Our long-serving and long-suffering news editor, David Polden, has decided to hang up his PN keyboard. He’s been writing news items for PN regularly since 2007!
David, thank you so much for your dedication and your hard work over the years. You have contributed so much to the paper, with your keen sense of what was happening around the peace movement.
David will continue to produce the CND Non-Violent Resistance Network (NRVN) newsletter.
Radicals excluding radicals because they have the ‘wrong’ ideas on trans rights is nothing new.
I was surprised, however – surprised, saddened and shocked – when I learned at the Anarchist Bookfair in London that the organisers of the bookfair had excluded a group not because it had the wrong ideas about trans rights, but because it had not expelled members who had expressed the ‘wrong’ ideas about trans rights in an internal discussion. (See p5 for the story.)
I don’t see how…
The world’s attention is fastened on Gaza at the moment. This issue of PN is almost completely taken up with Palestine.
At the same time, there is an important opportunity right now for British peace activists to help bring an end to another devastating war, and another horrifying humanitarian catastrophe.
As I write, the internationally-recognised Yemeni government has just called on the US, Britain and other Western governments to designate the Yemeni rebel movement…
‘“Peace, peace,” they cry’ – Jeremiah
‘The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart’
– Dorothy Day
On Armistice Day, I joined the march for Palestine as it snaked round Victoria. I sighed, I sat down on some steps, looked at the last yellow leaves left on the trees and on the ground and renewed my conviction that at heart I am an anarchist.
Given all that’s written on the subject, how am I qualified to count myself in that…
After many decades of selling Peace News (and a few books) on his street stall in Stroud, Gloucestershire, notorious poet-activist-letterpress-printer-footballer Dennis Gould is hanging up his boots/books. To mark the occasion, we’re reprinting most of an article Dennis wrote for PN in December 1973 (PN 1953) based on his experience of running ‘Books and Things’, a bookshop in Cornwall.
George Orwell wrote a classic article on ‘Bookshop Memories’. Descriptions of…
Last month, I sang Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as part of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. It is a large choral and orchestral work that was sparked by Tippett’s reaction to the Nazi pogrom of 1938 called Kristallnacht, and which he described ‘as an impassioned protest against the conditions that make persecution possible’. It was informed by Tippett’s complex personal history, exploring deeply at different times Communism, Socialism and pacifism.
One of…
The Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes are currently at the centre of the fight over artificial intelligence (AI), where US-based writers and actors are trying to stop their work from being replaced by AI systems.
Here at PN, we’re wondering about our own resistance to the new digital overlords.
You may be surprised to hear that AI played a big role at the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) conference that was taking place in Gothenburg, Sweden, as we…
One thing you have to do if you’re setting up a commune (especially a big one) is to meet a lot of people. Not just meet them, but meet them, really engage – compare what each other loves, what makes each other angry, dazzle them with the brilliant idea, ask about their financial and family situation, share some vulnerabilities, find out what makes them tick in time with your clock (or doesn’t).
We’ve just had one of our quarterly (there, I’ve said it in print, it is…
The other day, while speaking to a US friend online, I described the UK as ‘a damp little island with a tea fixation, and a deeply-entrenched class system.’
Now, we all know that the weather and the tea are non-negotiable elements of 21st-century Britain. If we can fix the climate emergency, I strongly suspect that they will be non-negotiable elements of 31st-century Britain – I’m fully okay with this.
But what of the class system?
Anyone who has spent half an hour with…
There’s one thing which really irritates me (what do you mean, just the one thing?). It’s when people say ‘that person/organisation is silent on the issue of….’
Often, that person/organisation isn’t silent on that issue and it doesn’t take long to find out just what they’d said on the issue, particularly if it’s an organisation with a website.
For example, some years ago, when there was a terror attack by a Muslim fundamentalist, someone said: ‘UK Muslims are silent on this…
In November 2006, after a blockade at Faslane, the nuclear missile submarine base in Scotland, I found myself sharing a cell with a gentle, erudite, bearded American called Brian Larkin. We talked pacifism, politics, and theology, and shared songs most of that night….
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, and growing up during the Vietnam War, Brian came to St Andrews university in Scotland in the late 1970s to study theology. There, he met Lindsay, a feminist and a Peace News reader…
Where should PN put its creative energies next year? Are there some ‘experiments with truth’ that you would really like to see us try out, or that you would be willing to be involved in? Are there obvious holes that we should fill in?
Here are some of my thoughts about the year ahead.
There are some things that go without saying. We will continue to argue for radical nonviolence; for a rapid negotiated end to the Ukraine War; for a deeper understanding of British…
In September, there was a reunion in London of the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) affinity group ARROW, something like 20 years after the group folded. Folk who had not seen each other for decades came together to catch up; it was a wonderful afternoon.
For me, ARROW was where I learned how to work with other people in a non-hierarchical group, or a group that was trying to put equality into practice. ARROW was my peace movement university. We didn’t just do actions, though we did a…
The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience. Nonviolence does not have to beg others to ‘be nice’. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences - or to pretend to have them.
Nor does it petition those in power to do something about a situation. It can face the authorities with a new fact and say: Accept this new situation which we have created.
If greater gains have not been won by nonviolent action it is because most of those trying it…
‘Oh, bonny Portmore, I am sorry to see such a woeful destruction of your ornament tree.…’
These words begin an Irish lament from Country Antrim, sung for an aged oak that fell in a great storm in 1760.
It is the oldest ‘environmental justice’ song (as we might call it today) sung in the English language that I’ve been able to source. (Please do let me know if you know of other early songs with this theme!)
As with all issues of environmental justice, the critique in this…
Mother Country Radicals is a fascinating ‘family history’ of the 1970s US radical left focusing on the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. The 10-part podcast is thoughtfully narrated by Zayd Dohrn, the son of Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. The series reflects on the consequences for him and his brothers of his parents’ involvement, and what it means to be willing to fight back, whether violently or nonviolently, against a racist and unjust…
It’s taken us a while, but today, at last, the members of Doncaster Skate Co-operative finally played Co-opoly, the game of setting up a worker co-op. Several ‘chance’ cards mirrored real life – being featured in the paper, getting co-op governance training and the unexpected costs of asbestos removal all elicited squeaks of recognition.
I’ve been pushing to do this since before we took over the skate park in March, because it’s such a good exercise in practising collective…
The latest Tory nonsense is yet another attack on university education. The phrase ‘low-value degree’ is being thrown around. I’m not entirely sure such a thing exists. Well, except maybe ‘PPE’ (politics, philosophy and economics); the Tory career politician degree of choice does not appear to equip folx to lead.
University was not easy for me. An undiagnosed, dyslexic, autistic: burnout and sensory overload followed me around university like my handy wheeled book bag. But it was a…
A couple of months ago, the prime minister claimed that ‘we’d moved beyond judging people for being rich’.
I’ve thought about that a bit since then. I’ve thought about my auntie saying how she resented footballers’ and pop stars’ massive salaries (when compared with for example, NHS workers). I didn’t say much at that time but I did wonder why footballers? They surely have a career of limited length even if they then go into management or training.
And why pop stars, given that…
How can I write or think of my dad, without the image of a rainbow coming to mind?
Yoga to Pink Floyd, peace flags, CND, a trip to Greenham Common, quirky nursery rhymes and funny poems (that still fall out of my mouth at random times), steam trains, stamps, museums, family history, follies, postcards, bird-watching, wild flowers, maps, reading, jigsaws, vegetarian, atheist, long hair, long beard, a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face and rainbows, rainbows, rainbows. A gentle,…
