAD:

Arundhati Roy

The writing has been on the wall for a long time. I sincerely hope Covid-19 will make it impossible for these ways of thinking to be brushed aside and ignored as the domain of dippy-hippies, whacko scientists, alternative dropouts, idealists, artists or activists. I pray that during this prolonged pause enough of us can shift our values and priorities fully into the camp of those we are currently embracing, not just as individuals but also as a nation. As I have frustratingly learned from decades of campaigning for prison reform, the political impetus to change will only come from widespread public insistence and/or inspired and wise leadership. I don’t yet know what exactly I, what we as individuals, can do and I welcome all suggestions. But maybe a good starting point is to follow New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern’s encouragement to “Be strong, be kind.”

Some further opinions:

Penguin is publishing essays about Covid-19 by their leading authors every Monday, like It’s all got to change by Philp Pullman and A New Normal by Malorie Blackman

The pandemic is a portal by Arundhati Roy

Covid-19 and the language of war by ADRIAN W J KUAH AND BERNARD F W LOO
Coronavirus and the language of war New Statesman

Coronavirus: How New Zealand relied on science and empathy BBC News

The Coronation by Charles Eisenstein as a podcast and as a PDF file

George Monbiot talks about Coronavirus

Japan’s heartfelt call for peace… but could it be even stronger?

angela findlay5 Comments

Whose call to peace is stronger? The call made by victims of conflict, or the call made by former perpetrators? That was the question I found myself asking as I wandered Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park earlier this month. 

Memorial Cenotaph
Hiroshima Peace Park
The A-Bomb Dome
The A-Bomb Dome

Japan is unique in so many ways. It’s a fascinating place of extremes and contradictions, where sublime beauty and attention to detail exist beside mass-produced, plastic-wrapped ugliness. I don’t think I have ever been to a place where so many things feel completely alien.

Of course Japan is also unique for being the only country in the world to have been victim not just to one, but two nuclear bombings. And it is very clear from the messages in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum that that narrative has played a strong role in defining how Japan sees itself today. Throughout the park were heartfelt messages offering pacifism and reconciliation as a path forward. 

I honestly can’t imagine how anybody could emerge from the Peace Museum’s collection of photographs and preserved artefacts untouched by the epic tragedy. Twisted clocks stopped in their tracks at 8.15am and the charred remains of a lunch box or child’s tricycle serve as illustrations to the deeply moving and disturbing testimonies of eyewitnesses or parents, whose children blistered and bubbled to their deaths. Surely nobody can think atomic warfare is a good idea. 

And yet, as I wandered the park, I found a “but” forming in my mind. Not about the inarguable suffering of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but about the fact that the Japanese were also known for being the aggressors of ruthless cruelty, particularly in the Pacific theatre. For their call for peace to be truly effective, I needed ‘Japan the perpetrator of huge suffering’ to stand hand in hand with ‘Japan the victim’. But this admission of guilt is largely lacking. And maybe it is wrong of me to expect Japan to respond as honestly as Germany in this regard. After all, is it not just responding the same way as all countries… in fact, most perpetrators of crime… well actually, most of us as individuals when it comes to our own misdeeds?

Over the years there have been expressions of remorse, such as Prime Minister Shinzō Abe expressing “deep repentance” for Japan’s actions during World War II at a Joint Session of the United States Congress in 2015. But one could see this through a cynical lens, as a strategic move designed to emphasise Japan’s reconciliation and alliance with the USA: Two former enemies turned staunch allies become leaders in the promotion of free value and the rules of engagement in the international community. Meanwhile, Japanese textbooks focus on the suffering the Japanese public had to endure and gloss over Japan’s own devastating actions as an imperial power. Even when they do acknowledge them, it is again as a victim. They look at Japanese foot soldiers’ suffering in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia, ignoring the perspective of the countries colonised or attacked by Japanese forces, like China, Korea and South East Asia.

After my talks on Germany’s culture of apology and atonement, I am often told stories of parents who had fought in WW2 and been able to forgive the Germans… but not the Japanese. Germany was, of course, every bit as cruel albeit in a different way, but it has long held up its national hands in the most unconditional admission of culpability and display of penitence any nation has ever shown towards its own deeds. When people wonder why Japan hasn’t done the same, it could be argued that the answer lies in the reversal of the question: Why has Germany done so much? For Germany is utterly unique in this regard and Japan is merely following the tradition of all other nations around the world. 

