Sinclair, Ian

Sinclair, Ian

Ian Sinclair

13 August 2011Feature

PN interviews the legendary co-founder of Food Not Bombs

Born in 1957, American activist Keith McHenry is one of the founding members of Food Not Bombs, a revolutionary movement that works for nonviolent social change by serving surplus food to the public that would otherwise be thrown away or go to waste. Established in 1980 by eight anti-nuclear activists in Boston, Food Not Bombs has served food to rescue workers responding to the attacks on 9/11, to survivors of hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami and to the tent city protestors during the…

13 August 2011Feature

PN interviews Michael Albert of Z Magazine on his model of anarchist economics.

Born in 1947, Michael Albert has been a radical activist since he opposed the Vietnam War as a student at MIT in Boston in the 1960s. He has gone on to write more than 15 books and establish some of the most important organisations of the American radical left – from the progressive publishing house South End Press, to Z Magazine, and the popular website ZNet. A visionary and strategist, Albert, along with Robin Hahnel, has developed a form of “participatory economics”, or Parecon, as an…

13 August 2011Feature

Ian Sinclair spoke recently to the radical watchdog Media Lens about the media’s role in the escalating war in Afghanistan

Since setting up the Media Lens website in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular free Media Alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”. Dissecting the reporting of issues such as Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and climate change in the liberal media (the BBC, Guardian, Independent and so on) Media Lens encourages readers to email individual journalists to take them to task, always urging those that do “to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non…

13 August 2011Feature

Established in 1977, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is an independent women’s organisation fighting for human rights and social justice in Afghanistan. RAWA opposed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, as well as the subsequent mujahideen and Taliban governments, running underground schools for Afghan girls, publishing a journal and setting up humanitarian projects. Mariam Rawi, a member of RAWA’s foreign relations committee,…

1 June 2011Review

Prestel, 2011; 128 pp, 80 colour illustrations; £24.99 in hardcover

In 1986, documentary and fashion photographer Iain McKell was sent by the Observer to photograph the new age traveller “Peace Convoy” on its way to Stonehenge. A year earlier, the police had attacked the convoy in what has become known as “the Battle of the Beanfield”. It was, said an ITN journalist present, “the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career”.

In 2001, McKell revisited the new age traveller community to see how the subculture had…

1 April 2011Review

The Fair Trade Revolution, Pluto Press, 2011; 257 pages; £12.99. Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa, Zed Books, 2011; 176 pp; £12.99

With contributions from fourteen campaigners and corporate practitioners, The Fair Trade Revolution is the Fairtrade Foundation’s official, if somewhat dry, history of the movement. It grew out of the grassroots activism of the 1960s, and editor John Bowles contends a “fundamental paradigm shift” has occurred in the last decade, with sales of Fairtrade goods in the UK topping £1 billion last year.

With fair trade guaranteeing producers in the developing world a minimum price for…

1 February 2011Review

Earthscan, 2010; 240 pp, £14.99

Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.

According to…

1 November 2010Review

PM Press, 2010; 304pp; £14.99

With industrial civilisation destroying the planet, How Shall I Live my Life? is “the only question worth asking” according to the radical thinker Derrick Jensen. Thus the ten wide-ranging interviews with largely American activists, philosophers and writers conducted by Jensen centre on each person’s holistic methods of resistance to the environmental degradation caused by the dominant culture.

Reconnecting to the natural world, looking to indigenous cultures and increasing democracy…

1 September 2010Review

New Internationalist, 2010; ISBN: 978-1-906-523-29-9; 133pp; £7.99

A recent edition to the New Internationalist’s “No-Nonsense” book series, Symon Hill’s short guide to religion is a readable introduction to an often controversial and misrepresented subject.

Hill, a Quaker Christian who is the co-director of the Ekklesia thinktank and former media spokesperson for Campaign Against the Arms Trade, argues: “For every example of a link between religion and oppression, there is a link between religion and liberation”.

To illustrate the former he…

1 June 2010Review

Haymarket, 2009; ISBN 978-1-931-859-74-5; 300pp; £12.99

Focusing on the 1919 general strike in Seattle – the first in the US – Revolution in Seattle is a dense, journalistic account of early twentieth-century radical agitation in Washington state.

Originally published in 1964, and now republished to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, Harvey O’Connor’s memoir of this forgotten chapter in US history is a timely tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn’s belief in documenting “people’s history”.
As the…

1 May 2010Review

Pluto, 2010; ISBN 978-0-745-330-24-2; 240pp; £12.99

In September 2009, the United Nations released the findings of the Goldstone report concerning Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

The 575-page inquiry noted that Israel’s offensive was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself and to force upon it an ever-increasing…

1 April 2010Review

PM Press, 2010; ISBN 978-1-604-861-08-2; 320pp; £16.99

Venezuela Speaks! attempts to counter the one-dimensional focus of the Western media on president Hugo Chavez by highlighting the central role that grassroots social movements have played in pushing the Bolivarian Revolution forward.

As one activist explains: “With Chavez or without Chavez, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Edited by three Venezuela specialists, Venezuela Speaks! is made up of in-depth interviews with 29 radicals and activists – from…

1 March 2010Review

C Hurst & Co, 2009; ISBN 978-0-23-170-112-9; 320pp; £25

The public debate surrounding Afghanistan has been “dominated by superficial or plainly wrong assumptions”, notes Dr Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics, in Decoding the New Taliban.

In an attempt to “expand the horizon of knowledge” about the command and control structure of the post-2001 Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, Giustozzi has enlisted the help of 14 journalists, diplomats, military officers and academics.

Due to the complexity and…

1 February 2010Review

Mainstream Publishing Company, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-845-964-56-6, 336pp, £19.99

Based on over 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, Voices Against War is a fascinating and lively survey of anti-war protest in the UK from 1914 to the present day.

A university lecturer and author of the bestselling Young Voices, Lyn Smith is keen to stress the complexity and range of anti-war positions held by those who have resisted their Government’s call to go to war. For example, in the first world war conscientious objectors (COs)…

1 December 2009Review

Haymarket, 2009; ISBN 978-1-931-859-88-2; 230pp; £13.99

On 24 October, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton made headlines by being the first serving British soldier to take part in an anti-war demonstration. Glenton’s courageous stand against the unpopular war in Afghanistan is certainly welcome, but, as Dahr Jamail highlights in The Will to Resist, the UK trails far behind the US when it comes to resistance among the armed forces to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A US journalist who has reported from Iraq on the devastation wreaked upon…