Emily Johns
When are we going to wake up? When is the war in Afghanistan going to become a burning issue in this country? When is it going to become a burning issue for the British peace movement?
As we approach the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, we see a welcome, if belated and timid, awakening of concern about the war in mainstream circles in both Britain and the US. What about the peace movement? If we are honest with ourselves, neither the traditional peace movement nor…
At the very heart of the British Museum there is a gentle murmuring in many languages. The English voices are fretting from the very start of the exhibition: “Have these things been destroyed?” “What has been the impact of the current war on the archaeology of Babylon?”
Babylon: myth and reality has a crowded audience of the knowledgeable and concerned. Usually the blockbuster shows have a large proportion of the compelled-by-advertising-shufflers, but this was a display where one…
The Israel assault on Gaza has left many of us angry and sick at heart. The glaring injustice of the conflict is reflected in the wildly disproportionate casualty figures. The government of Israel says it was motivated by fear of Palestinian rockets and mortars.
From November 2001 to November 2008, precisely 23 people were killed inside Israel by Qassam rockets (15) and by mortars (8) fired from Gaza (not all by Hamas), according to the pro-Israeli-government group The Israel…
Gaza desperately needs aid, but more than that it needs Israel to lift the near-total closure of Gaza’s borders, according to aid experts. Palestinian estimates of the cost of the first fortnight of the Israeli assault range from $976m to $1.7bn.
Even before the latest attack, Gaza was reeling from the effects of the Israeli blockade. Unemployment was nearly 50%, almost all of Gaza’s 3,900 manufacturers had been forced to shut down, 80% of drinking water was substandard,…
After months of silence, during which it seemed the idea had died quietly (like the much-derided “British Day”), the British government announced on 21 January that Armed Forces Day will after all be taking place – 27 June.
It now falls to the British peace movement to respond appropriately.
The central event of the first Armed Forces Day is to take place in the historic dockyard in Chatham, Kent. The five unsuccessful bidders – Cardiff, Blackpool, Plymouth, Southend and…
Over two-thirds of the British public want all British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan within 12 months, according to a new BBC poll. Meanwhile, five million Afghans are facing a winter of starvation because of “donor fatigue”.
The BBC/ICM poll, published to coincide with a 13 November Radio 4 debate on withdrawal from Afghanistan, met with a resounding silence from the political establishment, and the barest of mentions within the mainstream media.
The Ministry of Defence…
Why should Peace News, a paper devoted to peacemaking, concern itself so much with economic issues? Over the period of our editorship we have come back to class politics again and again and again.
Dan Clawson’s wonderful essay “Fusing our power” back in May 2007, at the start of our editorship, showed how activists from the new social movements have begun to revitalise parts of the US trade union movement, turning them from narrowly-focused bureaucratic monoliths into whole-person…
One million Iraqis
The most-censored story of the year was the estimate by a reputable British polling agency that over 1,000,000 Iraqis had died violently as a result of the invasion and occupation.
The story started in September 2007, when the mainstream polling agency ORB (widely quoted six months earlier and six months later for their work on Iraqi attitudes to the occupation) published an estimate of the number of Iraqis who had died violently since the 2003 invasion.…
On 27 October, Britain’s nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston was blockaded by hundreds of peace activists in the largest nonviolent direct action at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) for a decade. Over 30 activists from Trident Ploughshares and CND were arrested by police.
Roads around Aldermaston began to be blocked before dawn as activists from Scotland, Switzerland, Norway and elsewhere converged on the site where Britain’s nuclear weapons are constructed and maintained.…
Sitting in front of a panel of MPs and lords for the second time this year, Peace News abandoned etiquette and spoke plainly. The problem with giving evidence about the law on protest we said, is that parliament, the judiciary and the police have failed to take the action they should have - against the illegal invasion of Iraq, or those causing devastating climate change, for example.
In such circumstances, it is difficult to be forced to discuss “the policing of protest”, when…
In Battle this week there was the annual commemoration of England’s great and bloody encounter of 1066. It is peculiarly festive as hundreds re-enact the slaughter and subsequent regime change.
However I have come to see Unveiled at the Independent Photographers Gallery in Battle. I am looking at a soft view of a Kabul cityscape under snow. There are some bicycles and four people. I looked very hard to count these few people. Where are the rest of a capital city’s population? Dead?…
Two more US war resisters have been put on notice of deportation from Canada, where they have sought refuge.
On 8 October, US Iraq war resister Patrick Hart, his wife Jill and son Rian were told that they had to voluntarily leave Canada or be deported to the United States on 30 October.
The next day, Matt Lowell, of London, Ontario, was ordered to leave Canada by 28 October.
Patrick Hart is a former sergeant and a nine-year veteran of the US military. After serving…
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has sparked enormous enthusiasm throughout the world – and a fair amount back home in the United States – as a symbol of change. Many progressive-minded people are hoping that he will bring about genuine reform in domestic and foreign affairs.
Our opinion, to be blunt, is that Barack Obama is another Tony Blair.
It is difficult to remember at this point – steeped as we are in the blood and lies of the Iraq war – the excitement…
From Afghanistan to Palestine to Minnesota, video activism has been proving its value over the past few months.
It was video shot on a local doctor’s mobile phone that forced the Pentagon to drop its claim that only seven civilians died in Nawabad.
The footage, viewable on the web (see p2), shows dozens of bodies lying in the local mosque the morning after the massacre.
Point-blank
In July, in Palestine, video recorded by Salam Kanaan, 17, showed the world a…
Climate Camp has rightly been described as both “the world’s most organised protest” and “the most important protest of our time”. The severity of the climate crisis that is looming is not easy to imagine. If we do see a temperature rise of 4C above pre-industrial levels, up to half the world’s species could die out, and our descendants will face apocalyptic consequences.
The Camp is the confluence of several streams of organising going back decades. It demonstrates, among other…
