The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) is a British pacifist non-governmental organization. It is open to everyone who can sign the PPU pledge: "I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war." [1] Its members work for a world without war and promote peaceful and non-violent solutions to conflict [2].
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The PPU emerged from an initiative by Dick Sheppard, canon of St Paul's Cathedral, in 1934, after he had published a letter in the Manchester Guardian and other newspapers, inviting men (but not women) to send him postcards pledging never to support war. 135,000 men responded and became members. The initial male-only aspect of the pledge was aimed at countering the idea that only women were involved in the peace movement. In 1936 membership was opened to women, and the newly founded Peace News was adopted as the PPU's weekly newspaper. In 1937 the No More War Movement formally merged with the PPU. George Lansbury, previously chair of the No More War Movement, became president of the PPU, holding the post until his death in 1940. In 1937 a group of clergy and laity led by Sheppard formed the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship as an Anglican complement to the non-sectarian PPU. The Union was associated with the Welsh group, Heddwchwyr Cymru, founded by Gwynfor Evans.
A large part of the PPU's work involved providing for the victims of war. Its members sponsored a house where 64 Basque children, refugees from the Spanish Civil War, were cared for. PPU archivist William Hetherington[3] writes that "The PPU also encouraged members and groups to sponsor individual Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to enable them to be received into the United Kingdom".[4][5]
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.[6] 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.[7]
Some PPU supporters were so sympathetic to German grievances that one member, 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 Blackshirt by mistake."[8][9] There was Fascist infiltration of the PPU[10] and MI5 kept an eye on the PPU's "small Fascist connections".[11] George Orwell, always hostile to pacifism, accused the PPU of "moral collapse" after Dick Sheppard's death in October 1937 on the grounds of its links with the BUF.[12] 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."[13] David C. Lukowitz said 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."[6] The PPU has, throughout its existence, been primarily associated with left-wing and socialist politics.
In 1938 the PPU opposed legislation for air-raid precautions and in 1939 campaigned against military conscription. It opposed the Second World War and supported conscientious objectors. Throughout the war, Vera Brittain published a newsletter, Letters to Peace Lovers, criticizing the conduct of the war, including the bombing of civilian areas in Germany. It had 2,000 subscribers out of a UK population of 46 million.[14] Following the publication of a poster saying, "War will cease when men refuse to fight. What are YOU going to do about it?", six members of the PPU (Alexander Wood, Maurice Rowntree, Stuart Morris, John Barclay, Ronald Smith and Sidney Todd) were prosecuted for encouraging disaffection amongst the troops. They were defended by John Platts-Mills and were convicted but avoided imprisonment. PPU members were also arrested for holding open-air meetings during the war and selling Peace News in the street.[15]
Since 1945, "the PPU has consistently condemned the violence, oppression and weapons of all belligerents"; it opposed the US intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and condemned both the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands and the subsequent British retaliation."[4] It also promoted the ideas of pacifist thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Richard B. Gregg.[4] The PPU played an active role in the Aldermaston peace marches.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the PPU lost some members to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament even though CND was not a pacifist organisation. Some recovery in the PPU's fortunes took place after 1965 when Myrtle Solomon was general secretary.
The Peace Pledge Union's recent activity has included taking part in British protests against the 2003 Iraq War. [16]
One of the PPU's more visible activities is the White Poppy appeal, started in 1933 by the Women's Co-operative Guild alongside the Royal British Legion's red poppy appeal.[17] The white poppy commemorates not only British soldiers killed in war, but also civilian victims on all sides, standing as "a pledge to peace that war must not happen again". In 1986, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed her "deep distaste" for the white poppies,[18] on allegations that they potentially diverted donations from service men, yet this stance gave them increased publicity.
Members of the PPU have included Vera Brittain, Benjamin Britten, Clifford Curzon, Alex Comfort, Eric Gill, Ben Greene, Laurence Housman, Aldous Huxley, George Lansbury, Kathleen Lonsdale, Reginald Sorensen, George MacLeod, Sybil Morrison, John Middleton Murry, Peter Pears, Max Plowman, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Donald Soper, Sybil Thorndike, Michael Tippett and Wilfred Wellock.
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