The IWM gives peace a chance
People Power: Fighting for Peace IWM London
What an original and surprising idea for an exhibition: a major show, with more than 300 artefacts and artworks, charting the history of the anti-war movement in Britain at – of all places – London’s Imperial War Museum.
Downstairs, in the atrium, it’s business as usual, with a dramatic display of terrifying military hardware. Upstairs, though, in the temporary exhibition galleries, it’s all CND symbols, flower-power slogans, and hand-stitched protest banners.
Here, then, is an exhibition I never thought I’d see – at least, not here, at a venue with such fusty, unfashionable words in its name. Indeed, on paper,
People Power: Fighting for Peace seems guaranteed to alienate the Imperial War Museum’s core audience.
So, full credit to the museum’s bosses for boldly sanctioning such a wrong-footing exhibition in the institution’s centenary year, reflecting its mission to look at war from different perspectives.
Thankfully, People Power isn’t an excuse for a Left-wing diatribe. Rather, it is a subtle, dispassionate, and intellectually nuanced show, attractively designed throughout, which raises important philosophical questions – chiefly, what is the point of anti-war protests when, so often, governments ignore them?
The narrative begins with the First World War and the introduction of conscription in 1916. Around 16,000 men – including artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group – became conscientious objectors, at a time when, to do so, meant almost certain hostility and abuse. Despite early patriotic fervour within the population at large, the cataclysmic costs of the conflict ensured that, during the Twenties, a fledgling peace movement quickly gained support.
The show features two colourful posters designed by the eccentric Boy Scouts’ leader John Hargrave, who founded the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a batty camping group with a mission to bring about world peace. In one banner, created for a 1926 rally, the scary figure of Death evokes a trench-bound Tommy in a gas mask.
With the rise of fascism, though, pacifism became problematic – as witnessed by a letter written in 1939 by AA Milne, who styled himself a “practical pacifist”, and argued that “war is a lesser evil than Hitlerism”.
During the Second World War, there were 62,000 conscientious objectors. The more prominent of them received anonymous hate mail swarming with insults. Many conscientious objectors, though, undertook courageous and life-threatening work, including the defusing of bombs.
The biggest section of the show is devoted to the Cold War, when the spectre of nuclear oblivion offered an existential threat to civilisation. Here, we learn about the artist and designer Gerald Holtom (1914-85), who created the famous peace sign – an inverted “V” and a straight line within a circle – for the first anti-nuclear Aldermaston march in 1958. A sketch reveals that Holtom based his design upon the semaphore signals for “N” and “D” – standing for “nuclear disarmament”.
There is also a wall of peace posters from the Sixties, including the devastating “And babies” placard excoriating the Vietnam War, as well as a section about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
At this point, the exhibition brings the story up to date, with a room about resistance to recent wars in the Middle East. Photo Op (2007) is a notorious montage in which a grinning Tony Blair appears to take a selfie in front of a massive explosion in a desert.
We also see examples of the “bloodspot” placards, designed by artist David Gentleman for the Stop the War Coalition, which were brandished during the mass march in London against the first Iraq war on February 15 2003. Attended by between a million and two million people, it was the largest march in British history but failed to prevent tens of thousands of British troops being deployed in Iraq.
Perhaps the most heart-rending thing, then, about this exhibition is the thought that, despite the aims and actions of the international peace movement over the past century, collectively, as a species, we have learned nothing at all. Just look at the catastrophe that is Syria today, or the warmongering rhetoric of Donald Trump. People often speak of the futility of war. Depressingly, the same could be said of the peace movement. From Thurs until Aug 28. Information: iwm.org.uk