Nigel Farndale goes on to remark of another peace organisation:
At least the families against the war weren't wearing white poppies. These are being distributed this year by the Peace Pledge Union. The PPU's members feel that red poppies symbolise, well, I don't know what they think they symbolise but not, presumably, the sacrifice of life in the name of freedom and peace. They do, though, know what the white poppy stands for: "The belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers." Not enemy strangers, note. Not enemy strangers who are trying to kill you. In the Disney world of the Peace Pledge Union, there is nothing that can't be solved by joining hands to form a healing circle and singing a couple of verses of Blowin' in the Wind.
This is understating the case. I’m glad to fill in the historical gaps.
The Peace Pledge Union is a pacifist organisation that stemmed from a letter to The Manchester Guardian almost exactly 70 years ago – in October 1934 – from an Anglican clergyman, Canon Dick Sheppard, denouncing war. Sheppard received huge public support for his views. A mass movement speedily arose. As with the temperance movement, whose ethos the PPU resembled, members signed a pledge – in this case reading: “I renounce war, and I will never support or sanction another.”
Predictably, the movement never regained such levels of support after it became clear to all but the most fervent of Canon Sheppard’s flock that a pledge against war was ineffective against aggressive tyrannies that unaccountably declined to be held to the same standard. (Sheppard died in 1937, and thus didn’t live to appreciate the absurdity of his views. There is a portrait of him on the west wall of the incomparably beautiful Church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, where he was vicar from 1914 to 1927; he looks like a cherub.)
The PPU’s ‘White Poppies’ campaign dates from the 1930s, but was revived in earnest in 1980. It received a burst of publicity in 1986 when the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, was goaded into expressing in answer to a parliamentary question her distaste for the campaign. It was probably a counterproductive intervention, but it was certainly justified. The PPU claims the white poppies commemorate those who have fallen in war, but in fact they do something substantially different: they bear testament to the belief that those who fell in war were wrong to take up arms. I think that’s an immoral as well as mistaken belief, but I take particular exception to its being advanced as a parody of the act of Remembrance.
All that, however, is way of background. The main interest of the PPU in the history of the peace movement is that its political stance – while primarily religious and ethical in inspiration – closely parallels that of today’s anti-war movement, in one important respect. George Orwell referred to it in his essay Notes on Nationalism (May 1945):
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts [the colloquial name for Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists]. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.
This passage has become quite well-known since 9/11. Vaingloriously, I believe I’m indirectly responsible for this; incredulous at the anti-war campaigners after 9/11, Andrew Sullivan mentioned in his blog that he was reading Orwell, so I sent him this quotation, which he used to great effect and which was picked up by others. It has always been a passage that Orwell’s detractors – Raymond Williams, and more recently Scott Lucas – find offensive. Christopher Hitchens also cites the passage in his excellent book on Orwell and elsewhere, but uncharacteristically makes a transcription error: Orwell referred to the pacifists’ “unadmitted motive”, which Hitchens renders as “unacknowledged motive”. “Unadmitted”, with its implication of concealment, is the better word. (There is also a particularly ignorant Internet hoax doing the rounds by those who claim – on the basis of a Chomsky-like running together of two separate passages from different essays in order to give a false impression – that Orwell renounced his strictures against pacifists. I was accosted on this very subject in the letters page of The Guardian a while back by a lady who had read the hoax but not Orwell himself; I’ll explain her fallacy in a separate post, though - as with refuting Chomsky - it requires a bit of space to supply the missing context.)
Despite his harsh words about pacifists, and despite peace campaigners’ outrage then and now against him, Orwell was still being generous in his judgements. It is true that the overlap between membership of the PPU and the Blackshirts was numerically small. The personalities involved in pro-Nazi activity by British pacifists were, however, the peace movement’s leadership, and the activity itself took place in organisations other than Mosley’s BUF.
I recommend in this context a new book by Sir Ian Kershaw (the renowned biographer of Hitler) called Making Friends with Hitler. It is a study of a minor Conservative politician, Lord Londonderry, who became convinced in the 1930s of the necessity of improving relations with Germany in order to avoid war. This superb book is a fair-minded portrait of an aristocratic sentiment that was not in itself ignoble but was stupendously, culpably and catastrophically misguided. One of the many valuable insights is Kershaw’s distinction between this type of unimaginative and myopic appeasement, and the outright expressions of pro-Nazism and antisemitism that could be found among other appeasers, including those in Londonderry’s own party.
The link was an organisation called, appropriately, The Link. Kershaw notes (p. 247) that this group, while ostensibly calling for better international relations, was also “heavily laced with antisemitism and fervent support for Nazism”. Londonderry – more stupid than malign, but truly very, very stupid – decided that, though The Link was indeed pro-Nazi, he shared its judgement that Munich represented a reasonable resolution of justified German complaints. He thus added his name to a letter to The Times (12 October 1938) to that effect along with half a dozen council members of The Link and various other Nazi sympathizers. His reputation deservedly never recovered.
One person who, unlike Londonderry, did hold membership of The Link, however, was the Chairman of the Peace Pledge Union, Canon Stuart Morris, who had succeeded Dick Sheppard. Another leading member of the PPU, the Marquess of Tavistock (later the Duke of Bedford) founded an explicitly pro-Nazi and antisemitic party in April 1939, the British People’s Party (BPP). The party’s Treasurer, Ben Greene, a former Labour Party candidate, was also a member of the PPU, which helped him to establish a periodical that freely lifted material from pro-Nazi sources. The PPU executive eventually expressed some diffidence at – though scarcely opposition to - the slant Greene was adopting, but leading PPU members continued to support the Nazi cause. The BPP fought a by-election in Hythe shortly after its formation; a prominent speaker in support of its candidate was yet another leading pacifist campaigner Dr Maude Royden. (In a neat historical irony, the candidate was the explorer St John Philby, father of Kim Philby; admiration for totalitarianism was clearly a family trait.) Dr Royden continued to support the BPP before and after the outbreak of war.
(This account is drawn primarily from a fascinating and historically important account of these pro-Nazi groups, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and Antisemitism 1939-40, by Richard Griffiths, 1998. Ramsay was a fiercely antisemitic Tory MP who was interned for his pro-Nazi sympathies. His Right Club was an organisation that we may assume would have furnished a Vichy-type regime had the Nazis conquered Britain. For many years the membership book of the Club was believed lost, but it resurfaced in a solicitor’s office in 1990, and Griffiths’s account is a definitive exposition of the subject.)
During and after a war that proved as nothing else could the fallacy of pacifism when faced with a regime of absolute terror, the PPU retreated to a position that was scarcely more reputable: an evasive and mendacious doctrine of ‘moral equivalence’ between the allies and the Axis powers. This has remained the pacifist position ever since, and periodically resurfaces in public debate. It is worth rehearsing this history because, while historical parallels are rarely exact, there is a discernible consistency here. The peace movement of today is analogous to the peace movement of 65 years ago in an important respect: it contains many genuine though misguided idealists, while its leadership is unmistakably supportive of fascism.
