Activist history

First published in 2006, with a new edition last year, this is an engaging memoir of the mid-’90s anti-roads movement – one of the most successful UK nonviolent campaigns of recent times.

Jim Hindle tells the story of his time camping at Newbury, Fairmile in Devon, and Stanworth in Lancashire, resisting what the Thatcher government called ‘the biggest road-building programme since the Romans’.

While the activists lost the battles – each road was eventually built –…

As a young man in the USA in the 1960s, Jonathan Lerner left university and became part of a radical group, Weatherman, a faction of the organisation Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Eventually forced underground, Weatherman (later renamed the Weather Underground Organisation) managed to not only destroy SDS but also many of its own members’ lives.

As a 13-year-old, Lerner had joined a picket line at a local apartment building so he could get to know ‘the cool…

Goal: To stop open-cast coal mining.

Phulbari is an important agricultural region in northwest Bangladesh that also contains a low-quality coal deposit. Several companies have proposed using open-cast (or open-pit) mining techniques in Phulbari, which would displace thousands of people (many of them indigenous people), destroy farmland and homes, and divert water sources to the mining process.

Australia-based mining company BHP Billiton, which discovered coal in Phulbari, sold…

GOALS: To keep the owners from instituting a seven-day work week (owners were trying to add 12-hour mandatory Saturday and Sunday shifts – with no overtime pay)

On 9 June 1987, workers of the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Lunafil (Lunafil Thread Factory Workers Union, or SITRALU) were given unwelcome news by management.

The Lunafil factory was located on the main highway in Amatitlan, just 15 miles from Guatemala City (capital of Guatemala). In that factory workers spun cotton…

50 demonstrators run into the Greek embassy, 21 April 1967. Still from a film shot by Nic Ralph on the night. PHOTO: NIC RALPH

On 21 April 1967, as forthcoming elections in Greece seemed likely to elect a centre-left government, a group of right-wing colonels staged a coup. Tanks rolled into Athens, thousands of leftists were imprisoned without trial and, with the collaboration of king Constantine, the colonels’ junta established military law, abolished the constitution and cancelled the…

The Peace Museum in Bradford is asking for placards, leaflets, badges and banners used in peaceful protests, vigils or demonstrations for an exhibition later this year. Please contact them: Bradford Peace Museum, 10 Piece Hall Yard, Bradford BD1 1PJ; 01274 780 241; info@peacemuseum.org.uk

‘Most humans are neither rich nor famous, but working people. Their story needs to be told.’ This book is a loudspeaker for those forgotten voices, the majority whose lives are determined by those with blue blood or laden pockets.

Even from the commoner’s perspective, dealing with history always involves interpretation. Depending on which political wing you stand on, the French Revolution was either an appalling display of mob fury or a victory giving birth to modern democracy.…

Donald Rooum has been drawing cartoons for PN since (at least) 1962, and PM’s new selection of his work – many of them featuring his most famous creation, the anarchist moggie Wildcat – takes on a wide variety of familiar targets: religion, the military, police surveillance, the monarchy and capitalism. But we’re also treated to Rooum’s delightfully offbeat takes on Rumplestiltskin and the Garden of Eden (‘When you’re not blackmailing, you quite turn me on’, the miller’s daughter…

Don’t be deterred by this book’s hefty appearance or its purely historical premise. Using archival research, Sheila Rowbotham has retraced the lives of six US and British radicals in the late 19th century. Her commitment to mingling the personal and the political results in a fascinating mosaic of stories.

In the decades that Rowbotham reconstructs before our eyes, women could still not speak in public without ‘odium and ostracism’. Divorce and contraception were highly…

'Bohemians have occupied a semi-subversive status in modern society without being, in any consistent way, political-minded or even organised', notes Paul Buhle in his insightful introduction to this wonderful collection of comics.

Featuring almost 30 separate stories, artwork by over a dozen different artists, and with a a timeframe spanning over 100 years (one of the first stories tells the story of the New York-based Unitary Household, who practiced free love and critiqued gender…

A protest action in 1988 in which Phill Jones, Chipper Mills, and Tony Vallance from Faslane Peace Camp managed to get into the control room of one of the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines left British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ‘utterly horrified’, according to secret cabinet offices papers published by the National Archives on 29 December.

The papers describe how, at 1.15am on 10 October 1988, the three successfully broke into Faslane naval base north of Glasgow, climbed into…

This summer, PN is planning to bring Betsy Leondar-Wright to the UK to lead sessions at Peace News Summer Camp and other events. Betsy has been leading workshops on class and classism since the 1970s, and is a senior trainer with Class Action, based in Boston, Massachussetts. In this article, written in 2011, Betsy paid tribute to Felice Yeskel, a Class Action co-founder and close friend who had died recently.

Working in the…

Reports of different forms of action around the world give ideas about replicating them at home.

Also, they can remind us about fairly similar action in our own areas. Rev Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (PN 2598–2599) gives an example of well-planned, effective NVDA [nonviolent direct action].

In 2000, during the year-long care workers’ strike, in Ashton, Greater Manchester, we performed a nonviolent ‘invasion’. Tameside Care Group were forcing new…

Being a Muslim

We have the EDL [right-wing English Defence League] coming to a nearby town this weekend and I’m really torn about going to the counter-demonstration because we came very unstuck campaigning against the BNP [right-wing British National Party] in the elections. My young son and I managed to ‘intimidate’ the BNP candidate into not attending the hustings at the local town hall, which was great, and very thrilling.

Then we went home to our little council…

A visual celebration of the people and movement that opposed the First World War. 

As part of its First World War centenary project, The World is My Country, Peace News produced a series of ten colour posters and eight poetry / song broadsheets, celebrating key figures and events from the First World War anti-war movement. These can be viewed here.

We also produced a 100-page booklet…