Letter: Ordinary people across the world must organise peaceably to pressure their governments to reject all wars
A letter from Louis Shawcross:
So how come all these wars are going on when no one seems to want them?
Where's the push coming from? It's not coming from ordinary people. An anti-war march in Israel on June 22 was attended by over 150,000 Israelis calling for an end to the Gaza war, demanding new elections, and giving strong criticism of Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
These weren't pro-Hamas marches, just as similar marches in London and other parts of the UK are not pro-Hamas marches.
On March 25, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza - going further than the "humanitarian pause" the UK had long been pushing for. (The United States abstained from the vote.)
Globally, it would seem, the balance is against wars and one would imagine if states were more economically and financially independent and less coerced by certain superpowers, there would be near unanimous rejection of war.
Mass movements of ordinary people across the world must organise peaceably to pressure their governments to reject all wars, and to disinvest in arms manufacturing and arms sales.
Armies, as such, in my opinion, should solely protect domestic borders and cease in all foreign imperialist ventures.
Only when the voices of ordinary people have an equitable place at all the negotiating tables replacing those representing private corporate "tyrannies" (as Noam Chomsky has rightly labelled them) and their attendant lobbyists who wield much more power than they truly deserve, will we have any chance of fashioning a society based on humanitarianism rather than militarism cum profit mongering.
Louis Shawcross, Royal Hillsborough