Gabriel Carlyle
‘If you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff they were basically normal’, notes Frida Berrigan in this compelling reflection on her upbringing in a resistance community in Baltimore, and her current role as radical parent.
The ‘they’ are her parents, renowned Catholic peace activists Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAllister.
Quoting American poet Wendell Berry’s injunction to ‘be…
A passionate feminist, the Irish pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington viewed war and anti-feminism as ‘branches of the same tree – disregard of true life-values’. It is therefore unsurprising that, less than a fortnight after Britain’s declaration of war in 1914, the paper he edited, the Irish Citizen, produced a poster bearing the immortal slogan: ‘Votes for…
In the summer of 1946, ‘more than half the world’s supply of motion picture film... was loaded aboard US Army Air Force planes and dispatched to Bikini Atoll’ where it was used to photograph Operations Able and Baker – the second and fourth nuclear bomb explosions respectively – generating over a million still images and several million feet of moving image matter.
Some of these pictures are reproduced in this collection of essays and photographs, which ranges widely over the last…
‘Could the refusal to accept the existence of bisexuality be a root cause of homophobia?’ is the intriguing question that motivated the ‘not-very-bisexual’ Zan Christensen to pull together this colourful comics anthology exploring people’s diverse experiences of ‘non-binary sexuality’.
A gay man, he had read an article in the New York Times concerning a psychological experiment suggesting that over 20% of self-identified ‘highly straight’ people secretly harbour some same…
Late 20th century nyau face mask. PHOTO © Hans Hillewaert
They must have been very pleased when they finally caught him. Desperate to find him, the British had placed his friends and family under surveilliance and – after six weeks of unsuccessful hunting – had even offered a substantial reward for his capture.
Like many other Muslims in the north of Nigeria, he was opposed to fighting in the First World War for fear that he might be deployed against his fellow Muslims in the Ottoman…
Te Puea Herangi, the Maori princess who led the Waikaito tribal confederation’s successful campaign of nonviolent resistance to conscription during the First World War, articulated one of their reasons for not fighting as follows: ‘They tell us to fight for king and country. Well, that’s all right. We’ve got a king.…
Evidence of opposition to the war in the West Indies can be traced in the various countries’ newspapers (which were invariably hostile to such activity).
In British Honduras, calls for men to enlist resulted in an unprecedented exodus of young men from the district of San Estevan in early 1916. Some fled across the border to Mexico, while others, who had heard that the governor was coming to their area on a recruiting drive, disappeared into the bush claiming that they had…
Given his canonisation by mainstream culture as the icon of peace and nonviolence, one might have imagined that Gandhi would have led a strong campaign of resistance to the war. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the case.
In April 1918, Gandhi gave his unconditional assent to British plans to raise half a million more Indian troops. Attempting to recruit 12,000 men from the Kheda district of Gujarat, Gandhi did not shy away from employing moral coercion, telling them…
The UK armed forces currently make 11,000 visits to UK schools and colleges annually, and large sums of money have recently been set aside to expand cadet forces in state schools and to fund military-based ‘alternative provision’ projects.
This short film, made by young people for young people, examines whether recruitment is one of the aims of the new school cadet forces, interviewing cadets, as well as members of the Woodcraft folk who are campaigning against the…
Most people in Britain, I suspect, know little or nothing about women’s struggle for the vote here. For those who know a little, I would guess that the suffragettes would be top of the list of recognised names, followed by Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding-Davidson.
They might also recognise the name of the non-militant suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, but that’s probably about it. Sally Heathcote Suffragette…
Most people who’ve heard of Karen Joy Fowler probably know her through her 2004 New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, which got turned into a Hollywood film and was chosen as a title for the Richard & Judy book club. However, if you’ve never read her then you shouldn’t let the latter facts put you off, for Fowler is a delightful writer with a strong feminist sensibility, and this book – comprised of three short stories, an interview and a brief essay – provides an…
James-Lovelock and his daughter Christine collecting air samples in
Adrigole, South West Ireland, 1970. Photo: Irish Examiner.
To say that James Lovelock is a divisive figure in the environmental movement would be a considerable understatement.
Describing himself as an 'old-fashioned green', he is fêted by some for his groundbreaking speculations about the relationship…
Sentenced last year to 35 years imprisonment for leaking thousands of classified files to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning’s real crime was embarrassing the US government and exposing some of the brutal realities of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clark Stoeckley’s crudely-illustrated non-fiction graphic novel provides an accessible precis of Manning’s trial, taking us from her first pre-trial hearing in December 2011 through to her sentencing in August 2013. Along the way, we learn…
In his 2012 book Knowing Too Much, Norman Finkelstein argued that ‘a growing section of the disproportionately liberal US Jewish public... now knows too much about the realities of the Israeli-Palestine conflict to continue to lend Israel its blind support.’
Here he decisively skewers Israeli journalist Ari Shavit’s much-praised attempt ‘to repackage the old product... [so] that it sells despite its disquieting contents’, concluding that it ‘recycles too many shattered…
In 2008, Rebecca Solnit wrote a brief essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me', that went viral on the internet.
The title was inspired by an incident in which a male party host, on hearing that she had just published a book about the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, insisted on telling Solnit all about the very important Muybridge book that had come out earlier that year – only to discover, of course that it was Solnit's book that he was talking about.…
