Imagine Peace. These were the words that appeared on an otherwise blank page in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 2013. They were paid for by Yoko Ono and they are of course an echo of John Lennon’s most famous song. A few days later, the Guardian conducted an opinion poll in which it asked its readers whether they thought the advert would produce world peace. Surprisingly, a third of the respondents thought that it would, though there was little evidence around the world to confirm them in that hope. By then, the civil war in Syria had already claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 people. It’s now about 400,000.
Wouldn’t it be marvellous if war were just an idea, a very bad one, and that universal peace could be achieved by just imagining it? Jeremy Corbyn is certainly in the Yoko Ono camp. He doesn’t believe that it is worth fighting a war for anything.
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