Beale, Albert

Beale, Albert

Albert Beale

28 September 2014Comment

Peace News had recently moved its main office out of London, as part of a strategy of changing the balance between its alternativist and ‘constructivist’ coverage on the one hand, and its involvement in more mainstream politics, on the other. Nevertheless, the paper found itself sucked into the defence of a group of activists – some closely connected with PN – who were facing the possibility of years in prison.

Six anti-militarists busted

Six pacifists were arrested in…

9 June 2014Comment

Pacifists are now looking back 100 years to the start of the First World War, and at the lessons still to be learned by those who renounce war. Our predecessors, who were looking back from only 25 years’ distance, also digested the lessons of that earlier era, but with a greater sense of urgency.

To enable conscientious objectors to conscription to unite for mutual support and encouragement, a Fellowship of Conscientious Objectors was formed in London last week. Membership is confined to young men affected by the Military Training Bill.

This development recalls the formation during the early days of the Great War of the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF), which not only supported conscientious objectors in various ways but also carried on a great deal of propaganda work.

3 April 2014Comment

In the 1970s, Peace News carried frequent, and sometimes vitriolic, debates about the Middle East, often sparked by anger on the part of some readers at the uncompromisingly anti-Zionist line of its regular contributor – and sometime Middle East Editor – Uri Davis (himself a Jewish Palestinian). From time to time, as here, PN spelt out its own view.

Last week, Israel and Egypt signed a ‘peace treaty’. But the treaty isn’t between those who are actually fighting, and in fact intensifies the causes of the conflict.

Looking at it superficially, but with a nonviolent and anti-statist perspective, it has all the limitations of being merely a resolution of conflict over national territories.... The agreement is a further development of the Middle East wars, a continuation of Israel’s attempts to make Palestine a Jewish country and the…

19 March 2014Comment

During the years when there were peace camps - and regular one-off actions - at military bases all over the country [partly, but not only, on account of the cruise missile sites being established], Peace News ran a fortnightly round-up of news of actions.

A fortnight ago two peace campers from Daws Hill [an RAF base at High Wycombe which housed a US nuclear control bunker] went on an excursion into the nearby Chiltern Hills and occupied the microwave radio mast at Christmas Common. This is…

21 February 2014Comment

Howard Clark, reviews a Bradford University report by Nick Lewer and Oliver Ramsbotham on ‘humanitarian intervention’, written during the break-up of Yugoslavia.

What gives people – citizens or intergovernmental bodies – the right to intervene in a situation, and what considerations should govern this intervention?

... The first half [of the Lewer-Rambotham report] deals with non-coercive humanitarian intervention. While forms of civilian intervention aren’t likely to have the enormous consequences of military intervention, they too need to be assessed according to clear criteria. Marko Hren, commenting on ‘war tourism’ in former-Yugoslavia, talks…

1 November 2013Comment

Peace News gave wide coverage and support to the campaigning at Greenham Common which aimed to stop the new cruise missiles being deployed there; but it then became apparent that that phase of the campaign was not going to succeed.

The recent leaks about the arrival date of American cruise missiles at Greenham Common were followed last week by a series of transport planes bringing related equipment – though not it seems, initially, the missiles themselves. But even before the first planes arrived, nuclear disarmers were stepping up their opposition.

October 29 saw 1,500 women taking direct action at Greenham Common, where parts of the perimeter fence were cut down. On Monday October 31, the day of the…

1 October 2013Comment

Peace News played a key role in the upsurge of activism against nuclear power at the end of the 1970s, both by reporting events and by discussing strategies that could help different sorts of campaigners to work together effectively.

In the months since the Torness demonstration in May and the London anti-Windscale demo some kind of anti-nuclear movement has appeared. Discussion of how nuclear power can be opposed is shifting from isolated actions to the development of campaigns. The Torness Alliance is an attempt (experimental and perhaps inevitably frustrating) at developing mutual co-ordination of the efforts of local autonomous groups.

That development will be very difficult without a growth and…

1 September 2013Comment

In this era, Peace News’s supportive coverage of feminist campaigns and of anti-sexist men’s groups was still sometimes controversial; it frequently led to continuing debate on the letters pages each fortnight. Here, Mark Ashmore joins in.

I read the letter from Mary Winter [who had accused men’s groups of being ‘the counter-attack on the Women’s Liberation Movement’] with anger, then amazement, and finally with sadness. It seems that not only do male readers not know much about the women’s movement but also some female readers not know much about ‘Men Against Sexism’.

