As in, a monument to peace or some kind of memorial building or statue that is fully intended as some sort of anti-war or anti-violence gesture. It has to be deliberately targeted and not just collateral damage (such as a general bombing raid).
Stuff like the Haymarket Police statue doesn’t count since it wasn’t dedicated to peace, rather just as a memorial for the fallen officers.
Just wondering because it would be pretty ironic.
Well, there’s this: Remembrance Day bombing - Wikipedia
That was at a war memorial, not a peace memorial. The OP specifies an attack at a “memorial building or statue that is fully intended as some sort of anti-war or anti-violence gesture”, which definitely does not include the Enniskillen war memorial. War memorials are typically about commemorating and glorifying sacrifice, rather than opposing war.
I guess most things that are memorials, or are dedicated to peace will probably fail to qualify on that basis - given that their origin is most often a reminder of something other than peace.
No, it’s not a question of their origin. The Hiroshima Peace Park, for example, might qualify as a peace memorial, despite the fact that its origins lie in an act of war.
But the OP does specify an “anti-war or anti-violence”. Conventional war memorials are not inherently anti-war. They can be anti-war, but more typically they seek to justify war in terms of the motives for fighting (e.g. patriotism) or the cause served (e.g. freedom). Or, they simply avoid entirely the question of whether the war was justified (i.e. they are neither pro-war nor anti-war) and concentrate on mourning the fallen.
What are people remembering when they visit “peace memorials”?
Is the distinction between a war memorial and a peace memorial as hard-and-fast as is being suggested in this thread?
Can we see some examples of peace memorials that aren’t war memorials?
The Peacekeeping Monument in Ottawa is dedicated to peacekeeping, commemorating the Canadians who have gone abroad to help keep the peace, usually in UN sponsored peacekeeping missions. Peacekeeper soldiers are chosen from countries that by definition have not been involved in the conflict in issue, so the peacekeeping monument is not a commemoration of Canadian battles or wars.
[QUOTE=Lester B. Pearson, future PM of Canada]
We need action not only to end the fighting but to make the peace… My own government would be glad to recommend Canadian participation in such a United Nations force, a truly international peace and police force, …
[/QUOTE]
The Pearson quote came from his address to the UN during the Suez Crisis, where Canada offered its services for troops who were not part of the conflict between Britain/France and Egypt, to help keep the shaky peace from falling apart.
There’s also the Peace Gardens, right on the border between the US (North Dakota) and Canada (Manitoba), dedicated to the peaceful relations between the two countries:
I think the distinction between a war memorial and an anti-war memorial is fairly fundamental. The thing is, there aren’t a lot of anti-war memorials. After a war, most people who have been bereaved in the conflict want to feel that their loved one’s sacrifice, and their own pain, is justified; that something has been achieved. And conventional war memorials tend to support and reinforce this. The bereaved are mostly not going to be keen on a memorial which says no, lives were wasted, this conflict should never have been fought, your son died in a worthless enterprise, which is basically what an anti-war memorial says. So anti-war memorials would have been hurtful to many, and very controversial.
For a sense of how opposing feelings ran on this, consider the (conventional) war memorial, the Menin Gate, which dedicates the fallen “to the Greater Glory of God”, and the well-known poem by Seigfried Sasson, who fought in the battles which the Gate commemorates, in which he denounces the Gate as a “sepulchre of crime”. In that case we have a conventional war memorial being denounced from an anti-war perspective, but we can equally imagine an anti-war memorial evoking a similar response from a more conventional perspective.
There are a couple of anti-war memorials in France, erected after the Great War. They tend to have statues of widows and orphans, rather than of soldiers in either heroic or mourning poses, and to carry slogans like “Maudit soit la guerre” (“May war be cursed”).