A reflection by Marian Pallister
As a teenager, I shared the very real fear of my contemporaries that four minutes to nuclear oblivion was almost a certainty. We lived through the stand off over the Bay of Pigs incident when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev placed nuclear weapons just 90-off miles from the Florida coastline. We were terrified that either President Kennedy or Khrushchev would press the red button.
That’s history - a history that doesn’t engage today’s young people in the same anti-nuclear mind set of an older generation.
Membership of CND, ban the bomb marches, the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp protest against nuclear weapons at RAF Greenham Common, which my mother and I briefly visited in solidarity with women far braver and more persistent than we were – are all part of the history of the peace movement. After decades of ‘deterrent’ indoctrination that has kept Trident firmly on the UK Government’s agenda, it’s difficult to convince people that nuclear disarmament is much more than a political football.
And that’s why Pat Gaffney, national coordinator of Pax Christi – an organisation that has to date billed itself as the International Catholic Movement for Peace – wants a new vocabulary to engage 21st century peacemakers.
Gaffney delivered a cluster of talks in Scotland in September, travelling north from Pax Christi’s London headquarters on a day that a convoy carrying nuclear warheads was scheduled to make a similar journey the length of England north to Coulport on the Clyde. Neither she nor the convoy attracted headlines, despite the significance of each (in opposing ways) to the wellbeing of our world.
Her message was that it’s time for a change of approach and a change of language. She spoke of Pope Francis’s message to delegates at a conference earlier this year organised by Pax Christi International, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which explored the theme Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence.
He had called the current global situation a ‘world war in instalments’ and said ‘…humanity needs to refurbish all the best available tools to help the men and women of today fulfil their aspirations for justice and peace’. He spoke of a tangible ‘wall of indifference’ and admitted that that it is a ‘formidable’ task ‘…to work for peace by living the practice of non-violence’.
Pat Gaffney suggests that to become involved in non-violence and a just peace making means leaving behind the ancient concept of a ‘just war’ and instead diverting resources to create peace workers.
To engage a new generation in working for a just peace the scaremongering and fear have to go. Instead, Gaffney says ‘A shift in language is important.’ She wants ‘social justice’ to replace ‘peace movement’ because there is a need to ‘be aware that we are working for a much bigger picture’.
I was privileged to discuss with Gaffney the ’bigger picture’ – the interconnectedness of the arms trade, the banking system, the effects of austerity and of climate change that have created what she calls ‘today’s mess’. As individuals and as a Church, Gaffney suggests, issues of ethical investment need to be raised.
We can’t get rid of arms of any sort as long as the trade in them is so valuable to their manufacturers and the shareholders who invest in their manufacture. We must be aware that banks and insurance companies make us complicit by investing our money.
‘We need to reflect on the role of money in our lives and the ethics of making money out of money and money out of arms and fossil fuels,’ Gaffney said.
A reminder, surely, that Pope Francis and Pax Christi reaffirm the message Pope Paul VI gave us half a century ago when he said ‘If you want peace work for justice’ – Justice and Peace Scotland’s leitmotif.