20/11/2020
British Army veteran Donald Bell has spoken online about why he chose to pay his respects at the cenotaph yesterday with a warning that ‘climate change means war.’ In words that will chime with many gay and trans activists he said: “I think that much of the media would rather stoke outrage than look calmly at what we are saying. If you stop and look at what we did today you will see that it was an act of remembrance, and an act of respect for those who gave their lives for our future." Mr Bell is a member of the campaign group Extinction Rebellion, a network that has a lot of LGBT members and a lively “Rainbow Caucus” group. The ER group placed a wreath at the cenotaph to mark Remembrance Day and to warn that soldiers and other armed forces groups will end up picking up the pieces of defending against climate change. Perhaps somewhat predictably, this led the Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Telegraph and other papers on the right wing to screech in indignation. Extinction Rebellion UK said “The MoD are preparing the British Armed Forces for the effects of escalating climate change. Surely the public deserves to know that government departments are preparing for disaster, when they could be working to mitigate it?”. Meanwhile, and in related news, the Peace Pledge Union, who manufacture the white poppy as an alternative to the militarisation of the conventional red poppy symbol, said that in 2020, despite populism and right wing backlash around the globe, more young people than ever before are wearing the symbols of the peace movement. More than 130,000 white poppies were sold this year, according to preliminary statistics. The radical wing of the LGBTQ movement has always had a strong relationship with the peace movement, dating from the Gay Liberation Front in the seventies to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Encampments in the 1980s and Peter Tatchell's 1995 essay “We Don't Want to March Straight”.
https://extinctionrebellion.uk/
http://www.petertatchell.net/category/military/
http://www.greenhamwpc.org.uk/
