Swanson: Global Peace Flag Fashion Show Concert Extravaganza for Peace Held in Front of White House

By World BEYOND War, May 24, 2025

World BEYOND War & Fashioning for Social Environmental Justice on Saturday, May 24 displayed the Global Peace Flag Project at The Ellipse in front of the White House in Washington, D.C.

The Global Peace Flag consists of canvases displaying artwork and messages of peace from around the world, including from the U.S., Cuba, Nepal, India, Congo, Egypt, Sri Lanka, and more. At the intersection of fashion, environmental justice, and peace building, the Global Peace Flag transforms fashion waste — discarded muslin prototypes — into symbols of hope, unity, and resistance to conflict. This initiative has already seen success with its exhibit at the United Nations in New York, and now we’ve taken it to The Ellipse in front of the White House during Memorial Day weekend.

This event included a fashion show and exhibit displaying the Peace Flags from around the world, plus music and speeches from notable anti-war voices, including World BEYOND War’s own Executive Director David Swanson; fashion designer Runa Ray, founder of Fashioning for Social Environmental Justice; Marjan Naderi, former D.C. Youth Poet Laureate (2020); Eli S. McCarthy, Director of Programs at DC Peace Team; Dr. Steven Nabieu Rogers, Executive Director of the African Justice and Faith Network; and Notre Dame de Tous Les Peuples, a powerful choir ensemble that brings us songs of peace inspired by the African continent.

About the Organizers:

Fashioning for Social Environmental Justice is a public charity nonprofit dedicated to  addressing critical global, environmental, and societal challenges. World BEYOND War is a global grassroots network of chapters and affiliates advocating for the abolition of war.

Endorsed by: Busboys and Poets.

David Swanson’s remarks follow:

I want to thank Runa Ray for this fantastic project, creating peace flags in pieces from around the world. And I want to thank all the men, women, and children who have contributed a portion of the creation. It’s a wonderful symbol of what is needed, because we desperately need not only flags but also institutions, governments, structures, courts, arbitrators, and diplomatic fora for peacemaking. And a culture of peace — celebrations of peace — helps us get there. Our national cities are sprouting war monuments like mushrooms after a storm. This temporary peace monument radically changes this city or whatever city it is in, at least for a day or a holiday weekend. Our calendars are filling up with war holidays, but many of them used to be for peace. The first Memorial Day in the United States was on May 30, 1868, when two women placed flowers on graves from both sides of the U.S. Civil War. In a sense, that was an effort to finally end that war in U.S. culture, end the resentment, bitterness, hatred, and mythology of it, unite the children of the two sides in joint mourning of the tragic stupidity, honor the dead and by implication not create any more of them. Is there any better way to honor war dead than to create no more of them? Is there any worse insult to war dead than to continue piling them up? But like many a holiday originally for mourning the dead of both sides of a particular war, Memorial Day was gradually turned into a holiday for celebrating the dead on one side (the U.S. side) of many wars — often a very small fraction of the total dead, it should be noted. And the animosity over the U.S. Civil War is still with us. Think of how long that is. Think of how long it will be before people and their descendants recover emotionally from the many wars happening around the world right now.

The people of the world are well represented by the people who have helped to create these peace flags. The people of the world want art and beauty, would prefer investments in art and beauty to those in death and destruction. Most people in the world want peace, and want peace through peaceful means — as distinct from those weapons lobbyists and others who claim to want to create peace using war. We need flags and stories and songs and museums that tell the truth about the utter uselessness of war, that it endangers rather than protects, that militarism justified as deterrence instead provokes, that nonviolent activism can do better every useful thing ever claimed on war’s behalf. Our amazing brothers and sisters in South Korea in recent months have been nonviolently preventing a state of war. In Bangladesh last year a student movement nonviolently transformed the government, while in Bolivia peaceful people nonviolently prevented a military takeover. Two years ago in Niger, nonviolent demonstrations removed foreign military bases and deterred a foreign invasion. Indigenous communities in Latin America and Canada are using the remarkable powers of nonviolent action to protect democratic control from corporations and governments. A couple of blocks from here, in a museum, you can see a counter at which participants sat in one of the most important successful desegregation actions in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. That exhibit should be expanded a thousand-fold to encompass a truer picture of nonviolent action.

The people walking up and down the national mall of Washington D.C. are not from a single nation. Like today’s peace movement, they are from everywhere. They are from many of the places these peace flags are from. They are from many of the places represented in online peace events today, where little by little participants are learning to identify, and think of themselves, and talk as, citizens of the world, rather than partisans of a nation. When the government of your nation has attacked the nation of someone else with whom you are speaking in a video meeting, but the people of that nation are making great efforts for peace, once upon a time you would have been sure to remark “We bombed that place” — identifying yourself with a military that you had been protesting, and excluding your friend from your use of the term “we”. Nowadays you would be more likely to say “We are working together to end the violence and create a better world” identifying with the good people of the world and not with any military. This matters, because the news media in whichever country you are in are likely to treat the deaths of citizens of that country as dramatically important, but the deaths of people from the whole rest of the world as virtually meaningless. If we were to all identify as human beings, as global citizens, this last remaining fully respectable form of bigotry could not survive.

It matters also because even peace activists tend to label themselves pro-this country or pro-that country, out of sympathy or solidarity with particular victims of a war, making it easy for others to malign them as being anti-some other country. Maybe an art project like the peace flags is an easier place to start the process of labeling ourselves pro-peace and pro-everybody, a clearer path to understanding that peoples and governments are generally not the same thing.

I once fulfilled an assignment to create an image of a world with peace. I could have simply taken a photo of my backyard. The wars are far from me. I could have painted a picture of happy children playing in a bucolic setting. Instead I edited a map of this place we are in, downtown Washinton D.C. I depicted a cleanly fueled highspeed rail line crossing the 14th Street bridge, and a solar energy facility having replaced the golf course at Potomac Park. I put a peace fountain in the middle of the Tidal Basin. I added a Memorial to Collateral Damage on the National Mall. Here in the Ellipse I placed a monument to International Law. Just across the Arlington Memorial Bridge I identified a site for the burial of the last remaining nuclear weapon. And then I drew in a dark green forest called Pentagon Woods in the area where the Pentagon had once stood. Those with more artistic ability — like those who’ve created these peace flags — add more to the picture than I do.

One of the greatest artistic contributions to envisioning a peaceful world hides in plain sight. It’s a song that is performed at fancy prestigious events in national cathedrals and halls of power, with apparently few listeners paying the slightest attention to the words. It begins:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there are no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

It seems easy, but is it? Or is it easy to imagine and hard to work for? Or is it easy to imagine but hard to start thinking and speaking and behaving as if it were real?

I see the work of the global movement to end all wars and to establish a just and sustainable peace as involving the shaping of our actions to better suit the world we can imagine, the world that could be happier, the world that might be the only chance life on this planet has got. I encourage you to think of that when making peace flags, when celebrating peace flags, when perhaps urging the creation of a peace flag holiday, and when building a peace movement with fellow peace flag creators from all over this little blue dot in space.