PNedit's blog

    28 Aug 2011

    Bill Hetherington

    <p>Bill Hetherington on his activities on (and around) 6 June 2011 - PN's 75th birthday.</p>

    In the month leading up to 6 June a major pre-occupation was preparation for International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, 15 May.

    For the past ten years I have prepared a list of representative COs of as many countries as I can find a name for, to be read out at the annual COs’ ceremony in Tavistock Square, London, whilst white flowers each bearing the name of a CO are laid on the Commemorative Stone. Each year further research expands the list, and this time there were 75 names,…

    28 Aug 2011

    Adam Weymouth

    Adam Weymouth on his walking from England to Istanbul, challenging xenophobia, the fear of strangers.

    As I walked along the European bank of the Bosphorus, I stumbled upon a small group of fisherman who were coming to the end of their dinner. They called me over, offering me grapes and raki, and I explained in my smattering of Turkish what I was up to. “Londra, Istanbul,” slap legs, mime walking. “Sekiz ay” (“eight months”).

    Throughout my whole journey I had been offered hospitality to an extent I could never have imagined before I left. I had been invited to sleep in peoples’ homes,…

    14 Jul 2011

    Milan Rai

    <p>Milan Rai on the origins of "al-Qaeda"</p>

    I’m doing a talk about al-Qa’eda for Peace News Summer Camp which is in two weeks. (Really looking forward to seeing Tracy Curtis perform – I’ve heard Seize the Day and the Carbon…

    03 Jul 2011

    Maya Evans, Milan Rai

    This content has been removed from the website on request of one of the authors.

    01 Jul 2011

    Jill Gibbon

     

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    01 Jul 2011

    Pippa Bartolotti

    Pippa Bartolotti writes about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla

    Going to Gaza

    As September approaches, a potentially momentous political event looms before us: the admission – or not – of Palestine as a member state of the UN. There are diverse opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing, but the discussion must be held, and quickly. Those of us concerned with the upholding of human rights and fair play in this world know that we cannot ignore this complicated issue which deserves serious and detailed consideration. The fate…

    01 Jul 2011

    Malcolm Pittock

    Malcolm Pittock uses PN's 75th birthday as an opportunity to reflect on a lifetime of peace activism

    Keep on keeping on

    I have been a peace campaigner more or less continuously since I was imprisoned as an unconditionalist conscientious objector from September 1954 to January 1955, and over nearly 60 years have learned the necessity of keeping on keeping on. Many in the peace movement fall by the wayside. Some – and this is particularly true of politicians – end up as enemies of the movement they once supported; others, perhaps even more inexplicably, without any…

    01 Jul 2011

    Phil Steele

    <p><em>PN</em> invited activists from around the movement to record what they were doing when Peace News turned 75. &nbsp;Our birthday was on 6 June 2011.</p>

    Looking back, looking forward

    So Peace News was first published on 6th June 1936.  6th June was also, as it happens,  the date of  other momentous events – the D-day landings in 1944, the publication of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the bombing of Haiphong during the Vietnam War in 1972.

    2011 seems to be a year of  significant anniversaries: 75 years of Peace News… 50 Years of Amnesty International…  and good grief, very…

    01 Jul 2011

    Genny Bove

    PN invited activists from around the movement to record what they were doing when Peace News turned 75.  Our birthday was on 6 June 2011.

    Peace News is 75. Happy birthday! Today is another anniversary; it’s two years  since my Mum’s death so I’m feeling somber, remembering the failings in the hospital care she received and our struggle to get her home so she could die as well as she had lived: in peace, with her family, in familiar surroundings. Time was short, and when some of the things that should have happened to facilitate this did not and our questions met with poor excuses, we blew the whistle to get things moving.…

    01 Jul 2011

    Chris Knight

    <p><em>PN</em> invited activists from around the movement to record what they were doing when Peace News turned 75. &nbsp;Our birthday was on 6 June.</p>

    Arrested for Attempted Street Theatre

    It was 5.30 pm on the eve of the royal wedding. “The Government of the Dead” street theatre troupe had just built a 12-foot high guillotine, topped with the banner headline “Some Cuts Are Necessary”.

    We’d added an effigy of Prince Andrew with a rather long neck – easier to chop through. We’d pinned on him the knight grand cross of the royal victorian order, the bauble his mum had given him four weeks earlier. And then there…

    01 Jul 2011

    Cedric Knight

    PN invited activists from around the movement to record what they were doing when Peace News turned 75.  Our birthday was on 6 June 2011.

    On 5 June 2011, the day after a Peace News 75th anniversary celebration was held nearby in North London, I attended a panel discussion at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. It was 90 minutes on “The Age of Dissent”, featuring Laurie Penny, Dan Hind and Dan Hancox. Despite the overarching title of the festival, the panel had practically no literary content (other than that the panel were writers and journalists), and only the most tenuous of connections to Stoke Newington.

    01 Jul 2011

    Jane Tallents

    <p>PN invited activists from around the movement to record what they were doing when Peace News turned 75. &nbsp;Our birthday was on 6 June 2011.</p>

    The week of 6 June 2011

    It’s mostly been a week of paper. Those who try and marginalise us as only interested in “action” have no idea just how much paper NVDA (nonviolent direct action) can generate!

    I start the week helping Brian with preparing his international law defence for his court case for blockading the Trident refit area of Devonport in November last year. So it’s copying, collating, stapling and labelling new information found on the internet, while…

    01 Jul 2011

    PN

     

    Chuck out the bombs and the bankers.
    Prepare to turn the world upside down …

    PEACE NEWS SUMMER CAMP 2011!

    28 July – 1 August 2011
    near Shrewsbury, Shropshire

    More info: www.peacenewscamp.info
    Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/pncamp
    Twitter: pnsummercamp
    Contact: peacenewscamp@googlemail.com…

    30 Jun 2011

    Milan Rai, Emily Johns

    <p>Emily Johns and Gabriel Carlyle talk about Peace News, the birthday party, the Egyptian revolution, Peace News Summer Camp, and the point of doing pointless things.</p>

    27 Jun 2011

    Roger Stephenson

    Roger Stephenson on Picasso’s anti-war art

    In Paris, Dora Maar was in tears and Picasso had found the subject for the painting he had been commissioned to do by the Spanish republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the international exhibition that was due to open in the French capital in May. With time running out, the exhibition finally opened on the 1900 exhibition site between the Champs de Mars and the Trocadero in June. The Spanish pavilion was not ready until July.

    Picasso worked quickly with an intense fury of…