The idea of national guilt and the potential need for a nation to apologise is a newish one. And, having been a staunch supporter of apology as a way to forge a new identity, I am actually questioning its importance as a gesture long after the event. True apology is deeply transformative, but when it comes to retrospectively apologising on behalf of a nation, can an apology by people who didn’t do anything to people to whom something wasn’t done have any real effect? So I think my question is now taking the shape of: How can a nation acknowledge its misdeeds and actively dismantle their negative legacy? This could be in relation to slavery, colonialism, war crimes, discrimination… By doing so, we open up the possibility of having dialogues that are less binary than the divisive, fact-based discourses about perpetrators and victims, right or wrong, good or bad etc. and rather focus on the experiences of individuals now; how they have been impacted and what would help them.

So, in answer to my opening question ‘Whose call to peace is stronger?’ I think I would answer, that of the former perpetrator. Because, in order to arrive there, they have had to pass though a deeper process of unflinching honesty, self-reflection, humility and genuine transformation.

Could the question to start 2019 be: What can we, Great Britain, put in? rather than: What can we get out?

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I’d like to focus my last blog of 2018 on a single question that arose out of a letter written by a German citizen and published in The Guardian. It is addressed to all of us here in Britain and I feel it captures the essence of the principles we celebrate and/or practice in some form or other over the Christmas period: family and giving.

It says: “Dear friends in Britain. Maybe you are not aware of what Europe will miss when you leave. We will miss your refreshing views, because living on the continent can give a blinkered viewpoint. We will miss your international experience and networks. We will miss your calmness and pragmatism. We will miss your long democratic experience in developing the future EU. Together we are strong! Please stay. We are waiting for you with open arms.”

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War… what is it good for? (Absolutely nothing?)

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Over the past 4 weeks, I have been listening to this year’s Reith Lectures “The Mark of Cain” by historian Professor Margaret MacMillan. They are all about war and they are brilliant. Personally, as someone who is equally comfortable / uncomfortable with creativity and destructivity, I find the questions she is exploring absolutely fundamental to what it is to be human.

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I haven’t worked with many terrorists during my prison years but there was one who for years I, and my class of eight male prisoners, called ‘Habibi’ – the word for ‘my darling’ as we later found out.

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Behind every terrorist act is a human being with a grievance. Some will probably call me a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ for saying that, but one of the most important lessons I learnt from working and talking with countless criminals is that people themselves are not innately evil. Their deeds might be, but they themselves are not. That’s why many of the over-simplified, dualistic discourses in the recent ‘To bomb or not to bomb in Syria?’ debate really got under my skin. Action vs. Non-Action, Good vs. Evil, Right vs. Wrong…

team_terror.jpg

I have no first-hand experience of today’s terrorists (thank goodness) but in the nineties I did work closely with a Lebanese man awaiting trial for his major role in one of Germany’s biggest terrorist attacks in which five Kurdish politicians were blown up in a restaurant in Berlin in 1992. As a terrorist he was considered a potential danger and security hazard and kept in enforced isolation. So for him my art class became his only excursion from his cell. Why the authorities found it fitting to place him in my care when I myself was locked in the room with no beeper, no key, no guard, still puzzles me! He asked the group to call him Habibi, so obligingly we did. It was only many years later that I discovered that was the word for “my darling”.

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I don’t wear a red poppy, not deliberately to make a point, nor out of disrespect – it just isn’t the symbol that captures enough of what, how and to what end I want remember.

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It is Remembrance season and once again I find myself feeling slightly uncomfortable, a bit pedantic, no doubt irritating and at worst offensively unpatriotic. And yet Remembrance is one of my favourite themes and both my grandfathers fought in the World Wars. So why can’t I jump whole-heartedly into the seas of poppies and poppy wearers, dignitaries and wreaths, that stream through our streets to lap up against memorials and into churches each November? Of course I want to ‘remember’ and acknowledge all the soldiers who died or were wounded serving their country, but discordant questions waft like dried leaves or ghosts through the architecture of British Remembrance rituals. So once again I ask myself and all of us collectively: what exactly are we remembering, and to what end? Remembrance is by nature vital, solemn, beautiful, meaningful… in many ways we do it so well. But beneath the tradition, ceremony and ritual conveyed through a distinctly military visual language, the message has also, in today’s world, become slightly flawed, inadequate and at times hypocritical.

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