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What can we do to help create a more peaceful future? This is one of the questions put to a group of around 30 people who attended an evening event in Cheltenham on Sunday, organised by the Rendezvous Society as part of the Peace Week programme. The programme has been put together by peace2gether, a Gloucestershire-based group working with many different organisations to raise awareness of peace issues throughout this week (more details from Lin Kear on 014523 824282). If you had thought you were coming along to a sedate talk on Sunday evening, you would have been mistaken. Hiroshima – Remembered, Revisited, Regretted? was an interactive event encouraging us all to examine our own thoughts about peace. We were greeted with an exhibition with moving photos, paintings and poems by survivors of the A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then invited to listen to three very varied short talks followed by an energetic discussion. Dawn Evans has recently spent several years teaching in Hiroshima, and spoke with great love and admiration of this green city and its people. Her experience of the modern city was a very positive one, but Dawn also recounted the annual festival to commemorate the A-bomb victims, and the emotional account by a now elderly A-bomb survivor who had attended her classes. Yoko Moon, though she grew up in Japan, had never visited the city of Hiroshima until last summer, when she took her young family there. There they travelled on one of the two trams preserved from before 1945, and listened to a survivor as he recounted the story of the day the bomb fell while he and a group of schoolfriends were watching from their schoolyard. Takashi Nagara was 12 years old and suffered severe burns over much of his body. Through careful treatment and keeping him at home, away from the centre of the city where the risks of radiation remained great, his family nursed him back to health. He has been fortunate enough to survive into his 70s. Yoko illustrated her talk with photographs and pictures from Mr Nagara’s illustrated account of his experiences. Dennis Mitchell was a boy staying at a youth camp in the Yorkshire Dales when he learned, a few days after the A-bomb attack on Hiroshima, the news of this earth-changing event. It coincided with his birthday, and Dennis recalled how he felt as he heard the news on August 12, 1945. Astonishment – that such an extraordinary event had taken place; admiration – for the ingenuity of man to develop such a powerful weapon; relief – that the war in the Pacific, which was still raging since the end of the war in Europe three months earlier, must now come to an end; horror – at the indiscriminate nature of the killing and devastation which took no account of whether the victims were men, women or children, engaged in the war effort or just going about their daily lives. Dennis recounted with great lucidity and frankness how each of these emotions overtook him at the time. Now older and wiser, he regrets some of his teenage emotions and has devoted his energies since that time to helping to make the world a more peaceful place. The youth leader and respected mentor who broke the news to him told Dennis “you will always remember this moment, and the world will never be the same again.” Richard Millard has also lived for several years in Japan, and has a great love for the country and its people. He spoke about Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which prohibits Japan from entering into any wars: ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised. Now it was time for all of us to examine our own thoughts on the topic of nuclear weapons, war, and the future of the planet. To help in this discussion, the participants were asked to form small groups and answer four searching questions: 1) Is it morally acceptable for nuclear weapons to be used as an instrument of foreign policy? 2) Are we in the UK more, or less, secure through deploying our own ‘independent’ nuclear weapons> 3) Are there grounds for optimism, arising over the 64 years ince Hiroshima, that the future will be peaceful? 4) What can we do to help create a more peaceful future? We interrupted our discussion to go out into the courtyard where each person present placed a stone or pebble on a ‘peace cairn’, and we formed a circle around the cairn to contemplate peace. The discussion continued in larger groups, each one then sharing with the rest of the people present their answer to one of the four questions. I felt that I learned more about Hiroshima and the devastating effects of nuclear warfare in this one evening than I have learned over the past twenty years. It is not a topic that is high on anyone’s agenda these days. There are other problems facing the world, and all of them – climate change, depletion of the world’s resources, population growth – demand global solutions. This is no less true of the threat of war, nuclear or otherwise, to the threat and prosperity, and ultimate survival, of humanity. So, what can we do to help create a more peaceful future? The discussion in my group cetred around the need to lead decent and caring lives as individuals; to promote education on global issues; to reatin our confidence that a peaceful future can be achieved. |
