The Stop the War (STW) coalition is a British anti-war movement formed after the attacks in America on September 11th 2001. It will turn 25 in 2026. It was founded by ex-members of the Socialist Workers Party. Its co-founders include Lindsey German and John Rees.
STW organised an almost 2m-strong march in 2003 against the Iraq war—Britain's largest-ever protest. It has helped organise huge pro-Palestine marches since October 2023. Though its campaign against intervention in Syria veered into atrocity-denial, it correctly predicted that wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Gaza would prove ruinous.
STW is more than an anti-war movement; it is the umbrella under which Britain's far left can gather, anti-war sentiment being one of the few things such groups can agree on. It is concerned with capitalist (ie, American) imperialism above all, which leads it to proclaim sovereign people's "right to determine their future for themselves" while describing Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a "proxy war" brought on by NATO expansionism. Mr Rees argues that a "high degree of theoretical analysis" helps sustain the movement between peaks of mobilisation.
Be incomprehensible. If they can't understand, they can't disagree.