This September I will be joining the Peace Pilgrimage, walking from Malvern to Telford.

In November the Special Defence and Security Convention (SDSC-UK) is taking place in Telford. (As is usual with arms fairs the name is quite a mouthful).

This convention used to be held in Malvern (previously known as 3CDSE), but due to lots of campaigning and local pressure in 2023 it moved to the International centre in Telford.

The Pilgrimage will be an act of witness against SDSC-UK, and against the arms trade more widely.

It will be a chance to pray, to reflect, to vigil outside sites of destruction and suffering.

Why?

I have never experienced war directly. I am fortunate enough to have lived my whole life in a cocoon of safety.

However I am aware enough to understand that war is hell. Engaging intellectually, and more importantly emotionally, with the images and news reports I’ve seen throughout my life is enough to convince me of the evil of war.

My personal experiences of death have been painful enough to give me an insight, just slightly, of the overwhelming pain of losing a loved one; of seeing a beloved child go off to war and never return; of seeing multiple members of your family blown to pieces in seconds; of having everything you own destroyed; or of being forced to flee with virtually nothing at a moment’s notice.

My almost insignificant experiences of mild hunger and thirst; these give me the tiniest insight into the pain and panic of what real hunger and thirst might feel like.

“How could we consume vastly more than our fair share of the world’s resources if not by acts of violence both economic and military?”

All of us know this, at least we do if we stop and think about it. War is evil. War is painful beyond our imagining.

I think where we differ is of course that some of us have turned our heads away and chosen not to think too deeply about it all.

But more so where we differ is on the questions of whether war is useful, necessary, “worth it”; is a war ever worth the cost? Some people think it is.

We must all take this question seriously. Especially those of us with no direct experience to draw on.

Our pilgrimage in September emerges from an instinctive impulse to say “NO”, war is not worth the cost.

Yet I can hear voices out there telling me that I am naïve, “such facile statements ignore the realities of the world we live in, sometimes the good guys have to stand up and fight”.

There is some truth in these accusations of naivety. The truth is that I, and everyone living in the west, need to acknowledge that we have benefited from war. Take a long view of the last 300 years, how often has our nation (and similar nations) used violence to subjugate, to steal, to punish; violence has been used to gain power over the world’s wealth, both natural resources and human resources.

Of course everyone of us here in the UK benefits from this. Most of us live in the cocoon I mentioned above. How could we consume vastly more than our fair share of the world’s resources if not by acts of violence both economic and military?

Our naivety then might lay in a belief that we can work for peace while denying our privilege and our complicity. A false idea that the fuel in our cars, the electronic goods in our pockets, the food on our tables even, has no connection to militarism; in truth all of this wealth is protected by the use of violence around the world. The arms industry facilitates the processes which make our affluence possible.

Of course the more wealthy we are the more complicit we are. The more high-impact my lifestyles is then the more inner work there is for me to do. We are all responsible for struggling with our own addictions and impulses to over-consumption.

It’s important that our speaking out for peace is not a mission of criticising everyone around us. Especially the already struggling in our society. We are stuck in a deeply rooted toxic system, there is a balance to be struck between our responsibility to act and our areas of powerlessness.

So striving for peace, working for peace.

It is absolutely about speaking out against the Arms Trade. It is about using our bodies to oppose violence. It is about challenging the structures which make war possible.

It is about digging deep into ourselves, deconstructing our own sense of privilege. Dealing with our own addictions, our own propensities to violence.

And it is about our communities, working together to reject the benefits of violence, finding new ways of being in solidarity which support the vulnerable, don’t destroy the earth, and which aren’t supported by violence in faraway lands.

At every level to say NO to violence, YES to peace.

So, I offer an invitation. Come and join us in September.

Make a statement in opposition to the Arms Trade.

Meet like-minded fellow pilgrims, engage with the conversations necessary to de-violence our society.

And join us as pilgrims on the inner journey of peace, struggling out of our comfortable complicity with violence.

Matthew Neville