Ben Griffin – a few words:This is the first Remembrance Sunday in four years that I won’t be at the Cenotaph with Veterans For Peace UK, because I’m in Beirut. But I am thinking about them today, all the extraordinary men I’ve met with their stories of extraordinary courage – not the ‘courage’ of the war propagandists who are in […]
Two weeks ago on Armed Forces Day a group of men handing out leaflets in Blackpool was ordered by a private security firm’s employees to stop what they were doing immediately and leave the promenade. What on earth was on those leaflets? Something highly offensive, surely, to have forced the authorities into such dramatic action to prevent the public seeing […]
The area I was standing in was made safe only a few days previously by the SAA victory in Douma and East Ghouta as a whole. Under the surrender terms Jaysh al Islam agreed to release all their kidnapped civilians, a number believed to be around 5000. All the families of these disappeared turned up hoping to be reunited with them, but only 200 people emerged from the tunnels. The others had all been killed.
This fetishization of the ‘British Soldier’, emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity. The more profound the corruption, the greater the need for propaganda and, importantly, the cruder it needs to be as the most skilled propagandist of them all, Joseph Goebels, well understood when he declaimed that propaganda ‘must always be essentially simple and repetitious’ and must ‘appeal to the emotions and instinct, never the intellect.’ ‘Hero’, ‘Help For Heroes’, ‘our heroes overseas’, ‘our courageous men and women protecting our freedoms’, ‘protecting us’, ‘doing it for us’… ‘for us’, ‘for us’, for us’.
Veterans For Peace UK has a membership with a wide range of political views. That is one reason why we don’t get involved in party politics. Another reason is that it doesn’t matter who gets elected, Labour, Conservative or a coalition government, the wars just keep coming. So if we don’t get involved in domestic party politics, it is a […]
I’ve decided never to do anything I don’t want ever again as my New Year’s resolution! I don’t like making New Year’s resolutions actually so I’ve failed quite early on there – but from now on I won’t be doing a single thing I don’t want to! I don’t do much I don’t want to as it is to be […]
Wayne Sharrocks served in the British Army and is a member of Veterans For Peace UK. http://www.waynesharrocks.com/ I joined the Army at 17 years old and acquired 7 year’s experience. During those 7 years I served in The Rifles and The Special Forces Support Group (SFSG) where I was deployed in front line operations in Afghanistan (twice), where I was shot […]
DON’T BECOME A HATER. Soldiers are encouraged to hate. You will be encouraged to: Hate soldiers in other regiments. Hate people in the Royal Air Force. Hate the Royal Navy. Hate civilians (that means your friends and family). Hate foreigners. This is all done to make you feel that you are in a special gang and that all of the people in your gang are special. This feeling will then be exploited to get you to carry out tasks you would never have done
Veterans For Peace received these questions a while back from serving soldiers via the Fill Your Boots Facebook Page. VFP UK Coordinator Ben Griffin has finally gotten around to answering the questions, his answers are by no means comprehensive. Comments appreciated… 1. Do you think it’s suitable to refer to the organisation as veterans when they clearly renounce all ties to […]
