On Sunday, I had heard that there would be a flashmob orchestra in Trafalgar Square, playing Mussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kiev, in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. I went along with two 12-year-olds and made all the promises you have to make to get two preteens to go anywhere with you (it won’t take long and it’s near an Itsu).
Instead, we found a modest Stop the War rally with not a viola in sight – just Jeremy Corbyn speaking from a makeshift stage. “He just said: ‘War is bad because it kills people,’” my kid summarised – then, witheringly: “And this is your icon?” I explained that you don’t go to a demo for an original hypothesis. This was my entire childhood, standing in a crowd, listening to why war is bad, and so is poll tax. Also, “icon” is way too strong a word for my feelings about Corbyn, although I am glad to see him back in his happy place, saying determined, uncomplicated things to a small crowd.
There were some homemade signs, but two banners centrally produced, one uncontroversial: “No to Nuclear War.” The other was more problematic, drawing an elliptical but discernible equivalence between Putin’s aggression and Nato’s “expansion”, by saying “no” to both. This was quite complicated.
They say you only discover how well you understand something when you try to explain it to someone else; when the someone else is a scathing preteen, you discover it faster. I can lay out the criticism of Stop the War easily enough – that its anti-Americanism is so vehement, it amounts to pro-almost-anything-else, from Assad to Putin. What I couldn’t do was explain what that meant for pacifism generally. Had the entire case against war been hollowed out? Is everyone who has ever been on a Stop the War rally discredited? Realistically, given the strength of popular opposition to the Iraq war, isn’t that almost all of us? Would I get kicked out of the Labour party for being in Trafalgar Square at all? Well no, obviously: I was looking for Mussorgsky, on my way to an Itsu.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
