On this ANZAC Day we remember the fallen in all wars and affirm our commitment to peace, justice and a future without war.
We recognise the fallen in the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars and the resistance of Māori to colonisation and seizure of land. In particular, we recognise the foundational non-violent resistance of Taranaki whānau at Parihaka. A form of resistance that later influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
We recognise and deplore the imperialist and colonialist nature of World War One and the deaths of around 15 million people (military personnel and civilians) to achieve the expansionist aspirations of Western empires. We affirm the rights of Aotearoa’s conscientious objectors to refuse warfare, and we celebrate their stance.
We recognise all who fought and died in the 20th-century anti-fascist wars, with a million lives lost during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and between 70 and 85 million lives lost during World War Two.
Nazi activities alone resulted in 17 million deaths, including six million Jewish people in the holocaust. We stand with all people who refuse and resist new forms of far-right movements active in the world today.
We recognise the fallen in the national liberation struggles of colonised peoples worldwide, including Vietnam, Angola, Algeria, Ghana, the Congo, Indonesia, Ireland, and Palestine.
We acknowledge the ongoing genocide and displacement of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and deplore the complicit silence of our government on this matter. This is not a war in any conventional sense. The overwhelming disparity of civilian to military deaths (with most of the dead being woman and children), make the racist and genocidal intent of the far-right Israeli state quite clear.
In the cities and villages of Ukraine and Sudan, the only people who benefit from drones, bombs and bullets are the arms companies whose profits are soaring.
Embracing a future without war, means refusing the government’s 2025 Defence Capability Plan to spend an additional $12 billion on military spending over the next four years. It means rejecting their dangerous discussions with AUKUS: an Anglophone militarist alliance.
Instead, we commend the arguments of Professor Richard Jackson and colleagues at Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa | National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies that Aotearoa ought to abolish our misplaced military investments and create an infrastructure for forms of civil defence at home and humanitarian interventions overseas.
That is what a future without war looks like. After all, as the British MP Tony Benn once said:
If you can plan for war, why can’t you plan for peace?
Cited in The New Statesman (2014)
