The Twilight Years by Richard Overy

Author:Richard Overy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Two pamphlets from 1936 which illustrate the growing divide in the anti-war movement. Aldous Huxley insisted that all violence was wrong and that people should train themselves for a life of peace; C. Day Lewis represented a growing body of opinion that saw violence as necessary in a just cause.

It was the strong religiosity of the Sheppard movement which made it difficult for rationalist pacifists to participate. Arthur Ponsonby, who knew Sheppard well from more than twenty years’ acquaintance, hesitated to accept his friend’s request that he become a formal sponsor of the movement in May 1936. He admired Sheppard as ‘the one really live wire who is doing something’, but found it difficult to work with people animated by ‘a fervent belief in the teaching of Jesus Christ’. He was not, he told Sheppard, a Christian, nor did he believe in God; he was also unconvinced that most Christians accepted the pacifist argument. Only after Sheppard agreed to make it clear that his movement was ecumenical, open to believers and non-believers as long as they were absolute pacifists, did Ponsonby agree not only to sponsor the movement but to work actively on its behalf.113 He wrote to Sheppard in July 1936 that after his own experience of ‘almost continuous failure’ it was a pleasure to find himself working alongside a personality with so much ‘drive, tact and persistence’, but he remained uncomfortable with his presence at mass meetings that more closely resembled rallies for religious revival.114 Ponsonby’s decision to join Sheppard had more to do with his alienation from the Labour Party as it moved in the autumn of 1936 to endorse the idea of League military action and rearmament against the fascist threat. ‘Go Jingo if you like,’ he wrote in his diary after reading the speeches at the annual conference in Edinburgh, ‘and swallow all you are told, split the party and wave the flag.’115 Whatever the drawbacks of Sheppard’s simple Christian view of war, the initial success of the Peace Pledge Union reflected the realization among the prominent figures and mass supporters of complete pacifism that the gulf separating the two main parties in the anti-war movement had to be made publicly clear as the international crisis deepened.

The peace movement became irretrievably split into two camps in 1936, those for whom violence was always unacceptable, and those for whom violence could be accepted if the threat to peace could not be resolved any other way. The immediate effect of the schism was to weaken the broad anti-war movement inherited from the 1920s and to create among both flocks of the faithful declining confidence in the power of popular opinion to hold back the tide of war and rearmament. The two parties were divided as sharply as Protestant from Catholic had been four centuries earlier. ‘Ultimately,’ wrote Kingsley Martin in 1938, ‘it is a clash between two religions. In a crisis people find out what they are.’116 Like religious zealots the two sides sniffed out the unorthodox and hunted for witches.

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