Guest Blog: Hardie & Sorley: Different Worlds, Common Cause?
Delegates to the April 1915 Women’s International Congress for Peace and Freedom aboard the MS Noordam with their blue and white “PEACE” banner (Wikipedia)
On October 31, the Halifax Chronicle Herald published my article contrasting two very different Great War tragedies: the deaths, within three weeks of each other in the autumn of 1915, of Kier Hardie (b. 1856), founder and leader of the British Labour Party, his apparently indomitable spirit broken by the spectacle of millions of workers volunteering to slaughter each other for profit and empire, and Charles Sorley (b. 1895), a precocious upper-class poet with a deep love of the German language and people. With Armistice Day approaching, certain to be dominated in both Canada and the UK by clichés of ‘noble sacrifice’ for ‘freedom’s cause’ – the saying, as Sorley predicted, of “soft things” about unspeakable suffering – I hoped this exercise in unconventional remembrance might light fresh connections between anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-war struggles, a hundred years ago and now.
The article can be viewed at The Chronicle Herald here.
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and Campaign Coordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton.
Jeff Piker
November 11, 2015 @ 10:51 am
Sean – I’m reading your guest blog early on the morning of Remembrance Day 2015. You have written so much that needs to be said.
Hardie: ‘What he despised most about capitalism was its ownership of both “the means of existence,” the resources determining whether people are “free to live the lives they feel stirring within,” and the means of destruction: the way the search for new colonies and markets generates ever more ruthless conflict.’
I agree with his analysis. Until we look closely at the economic system we have built for ourselves and dwell so confidently and happily within, I doubt that we’ll be able to know how to work effectively for peace.
Sorley: ‘“I could wager,” Sorley predicted that August, “that out of twelve million eventual combatants there aren’t one in twelve who really want it.” Four years later, 72 million had served, and at least nine million lost their lives (plus three million civilians). Sorley’s desperate hope that “when it is peace/We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain” was dashed by the irredeemable brutality of mechanized slaughter and the botched imperial “settlement” imposed at Versailles.’
Our ‘celebration’ of Remembrance Day seems always, as you wrote of Sorley’s last poem: ‘…to speak for “the millions of the mouthless dead,” showering trite praise and cheap tears on “the fallen.” “Say only this,” Sorley urged: “They are dead.” Though Hardie might add (“lest we forget”): “They were brothers.”
As you indicate so well in your posting, how we ‘remember’ this day clearly affects how likely we are to repeat the tragedy that happened a hundred years ago. Indeed, we’ve been doing just that in Central Asia and the Middle East in recent times — we show no inclination to really learn from the meaning of the past. ‘Lest we forget’ — a cruel irony.