Peace campaigners accused of 'indoctrinating' children, as teaching union promotes white poppy scheme

magica wrote:This has been tried before and flopped.

Red poppies are not glamourising war, it remembers the blood spilt, the poor men and boys who died.

That should never be forgotten.

Lord Foul wrote:where does the money these cowards poppies raise go to?

Like many in the 1930s, the PPU supported appeasement, believing that Nazi Germany would cease its aggression if the territorial provisions of the Versailles Treaty were undone. It backed Neville Chamberlain's policy at Munich in 1938, regarding Hitler's claims on the Sudetenland as legitimate. Peace News editor and PPU sponsor John Middleton Murry and his supporters in the group caused considerable controversy by arguing Germany should be given control of mainland Europe. In a PPU publication, Warmongers, Clive Bell said that Germany should be permitted to "absorb" France, Poland, the Low Countries and the Balkans. This position drew criticism from other PPU activists such as Vera Brittain and Andrew Stewart. At the time of the Munich crisis, several PPU sponsors tried to send "five thousand pacifists to the Sudetenland as a non-violent presence", however this attempt came to nothing.

Some PPU supporters were so sympathetic to German grievances that Rose Macaulay claimed she found it difficult to distinguish between the propaganda of the PPU and that of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), saying, "Occasionally when reading Peace News, I (and others) half think we have got hold of the [BUF journal] Blackshirt by mistake". There was Fascist infiltration of the PPU and MI5 kept an eye on the PPU's "small Fascist connections".After Dick Sheppard's death in October 1937, George Orwell, always hostile to pacifism, accused the PPU of "moral collapse" on the grounds that some members even joined the BUF.The historian Mark Gilbert said, "it is hard to think of a British newspaper that was so consistent an apologist for nazi Germany as Peace News," which "assiduously echoed the nazi press's claims that far worse offences than the Kristallnacht events were a regular feature of British colonial rule". But David C. Lukowitz argues that, "it is nonsense to charge the PPU with pro-Nazi sentiments. From the outset it emphasised that its primary dedication was to world peace, to economic justice and racial equality," but it had "too much sympathy for the German position, often the product of ignorance and superficial thinking".

In 1938 the PPU opposed legislation for air-raid precautions and in 1939 campaigned against military conscription.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Pledge_Union#Appeasement_of_Nazi_Germany

magica wrote:This has been tried before and flopped.

Red poppies are not glamourising war, it remembers the blood spilt, the poor men and boys who died.

That should never be forgotten.

magica wrote:This has been tried before and flopped.

Red poppies are not glamourising war, it remembers the blood spilt, the poor men and boys who died.

That should never be forgotten.

Tommy Monk wrote:It is a symbol of remembrance of the horrors of WW1... with the hope of preventing anything like it ever happening again!