Buried Treasure

Last week, Israel and Egypt signed a ‘peace treaty’. But the treaty isn’t between those who are actually fighting, and in fact intensifies the causes of the conflict.

Looking at it superficially, but with a nonviolent and anti-statist perspective, it has all the limitations of being merely a resolution of conflict over national territories.... The agreement is a further development of the Middle East wars, a continuation of Israel’s attempts to make Palestine a Jewish country and the…

During the years when there were peace camps - and regular one-off actions - at military bases all over the country [partly, but not only, on account of the cruise missile sites being established], Peace News ran a fortnightly round-up of news of actions.

A fortnight ago two peace campers from Daws Hill [an RAF base at High Wycombe which housed a US nuclear control bunker] went on an excursion into the nearby Chiltern Hills and occupied the microwave radio mast at Christmas Common. This is…

What gives people – citizens or intergovernmental bodies – the right to intervene in a situation, and what considerations should govern this intervention?

... The first half [of the Lewer-Rambotham report] deals with non-coercive humanitarian intervention. While forms of civilian intervention aren’t likely to have the enormous consequences of military intervention, they too need to be assessed according to clear criteria. Marko Hren, commenting on ‘war tourism’ in former-Yugoslavia, talks…

The recent leaks about the arrival date of American cruise missiles at Greenham Common were followed last week by a series of transport planes bringing related equipment – though not it seems, initially, the missiles themselves. But even before the first planes arrived, nuclear disarmers were stepping up their opposition.

October 29 saw 1,500 women taking direct action at Greenham Common, where parts of the perimeter fence were cut down. On Monday October 31, the day of the…

In the months since the Torness demonstration in May and the London anti-Windscale demo some kind of anti-nuclear movement has appeared. Discussion of how nuclear power can be opposed is shifting from isolated actions to the development of campaigns. The Torness Alliance is an attempt (experimental and perhaps inevitably frustrating) at developing mutual co-ordination of the efforts of local autonomous groups.

That development will be very difficult without a growth and…

I read the letter from Mary Winter [who had accused men’s groups of being ‘the counter-attack on the Women’s Liberation Movement’] with anger, then amazement, and finally with sadness. It seems that not only do male readers not know much about the women’s movement but also some female readers not know much about ‘Men Against Sexism’.

‘Men Against Sexism’ (MAS) avoid the use of the term men’s liberation because it does sound arrogant and does not make clear the great…

The struggle in America is not what it appears to be to most white people; nor is it comparable or similar in nature to the fight against apartheid. It is a curious struggle that is being waged both in the area of public amenities and in the Negro soul itself. The struggle for civil rights – which is also, in the main, the subject of Mr Lomax’s book – is moreover perplexing because of its diverse ramifications. While speaking to American Negros one soon gains the impression that the growing…

At 4pm on Saturday, over 30 ‘tourists’ in Notre Dame cathedral quietly took loose ends of chains from under their clothing, each passed them to the nearest person, and within a few moments three pillars were surrounded by circles of people holding banners calling for an end to French nuclear tests. 

The Greenpeace walkers had arrived in Paris!

After these people were secure, the support actions started. At 4.05pm the press were informed, explanatory leaflets were…

The deference which politicians, church leaders and the press pay to pacifism is at once encouraging and humiliating. It is a tribute to the success of [pacifist organisations] in keeping before the community the perennial relevance of the golden rule in personal and national affairs; it rubs in that although we leaven the lump in a variety of ways, nobody seriously believes we could take over from the baker.

In recent years, the pacifists in this country have…

On Thursday April 11, a pamphlet entitled ‘Danger Official Secret RSG 6’ was circulated to the national press, political parties, prominent personalities in the peace movement including Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer and Linus Pauling, to a number of MPs and to MI5. The pamphlet gave details of the government’s plans for setting up 12 regional seats of government (RSGs) in secret underground offices, naming the sites of several of them and giving names and…

The Wethersfield US Air Force base, Essex, is the latest target for a peace camp. CND groups in Essex established a camp outside the base on February 6 during a rally of over 200 people. After being a stand-by base for about ten years, fresh developments have been taking place at Wethersfield for the last 18 months. Building work has been going on and 400 extra US personnel have moved in. Activists wonder if there is a secret plan to base the second batch of cruise missiles (after Greenham…

In the concluding chapter of his autobiography, My Experiments With Truth, Gandhi wrote “The exercise has given me ineffable mental peace, because it has been my fond hope that it might bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa (total nonviolence) to waverers.”

I am certain that the film will convince some if not all of those waverers who doubt that a person without weapons can practise self-defence and fight against a powerful and ruthless opponent. Gandhi’s was not passive resistance, it was…

There were certainly moments of humour – of the absurd variety that [the prosecutor] Michael Coombe, with his inability to comprehend the possibility of a different view of the world from his own, is so good at.... He explained that an expert witness was to be called, who would testify to the type of risk to the safety of the state that might ensue if the information of the sort [the three defendants talked about] were disclosed. The risk has been assessed, he intoned, as varying from grave…

I've come to the conclusion that there are two basically different ways of looking at nonviolent revolution, and several different positions which might be accommodated to this label. This has not eased a sense I have that a great big rag-bag of a concept is being held out as a goal for pacifists, which will certainly be taken up because it sounds right and, as a slogan, has flair.

The danger, I fear, is that we'll begin to speak and act as if nonviolent revolution is the agreed…

[The views of nonviolent revolutionaries towards more “traditional” revolutionary struggles have frequently been discussed in PN. Here, Nigel Young contributes to a then current debate within War Resisters’ International (WRI).]

I hope that we can examine the assumptions that we, as war resisters, have brought to bear when we have adopted positions in relationship to ‘military modes of liberation’...

The fact that a ‘new system of oppression exists in embryo in violent…