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First World War

  • November 1, 2014

    Red, white, purple or any combination thereof. The hue of the poppy we wear should be the choice of an informed conscience. To be coerced into a symbol, for whatever reason and by whatever means, immediately invalidates its significance.

  • September 26, 2014

    One sign of the impact of militarism is the number of progressively minded people who express a belief in peace but support war once it is proposed. This is rather like being teetotal until you're offered a drink.

  • August 4, 2014

    Quakers’ online project serialising the diaries of five young people who lived during and opposed World War I goes live today.

  • May 16, 2014

    Yesterday saw the formal launch of the White Feather Diaries, a social media project exploring the lives of British pacifists during the first world war. The project's run by Quakers in Britain, who hired me as a writer and an editor for the project. I'm really pleased to be working on this project. Yesterday we announced the names of the five individuals whose writings will form the basis of the project, when it goes online in the summer.

  • April 18, 2014

    Two friends of Ekklesia will be appearing on BBC Radio Scotland at 8.05am on Easter Sunday morning (20 April 2014), in a programme intriguingly entitled 'Bayonets and Green Blades'.

  • January 7, 2014
  • January 6, 2014

    The Fellowship of Reconciliation is urging people to turn "coins into ploughshares", by using the new £2 coins into a peace investment.

  • January 6, 2014

    It is an instantly recognised and powerful image which has endured for over a century. The foreshortened pointing finger, extravagant moustaches and braided military cap of Lord Kitchener have been utilised across a wide range of advertising since they were first employed to tell young men that their country needed them.

  • January 3, 2014

    Peace activist, writer and Ekklesia associate Symon Hill has established a petition at Change.org calling on the Royal Mint: to replace the the Kitchener £2 coin with one that truly commemorates the millions who died in the First World War.

  • January 1, 2014

    The Royal Mint have revealed the design of a special £2 coin to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25558632). It is described as a “commemorative” coin, but it does not commemorate the millions of people who died. Instead, the coin's design glorifies war and celebrates a leading warmonger.