‘Men Against Sexism’ (MAS) avoid the use of the term men’s liberation because it does sound arrogant and does not make clear the great…

5 July 2013Comment

The South African political exile Lewis Nkosi, writing in Peace News in the period before he became a well-known author, drew on his experience of the South African struggle to criticise the analysis of African-American writer Louis Lomax in the latter’s book The Negro Revolt. This was part of PN’s wide-ranging coverage – by those involved – of the Civil Rights movement in the US in the ’60s.

The struggle in America is not what it appears to be to most white people; nor is it comparable or similar in nature to the fight against apartheid. It is a curious struggle that is being waged both in the area of public amenities and in the Negro soul itself. The struggle for civil rights – which is also, in the main, the subject of Mr Lomax’s book – is moreover perplexing because of its diverse ramifications. While speaking to American Negros one soon gains the impression that the growing…

24 June 2013Comment

London Greenpeace–established by people around Peace News, and separate from and pre-dating the bigger and more corporate Greenpeace organisation – had organised a walk from London to Paris in opposition to French nuclear tests. The PN staffer who was there reported...

At 4pm on Saturday, over 30 ‘tourists’ in Notre Dame cathedral quietly took loose ends of chains from under their clothing, each passed them to the nearest person, and within a few moments three pillars were surrounded by circles of people holding banners calling for an end to French nuclear tests. 

The Greenpeace walkers had arrived in Paris!

After these people were secure, the support actions started. At 4.05pm the press were informed, explanatory leaflets were…

26 May 2013Comment

Whether to work more with peace campaigns with limited aims, at the expense of concentrating on the fundamental issue of the rejection of war itself, is a never-ending debate within pacifist organisations. Here, Harry Mister reports from the 1963 AGM of the Peace Pledge Union.

The deference which politicians, church leaders and the press pay to pacifism is at once encouraging and humiliating. It is a tribute to the success of [pacifist organisations] in keeping before the community the perennial relevance of the golden rule in personal and national affairs; it rubs in that although we leaven the lump in a variety of ways, nobody seriously believes we could take over from the baker.

In recent years, the pacifists in this country have…

5 April 2013Comment

Anti-nuclear campaigners caused a furore in 1963 by publishing details of the government’s secret Third World War control bunkers, to coincide with CND’s Aldermaston March at Easter.  

On Thursday April 11, a pamphlet entitled ‘Danger Official Secret RSG 6’ was circulated to the national press, political parties, prominent personalities in the peace movement including Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer and Linus Pauling, to a number of MPs and to MI5. The pamphlet gave details of the government’s plans for setting up 12 regional seats of government (RSGs) in secret underground offices, naming the sites of several of them and giving names and…

8 February 2013Comment

At their height, there were a dozen simultaneous peace camps at military bases around Britain; PN ran a regular round-up each fortnight.

The Wethersfield US Air Force base, Essex, is the latest target for a peace camp. CND groups in Essex established a camp outside the base on February 6 during a rally of over 200 people. After being a stand-by base for about ten years, fresh developments have been taking place at Wethersfield for the last 18 months. Building work has been going on and 400 extra US personnel have moved in. Activists wonder if there is a secret plan to base the second batch of cruise missiles (after Greenham…

1 December 2012Comment

Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi was reviewed at length for PN by Devi Prasad, a colleague of Gandhi who’d lived on Gandhi’s ashram both before and after the latter’s assassination in 1948.

In the concluding chapter of his autobiography, My Experiments With Truth, Gandhi wrote “The exercise has given me ineffable mental peace, because it has been my fond hope that it might bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa (total nonviolence) to waverers.”

I am certain that the film will convince some if not all of those waverers who doubt that a person without weapons can practise self-defence and fight against a powerful and ruthless opponent. Gandhi’s was not passive resistance, it was…

17 October 2012Comment

A PN editor, reporting from the committal hearing (where the prosecution demonstrates to a magistrate that there's a case to answer in a crown court) in the ABC official secrets case, took notes which led to a minor constitutional crisis – not to mention to all the PN staff appearing before the lord chief justice, and later the house of lords. See also the obituary of Crispin Aubrey.

There were certainly moments of humour – of the absurd variety that [the prosecutor] Michael Coombe, with his inability to comprehend the possibility of a different view of the world from his own, is so good at.... He explained that an expert witness was to be called, who would testify to the type of risk to the safety of the state that might ensue if the information of the sort [the three defendants talked about] were disclosed. The risk has been assessed, he intoned, as varying from grave…