Rai, Milan

Rai, Milan

Milan Rai

1 October 2008Feature

China, which spent £6bn on green energy projects last year, may soon become the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.

The ministry of public security has listed pollution as one of the top five threats to China’s peace and stability. In 2005, China experienced 51,000 riots or demonstrations of 100 or more people protesting against pollution – according to official estimates.

Li Junfeng, an energy expert at the National Development and Reform Commission said in…

1 October 2008News

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…

1 October 2008News

Once again, Iran’s recent cooperation with UN inspectors, and its positive proposal for an international consortium to control its uranium enrichment, are being ignored, and the Iranian government is being pilloried in the press.

As PN goes to press, a new report on Iran is being presented to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), accusing Tehran of failing to cooperate with IAEA investigations into alleged “weaponisation” research.

The IAEA has also…

1 October 2008News

The Israeli government has more than doubled the size of a dozen of its settlements on the West Bank, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, by seizing Palestinian land for “special security areas” – by military order.
The justification is that these lands are needed as “warning areas” – but they are used by settlers, exposing their real purpose: the seizure of Palestinian land.
Figures compiled from official sources by Israeli peace group Peace Now indicate…

1 October 2008News

The US raids inside Pakistan (see p1) raise the risk of terrorist attacks in London, said Wajid Shamsul Hassan, Pakistani high commissioner to Britain, on 14 September.
“This will infuriate Muslims in this country and make the streets of London less safe,” he added. “The Americans’ trigger-happy actions will radicalise young Muslims. They’re playing into the hands of the very militants we’re supposed to be fighting.”
Pointing out that no high-level Taliban or al Qa’eda leader…

3 September 2008Comment

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…

1 September 2008Feature

It is customary to mark significant dates in a scholar’s life with a festschrift – a publication containing original work in fields that the honoured academic has been involved in.
I think we can be sure that Noam Chomsky has little interest in such honours, but it seems churlish to allow his 80th birthday to pass on 7 December without some public marking of the value of his work and example to several generations of activists around the world. (I note with alarm that German…

1 September 2008News

The US-Iran nuclear crisis continues, as the world’s great powers disagree on how to move forward, and the west snubs Iran’s proposal for an international consortium to control the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil.
Iran’s consortium proposal was made on 13 May, but has been studiously ignored, not only by diplomats, but by the western mass media.

Public support

This is despite the fact that a majority of people in Britain, France and the US support Iran’s…

1 September 2008Review

Streetwide Worldwide: Where people power begins, Jon Carpenter 2008; ISBN 978 1 906067 03 8; 306pp; £14.99. From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World , Oxfam 2008; ISBN 978 0 85598 593 6; 522pp; £15.95. The Urgency of Now, Oxfam 2008; ISBN 978 0 85598 629 2; 62pp; £3.99.

Tony Gibson’s previous book The Power in Our Hands (Jon Carpenter, 1996) demonstrated truly participatory grassroots organising using methods as open to the verbally unconfident as to the fluent.
Surprisingly (to me), his follow-up book is an autobiography. But what an autobiography!

Tony Gibson’s experiences in just-pre-revolutionary China with the (Quaker) Friends Ambulance Unit are a wonderful description of how outsiders can truly support and empower poor people

His…

16 July 2008Feature

The third and biggest British Camp for Climate Action fed, watered and educated perhaps 3,000 people from 3-11 August, sparked actions around the country, triggered 100 arrests and two prison sentences and culminated in a massive day of action against the proposed new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Essex.

Climate Camp highlighted the importance of the Kingsnorth decision as a key indicator of whether or not Britain is serious about avoiding catastrophic climate change (see…

3 July 2008Comment

There were many acts of remembrance around the country when the hundredth British soldier was killed in Afghanistan, names of the dead were read out. The occasion highlighted the enormous importance of Iraq Body Count’s work in collecting the names of non combatants killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. There are in contrast so few names of Afghans killed, there is no one doing an Afghan body count. Uncounted Afghan’s have lost their lives, and without their names who knows if they ever…

1 July 2008News

When US president George W. Bush said on 15 June that Iran had “rejected this generous offer out of hand”, you could assume that (a) the offer was not generous and (b) Iran had not rejected it. You wouldn’t go wrong, either, assuming that the media would assist Bush by erasing memories of the recent breakthrough Iranian offer.

The proposal Bush was referring to came from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (plus Germany), which was conveyed to Tehran by the European…

1 June 2008Review

Seven Stories Press, 2007; ISBN 978-1-58322-742-8; 452pp; $22.95

Movements need people who can think big. It would be hard to find someone who thinks bigger than Michael Albert, co-founder of South End Press, Z Magazine and ZNet, the sprawling online home of global radicalism.

Remembering Tomorrow is a memoir (mainly of Sixties activism on-and-off campus – at MIT); a manifesto (for Michael Albert’s intriguing brand of anarchism – though he prefers the term “participatory economy” or “parecon”); and a thoughtful reflection on actions, initiatives…

1 May 2008Feature

There is something surreal about the holding of a Peace History conference attended by some of the country’s longest-serving peace activists right in the heart of the Imperial War Museum.

The outgoing director of the museum, Sir Robert Crawford CBE, welcomed us all to the two-day event, thanking Bruce Kent of the Movement for the Abolition of War, a conference organiser, for his cooperation over the years.
We then heard an array of speakers on a wide variety of topics, almost…

1 May 2008Feature

Two figures towered over Black America in the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr called for racial integration, for nonviolence, for love of the enemy. Malcolm X advocated racial separation, armed self-defence and self-love – black pride. Martin Luther King came out of the Black middle classes, the American South, the traditional Christian churches. Malcolm X came out of the Black underclass, the North, some new form of Islam. King spoke for reconciliation; Malcolm X for rage.

And yet, in…